When you peel back the events of history and see them without all the partisan puffery, they begin to clear up considerably.
The Iraq War was a horror story visited on the American people in the name of vengeance and profits.
In the beginning, swaggering Iraqi dictator Hussein claims the area of Kuwait, owned by rich oil sheiks, belonged to Iraq. He seizes all of it. President George Bush the first is a close ally of the Saudi Arabia oil sheiks and the family’s business is oil and gas. He puts together a hurried international coalition force that drives Hussein out of Kuwait.
The dictator populates his front lines with teenagers who barely know how to shoot a gun. We wipe out the pawns in great numbers while his elite Republican Guard retreats and regroups, still in power, in Baghdad. The international coalition only approves getting them out of Kuwait.
Bush II is later stung by criticism of unfinished business, a dictator still boasting, and with a tile floor with his father’s face on it. There were reportedly 56 Hussein castles around the country. A wise choice would have been to destroy them all first, instead of destroying the city of Baghdad and all of its facilities. This would be a strong deterrent that wouldn’t drive the whole country into chaos.
The Bush invasion was based on trumped-up and unreliable evidence. The W. wanted revenge and the bigger penis. VP Cheney and his associates wanted the enormous profits accruing to the war industries and the contractors rebuilding Iraq. American Standard produced large numbers of toilets for the ruined country and its occupiers.
In the takeover of Iraq, white Christian invaders in tanks actually commanded the city by military force, drove out huge numbers of Baath Party members and their considerable arms. They raided an American facility to take a huge amount of additional weaponry. They scattered across the countryside and began organizing resistance cells. The Sunnis still hated the Shi’as and vice versa, enormously complicating the situation. Rival clerics vied for control of specific areas and put together armed militias to defend them.
These tribal people would have great difficulty adjusting to a democratic parliament in which various sects would argue and still under a strongman puppet who simply assimilates himself and his gang into the usual corruption, thievery and murder that is an endemic part of the society.
We build a green zone fortress within Baghdad that is constantly under attack, while bombings and massacres across the country belie any idea that the U.S. is in control. These people don’t want the U.S. to be in control and all things festered.
Our mercenary contractors at Blackwater are responsible for a wild shootout which killed more than a dozen innocent people and they are thrown out of Baghdad by the puppet government which must, in the end, answer to its people. With their founder under indictment on serious charges, Blackwater later became Xi and are headquartered in privately-owned Dubai. They proclaim that security is their business and they have contracts to protect embassies and other entities all over the world with trained soldiers.
Meantime in Iraq, they wanted us gone. In a ceremony regarding our pull-out, President Bush has to duck a flying shoe, the ultimate sign of disrespect. Iraq was tired our chaotic misunderstandings and manipulations and wanted us out of the way so they could run things their way. Much later, the Republicans would spawn the story that President Obama pulled out too soon and it created chaos. Politicians feel free to re-write history and seem to get by with it all the time.
Over time, the Iraqis have found it very hard to govern themselves and maintain control over religious sects who have vowed to destroy one another. Under President Obama, we have thankfully pulled back from combat in any of these forever embroiled middle east fiefdoms. It is really beneath our dignity as civilized residents of the 21st Century. We can’t fight their battles for them because we live in an entirely different reality.
We need to preach to them the insanity of having battles at all.
True religion and spirituality are about peace and the sharing of love. People who kill people on behalf of their religion have no real religion at all. When they claim that God endorses their murders, they throw down a lot of boulders onto their road to personal salvation.
Today, we see Iraq in its usual conflicts, as well Afghanistan. Religious pilgrimages, church services, weddings and funerals are the targets for massacres. After all, they conveniently put your generations-old enemies into one place so more of them can be killed. Is the concept of Honor dead as a nail in such places?
Syria is now the hotbed for the factions, including Russia’s rescue of their puppet regime and arms customers in Damascus. President Obama has wisely chosen not to participate in another boots-on-the-ground fiasco and is able to strike and destroy terrorist cells all over the world with our drones, bombs and special non-invasive forces with few casualties.
The location of the bloodbath seems to change periodically but the bloodbaths continue. Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon take their turns being the genocide of the day.
Our military stands ready to kill the enemy long distance, best possible way, and they should not argue to send our young soldiers into such a quagmire again. More American soldiers are dying from suicide than from enemy fire. That means something is wrong.
Are our soldiers not ready for this level of depravity, gore and violence? Should we train soldiers who can sink to that level and deal with it better? Or shouldn’t we keep them safe and prospering in our American homeland, rise above savagery and not get involved in it? Quit sending our young people into worlds of horror. We should spend our time helping refugees who are fleeing from that barbarity and we could use our troops to help construct safe havens and new towns and villages.
The GOP and their war industries seemed cowed at the moment, since people are very sensitive to them dragging us into another tragic and expensive war that we can’t afford and would be a total waste of money. It remains to be seen, at this writing, whether they can churn up another invasion. It appears doubtful, especially since the Russians have entered the arena.
They will be satisfied to egg up another ‘cold war’ in which we can spend vast sums of money to match what the Russians are doing. Perhaps it will stimulate the economies of both countries to spend money on vast arms stockpiles ourselves and in our recruited satellite cold war partners.
We spent the Soviets into bankruptcy last time. We may face off again if the political hawks and their business partners have their way. But every dollar spent on weaponry is wasted as far as making people’s lives better. And a lot of people sure could use some help.
For them, 1,370 nuclear warheads is more than enough. There is no realistic ‘missile gap’ for them to fill because the Russians have a few hundred more. How many does it take to destroy the world?
For them, a new wave of modern multi-million dollar jet planes, tanks or Humvees does nothing at all for anyone’s quality of life. Indirectly, it damages it a lot. Stupendous fortunes are spent on war while the world’s hungry die day after day.
But some scream: Bull on that. We’ve got to protect ourselves. Yes, we do, from ourselves.
IRAQ AND RUIN: A Cut-the-Shit Story
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