|
The Iraq War Main page |
- Vikram Dodd: Dr David Kelly: 10 years on, death of scientist remains unresolved for some
Senior figures unwilling to accept suicide verdict delivered after death of man who hunted WMDs for Blair government
Debate still surrounds Hutton's conclusion that Kelly committed suicide. ... Among those who have called for an inquest or have doubts it was a suicide are former Tory leader Michael Howard, and Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker, who wrote a book saying Kelly was most likely murdered. A group of doctors say Hutton's findings should be discarded and a new inquest held. Dr Stephen Frost said: "We have lots of evidence ... No coroner in the land would reach a verdict of suicide as Lord Hutton did."
- Kaveh L Afrasiabi: Compelling case for Iraq war crime tribunal
A review of Mohamed ElBaradei's The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times
This book, eloquently written by a former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a must read, both for the wealth of information it provides on the contentious issues of global nuclear diplomacy as well as for the passionate and compelling case that it presents for a war crime tribunal to prosecute United States and British leaders who instigated the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction.In blunt yet sincere language steeped in international law, ElBaradei writes that in light of the US's complete "disdain for international norms" in its invasion of Iraq, the United Nations should request an opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as to the legality of the Iraq war.
Convinced that the overwhelming weight of evidence favors a negative verdict if the ICJ ever braved such an initiative, ElBaradei then makes a case for the International Criminal Tribunal to "investigate whether this constitutes a war crime".
- Peter Van Buren: On the run from America's Stasi
[T]he Iraq we created via our war is a mean place, unsafe and unstable. Life goes on there (with the usual lack of electricity and potable water), but as the news shows, to an angry symphony of suicide bombers and targeted killings. While the American public may have changed the channel to more exciting shows in Libya, now Syria, or maybe just to American Idol, the Iraqi people are trapped in amber, replaying the scenes I saw in 2009-2010, living reminders of all the good we failed to do.
- Pepe Escobar: War porn: The new safe sex
Iraq may indeed be seen as the Star Wars of war porn — an apotheosis of sequels. Take the (second) Fallujah offensive in late 2004. ... Fallujah was reduced to rubble, at least 200,000 residents became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed, in order to “save it” (echoes of Vietnam). No one in Western corporate media had the guts to say that in fact Fallujah was the American Halabja.
Fifteen years before Fallujah, in Halabja, Washington was a very enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam, who used them to gas thousands of Kurds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time said it was not Saddam; it was Khomeinist Iran. Yet Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, just like the US in Fallujah.
Fallujah doctors identified swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, as well as “melted bodies” — victims of napalm, the cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Residents who managed to escape told of bombing by “poisonous gases” and ”weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud ... and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them.”
That's exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The United Nations banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.
- Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes: The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond
- Middle East Reality Check (2010-08-25): The US Withdraws from Iraq
"With the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq, the administration, the military and the media are trying to put a positive spin on this grim chapter of US history. It would certainly give some comfort to the grieving families of the over 4,400 soldiers killed in Iraq if their sacrifices had left Iraq a better place or made America safer. But the bitter truth is that the US intervention has been an utter disaster for both Iraq and the US."
- Paul Craig Roberts: Muslims Are Their Own Worst Enemy
Muslim disunity has made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the U.S. to invade Iraq - Afua Hirsch, Guardian UK: Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules
The war in Iraq had "no basis in international law", a Dutch inquiry found today, in the first ever independent legal assessment of the decision to invade. In a series of damning findings, a seven-member panel in the Netherlands concluded that the war ... had not been justified in law.
And thus it was a war crime, and George W. Bush and Tony Blair are war criminals.
[A]ccording to the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals (the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal), "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." — Ghali Hassan, U.S. War Crimes, an International Vow of Silence
- Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian UK (2009-12-09): Ex-general tells Iraq war inquiry of 'amateur' approach to invasion
Senior officer says lack of direction caused deaths and Afghanistan faces similar fate if lessons are not learned - Mike Whitney (2008-04-16): US Financial Collapse Will End Bush/Cheney Iraq War— And it won't be 'a time of our choosing'
The Bush administration has decided to pursue a strategy that is unprecedented in US history. It has decided to continue to prosecute a war that has already been lost morally, strategically, and militarily. But fighting a losing war has its costs. America is much weaker now than it was when Bush first took office in 2000; politically, economically and militarily. US power and prestige around the world will continue to deteriorate until the troops are withdrawn from Iraq. But that's unlikely to happen until all other options have been exhausted. Deteriorating economic conditions in the financial markets are putting enormous downward pressure on the dollar. The corporate bond and equities markets are in disarray; the banking system is collapsing, consumer spending is down, tax revenues are falling, and the country is headed into a painful and protracted recession. The US will leave Iraq sooner than many pundits believe, but it will not be at a time of our choosing. Rather, the conflict will end when the United States no longer has the capacity to wage war. That time is not far off.
The Iraq War signals the end of US interventionism for at least a generation; maybe longer. The ideological foundation for the war (preemption/regime change) has been exposed as a baseless justification for unprovoked aggression. Someone will have to be held accountable. There will have to be international tribunals to determine who is responsible in the deaths of over one million Iraqis.
Click to enlarge
© 2006 Studio Bendib. LLC
- Arthur Silber: The Worsening Nightmare (15 August 2007)
The strongest criticism of the Iraq catastrophe [coming from either the Democrats or the Republicans] is that it represents "the worst strategic blunder" of the last hundred years. No one who is prominent in our national political life will say that it is a monstrous war crime. ...
With regard to Iran in particular, the current Democratic Congress has already approved the critical rationales for an attack. ...The Democrats don't object and they completely fail to mount serious opposition to our inevitable course toward widening war and an attack on Iran, not because they are cowards, not because they're afraid of being portrayed as "weak" in the fight against terrorism, and not because of any of the other excuses that are regularly offered by their defenders. They don't object because— they don't object. That is: they agree—they agree that the United States is the "indispensable" nation, that we have the "right" to tell every other country how it is "permitted" to act, that we must pursue a policy of aggressive interventionism supported by an empire of military bases. ...
I see only one possibility that might stop these events [in the aftermath of an attack on Iran and what would almost certainly be a rapidly widening war that would wipe every other issue out of existence]: a massive demonstration or series of demonstrations in Washington, probably accompanied by a massive sit-in in the offices of Congress. ... But that's not going to happen. So we proceed on our path to a still worse and deepening nightmare.
- John Pilger: Iran: the war ahead (16 April 2007) (Also here.)
- Edward S. Herman and David Peterson: Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression (31 March 2007) (Archived here.)
Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack [on Iraq in 2003], it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after "shock and awe," the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.
Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. ... Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran ... the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors ...
We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor [the U.S.A.] is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war [Iran] a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.
- Edward S. Herman, David Peterson and George Szamuely: Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party (27 February 2007) (Archived here.)
[HRW's executive director, Kenneth] Roth describes in detail Saddam Hussein's crimes against the Kurds, which he repeatedly calls "genocide," whereas the number of Iraqis killed by Western sanctions were between five and ten times the number of Kurds killed by Baghdad forces, but don't get mentioned, let alone described as victims of "genocide." ... Roth's piece "Indict Saddam" [published in the Wall Street Journal in March 2002] was a form of public relations support for the prospective attack on Iraq. ... Throughout HRW's work runs the presumption that the United States is the global lawgiver, with special rights that call for special treatment, including in particular the non-reciprocal right to interfere in the sovereign affairs of other states and peoples, militarily if its leadership so decides.
- Robert Parry: Iran Clock Is Ticking (31 January 2007)
Nothing short of a direct congressional prohibition on war with Iran and a serious threat of impeachment would seem likely to give Bush more than a moment's pause. But congressional Republicans would surely obstruct such measures and Bush might well veto any law that was passed. Still, unless Congress escalates the confrontation with the President— and does so quickly— it may be too late to stop what could become a very dangerous escalation.
- Jeff Wells (Rigorous Intuition): We Are Family (16 January 2007)
"I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil's business."
- Col. Sam Gardner: Escalation Against Iran: The Pieces Are Being Put in Place (16 January 2007) Also here.
As one of the last steps before a strike, we'll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we'll only be days away from a strike.
- Dave Lindorff: Death Watch in the Persian Gulf and Washington (16 January 2007) Also here.
An attack on Iran, which poses no immediate or imminent threat to the United States, would be the most heinous of international war crimes— a "crime against peace" violating the UN Charter and the Nuremburg Charter. It would also be a strategic disaster that would dwarf even the president's collassal strategic blunder in invading Iraq. ... [But it is] clear that the Congress doesn't have the guts and principle to halt this march to madness.
- William S. Lind: How to Lose an Army— Plow deep into Iraq and dare Iran to strike (December 18, 2006)
If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both, cutting our one line of supply and then encircling us, the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover. Nothing, not even Israel's demands, should lead us to run this risk, which is inherent in any attack on Iran.
- Tom Andrews: It's Time for an American Surge To Stop the Bush War in Iraq
- Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith: Start Preparing Now for the Coming "Cataclysmic Fight to the Death"
- Michael T. Klare: Ominous Signs of a Wider War
On January 5 [2007] Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that he was replacing Gen. John Abizaid ... with Adm. Richard Fallon ... [who] served as vice chief of naval operations before becoming the head of Pacom in 2005. All this means that he is primed to oversee an air, missile and naval attack on Iran, should the President give the green light for such an assault ...
- Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya: Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a "New Middle East"
- Brian Cloughley: What Are They Dying For?— Oil and the egos of Bush and Cheney.
- The Nation: Why Haditha Matters
- Paul Craig Roberts: The Evil Within
- Universal National Service Act of 2006
To provide for the common defense by requiring all persons in the United States, including women, between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.
The Bush administration needs more boots on the ground for future military aggression. Until this bill is passed there is still time to leave the U.S.
- James Cogan: The consequences of the US-led war against Iraq
- The Carol Fisher case:
- Uppity Cleveland woman carted to psych hospital by police and ordered to a psych unit by judge
- Statement from Carol Fisher
- What you can do
- Mossad hit squads murder Iraqi scientists, academics
- Robert Fisk:
- The march of folly, that has led to a bloodbath The Iraq War: Three Years On
- Seen through a Syrian lens, 'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq
- Chris Floyd: Dead Cities
- Dahr Jamail and Jeff Pflueger: Learning to Count: The Dead in Iraq
- Patrick Martin: Bush approved security leak to smear Iraq war critic
- Sandy English: Three years after looting of Iraqi National Museum: an official whitewash of US crime
- A nation blind to their disgrace— a 4-minute video
- Camilo Mejia: Regaining My Humanity (Camilo Mejia Released from Prison)
- Greg Palast: Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools— THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCCOMPLISHED
- THE IRAQ WAR: Three years— White House no longer sees quick end to difficult war
William Odom, a retired lieutenant general who ran Army intelligence and later the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, has called the Iraqi adventure "the greatest strategic disaster in our history." ...
So far, American taxpayers have spent about $320 billion, a figure that is rising at about $7 billion a month, if the costs of Afghanistan are included. ...
"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Bush said. "It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come."
And whose idea was it to attack Iraq?
- The Abu Ghraib files
279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.
- Bill Van Auken: Saddam Hussein turns the tables at US-run show trial
The obvious issue raised by such charges, and implicitly by the US-orchestrated trial itself, is when will those in Washington, who have carried out a war of aggression that has cost countless thousands of Iraqi lives, be held criminally accountable?
- Mike Whitney: The Changing Face of Terror
- Richard Neville tries his hand as PM's speech writer
- Gabriele Zamparini: The Insane Society (Also here.)
- War, Never Been So Much Fun!
New video shows US troops laughing at slaughter and carnage - William Bowles: The Silence is Poisonous! Bioweapons— The US government's Nuremburg Crime
- Gavin Gatenby: The Askariya Mosque job and the coming war on Iran
- The night before the bombing: Two eyewitnesses
- Dahr Jamail: Who Benefits? (Also here.)
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, urged Iraqi Shia not to seek revenge against Sunni Muslims [for the bombing of the Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra], saying there were definite plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni ..."
Instead, he blamed the intelligence services of the U.S. and Israel for being behind the bombs at the Golden Mosque.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that those who committed the attack on the Golden Mosque "have only one motive: to create a violent sedition between the Sunnis and the Shiites in order to derail the Iraqi rising democracy from its path."
Well said Mr. Blair, particularly when we keep in mind the fact that less than a year ago in Basra, two undercover British SAS soldiers were detained by Iraqi security forces whilst traveling in a car full of bombs and remote detonators.
- ARMS AGAINST WAR
- William Bowles: Media Misinformation Roundup: How the BBC and the Guardian transform torture into bad PR and "history" for the occupiers
- Iraq pact 'was made before war'
Tony Blair and George W Bush decided to invade Iraq weeks earlier than they have admitted, a new book by a human rights lawyer has claimed.
The Book is Philippe Sands' Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules— From FDR's Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush's Illegal War
Sands, a British international lawyer and law professor, delivers a cool, reasoned lashing to the Bush administration for leading— and to Tony Blair for colluding with— a "full-scale assault" on the international rule of law, in this richly detailed survey of modern international legal disputes. Since FDR and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter after WWII, putting in place a rules-based system limiting the use of force, protecting human rights and promoting fair economic liberalization, the world has seen a transformation of international relations, Sands explains, most dramatically marked by Bush's decision to "go it alone." Tracking the current administration's "efforts to rewrite international law into irrelevance," Sands covers the Pinochet case, the creation of the International Criminal Court, U.S. abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the U.S.'s selectively multilateralist policy vis-à-vis global free trade, and the "disgraces" of Guantanamo, Iraq and Abu Ghraib.— Publishers Weekly
- Walter C. Uhler: "Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office," the CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda
- Xymphora: Syrian thought experiment
- David Swanson: Rumsfeld Admits to "Ghosting" Detainee
- Bill Van Auken: Bush uses lies, fear-mongering to defend war in Iraq, police state measures at home
- John Pilger: Mainstream journalism is the voice of rampant power
A study by the Cardiff School of Journalism found that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to Saddam Hussein's WMD suggested he possessed them and that "spin from the British and U.S. governments was successful in framing the coverage." The same "spin" has ensured, until now, that the use of banned weapons by the Americans and British in Iraq has been suppressed as news.
- Greg Muttitt: Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq's Oil Wealth
- William Blum: The United States vs. Iraq— A Study in Hypocrisy
- Chris Floyd: Death Mask: The Deliberate Disintegration of Iraq
- Mike Whitney: America's Covert War in Iraq
- Max Fuller: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings in Iraq
- Wayne Madsen: Intel Contractors Re-Wrote, Cooked Intel Data (Also here.)
- William Bowles: BBC Newsspeak— 'Credible sources'
So whilst the B(S)BC does its damnest to cover up the use of illegal weapons against Iraqi civilians, the US military, anxious to show to its own how effective its weapons are, gets hoisted by its own petard by publishing an in-depth account of WP as an offensive weapon ...
- Mike Whitney: The Greatest Strategic Disaster in American History
- Paul Street: The "Cowardice" Card: Militarism's Last and Self-Fulfilling Refuge
- Daphne Eviatar: What Oil Wants
In Iraq, it [Big Oil] hopes to own the black gold, and to write the rules of the game, too.
- Rumsfeld In Australia
Calling Rumsfeld an international war criminal is not a piece of rhetoric— the evidence is clear and damning of his career as a bureaucrat of torture and pre-emptive war.
Rumsfeld is the director of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has so-far killed tens of thousands of Iraqis as well as over 2000 US and 100 British troops. That invasion has advanced the barbaric program of refining the technology of mass murder, such as the use of depleted uranium, which has been tested in Australia.
- Chris Floyd: The White Death (Also here.)
- William Bowles: Fallujah — Where is the outrage? The story the mainstream media won't tell you
- John Bart Gerald: Confronting the Big Lie
- Dick Cheney: War Profiteer
- Scott Parkin:
- William Bowles: 'Green Slime' invades Iraq
So here we have two provocateurs [British 'special forces' operatives] badly disguised as Iraqis, in a car packed with weapons and explosives who were intercepted by the Iraqi police and who clearly didn't want to be exposed, hence the fire fight. The obvious conclusion to draw is that they were going to plant bombs that would then be blamed on the 'insurgents' and/or the Iranians.
- Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions
This website is
motivated by the belief that the Bush administration is engaged in war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US code. My goal is to bring a civil action in the US District Court for the District of Columbia in order to prompt the enforcement of those laws.
- Edward Herman: The Farce of the Bush Pursuit of Democracy Abroad— While Undermining It At Home
The liberation and democratization [of Iraq] objectives were brought to the fore only after it was definitively established, and could not be hidden from public view, that the primary objectives had rested on lies, and were war-marketing claims advanced by a group determined to attack and whose "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." With the collapse of those claims something more was needed, in retrospect and to justify a continuing occupation and restructuring of Iraqi society. Liberation and democratization filled the bill nicely, noble objectives whose alleged pursuit could cover over less noble ends such as seizing assets, establishing bases, and working toward longer term political control. ...
The Bush team gets away with all this because the propaganda system works so well at this juncture. The media are increasingly commercial and concentrated, and now have a powerful rightwing sector that makes no bones about serving as an instrument of Bush propaganda.
- Dave Lindorff: Radioactive Wounds of War
Tests on returning troops suggest serious health consequences of depleted uranium use in Iraq.
- William Bowles: An awful sense of déjà vu
- Xymphora: More Cindy Sheehan
- Message From Matthew, August 5, 2005
- Chris Floyd, Global Eye, 2005-08-05
It's easy to forget sometimes— amid all the lofty talk of geopolitics, of apocalyptic clashes between good and evil, of terror, liberty, security and God— that the war on Iraq is "largely a matter of loot" ... Pentagon whistleblowers, former Halliburton officials and fellow contractors [have] revealed the grim picture of a rogue operation [Halliburton], power-drunk and arrogant, beyond the reach of law, secure in the protection of its White House sugar daddy ["Vicious Dick" Cheney]. ... Just last month, Don [Rumsfeld] and Dick ladled another $1.75 billion dollop of pork gravy into Halliburton's bowl. For this they have made a holocaust in the desert sands, sacrificing tens of thousands of innocent lives: for cheap, greasy graft; for grubby pilfering; for the personal profit of Richard B. Cheney and the whole pack of Bushist jackals gorging themselves on blood money.
- Dahr Jamail: "What Have We Done?"
- JB Campbell: Psychological Armor
- JustinLogan.com: What Is the Plan If There's Another 9/11?
- Xymphora: The reason for suicide bombers
- Chris Floyd: Dark Waters
But while eighty-sixing the brass knucks— in mixed company, at least— Bush and Rumsfeld have continued to implement a range of mind-breaking psychological tortures, the official documents show. These are practices that PHR [ Physicians for Human Rights] notes are "immoral and ... illegal under the Geneva Conventions, ... [U.S.] domestic law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice." These codified crimes are spread across the gulag's 42 prisons, where some 11,000 men are now caged— many of them innocent of any wrongdoing, all of them held without charges in an endless legal limbo.
This nightmare machinery was set in motion by [Attorney General] Gonzales, who, at Bush's order, led the White House legal team in drawing up official memos justifying the use of torture to the very point of death, and declaring that Bush was not bound by any laws in his role as "commander-in-chief." This monstrous perversion of justice was a virtual coup d'etat, establishing the president as a military autocrat and fostering an atmosphere of lawlessness and brutality "up and down the chain of command."
- Stephen J. Hedges and Andrew Zajac: Court OKs tribunals
A federal appeals court Friday [2005-07-15] ... [decided that] suspects slated for trial by the military commissions [at Guantanamo Bay] do not qualify for prisoner of war status and protections under the Geneva Conventions, which govern the rights of prisoners of war.
- Ex-CIA Chief Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis In 1999 CFR Paper
- Arundhati Roy: The Most Cowardly War in History
... a war in which international institutions were used to force a country to disarm and then stood by while it was attacked with a greater array of weapons than has ever been used in the history of war.
- Joseph Wilson's The Politics of Truth
- Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest: The Lie Factory
This special Mother Jones investigation late last year detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
- Preliminary Declaration of the Jury of Conscience World Tribunal on Iraq, Istanbul, 23rd - 27th June, 2005
- Remember Bush's repeated claims about how the "Butcher of Baghdad" was so evil that he "gassed his own people"? For a different perspective on the story see this comment by Xymphora.
- Xymphora: The Cheney doctrine and Iraq
The key to American rule of the world is a huge series of military bases encircling Russia and China, and providing American control over strategic assets, most notably oil. The Bush Administration economic plan, such as it is, seems to consist entirely of blackmailing the rest of the world into continuing to support the unsupportable American indebtedness by threatening to withhold access to oil. ... [But the] long-term effects of Cheney's mad ideas for world domination will result in the decline of American power, as the over-extension of the American Empire becomes more and more economically and politically expensive.
- Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., Lt. Col. (USAF, ret.): Unleashing the Resistance
- Paul Craig Roberts: What Is Bush's Agenda in Iraq?
- Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor, 2005-06-15: Is 'Downing Street Memo' a smoking gun?
- Xymphora on the nature of the Iraqi resistance:
Blaming the resistance on foreign fighters or Sunni deadenders is just another in the long series of American lies about Iraq intended to fit this conflict into the American mythology that everything the United States does is good, and all its opponents are bad. This mythology - proven to be a complete lie so many, many times - is so ingrained into American thinking that even the best commentators cannot grasp the reality of the ongoing resistance of the people of Iraq to the evil American oppression. It isn't going to be psychologically possible for Americans to end the occupation until Americans start to accept the reality of the fact that they are not noble liberators but brutal occupiers, and the whole country of Iraq wants them out, now.
- Frank Morales: The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"— and Global Terrorism?
- Xymphora on the Oil-for-Food-for-Money-for-Republicans scandal.
- Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement (Local copy here.)
Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.
- Xymphora, 2005-05-12:
Based on the ideas of Oded Yinon, the plan is to break Iraq up into small, unthreatening mini-states. The Israelis are trying to start an Iraqi civil war. To this end, the Israelis are hoping to pin the Americans in Iraq for as long as possible in a vain attempt to prevent this war. The Americans will only pull out when civil war is inevitable, which will be another huge embarrassment for the Pentagon. On top of that, the slow American defeat in Iraq, based on the perfidity of the Israelis in supporting the insurgency and undermining American counterintelligence in Iraq, is gradually destroying the American military (although no one in the Bush Administration will admit it). This effort means the Israelis are effectively currently engaged in war operations against the United States.
- Bill Van Auken: US imprisons Iraqi journalists without charges
- Robert Fisk: "Mission Accomplished"
- Happy Birthday Mission Accomplished
About which Xymphora says that this
is an excellent paragraph-by-paragraph analysis at Today in Iraq of Bush's May 1, 2003 speech announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The sheer quantity of lies and pure bullshit packed into this short speech is incredible. The analysis ends with a list of the dead American soldiers in Iraq. Blogs aren't big enough for a list of the 100,000 or 120,000 or so dead Iraqis, even if the Pentagon cared enough to keep a record of their names.
- Michel Chossudovsky: The Mysterious Death of Marla Ruzicka: The US Military has Detailed Statistics on Civilian Casualties
Marla Ruzicka had discovered, through careful investigation, that the US military authorities were involved in a cover-up ... [of] civilian casualties. These figures, however, were classified and were not intended to be made public. ... [She] was in possession of sensitive information on US sponsored war crimes, which extended beyond the count of civilian casualties. ... [T]here are indications that she planned to release this information ...
- Ian Masters: Who Forged the Niger Documents? See also the comment by Xymphora, which concludes:
The common thread in the forged Niger documents, the use of Curveball, and the British intelligence manipulations which ended up getting David Kelly killed, is a very clever use of multiple intelligence agencies to disguise the source of a collection of rather obvious lies which were used to justify the attack on Iraq. Whoever was behind this had to have had a long history of involvement in American government and involvement with multiple foreign intelligence agencies. There aren't that many people with that kind of experience. Who was: 1) a neocon in favor of an attack on Iraq; with 2) connections to Feith's Office of Special Plans; and with 3) ties to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress; and with 4) long-standing documented relationships with foreign intelligence agencies, particularly SISME? At some point, Americans might want to find this guy and ask him why he decided to do such damage to the United States.
Details here.
| The Iraq War | Serendipity Home Page |