US-Iraq War

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The US-Iraq War
justification | invasion | occupation

[edit] Overview

The US-Iraq War, commonly referred to as The Iraq War, has its roots in an apparent wish of US president George W. Bush to invade Iraq, which he expressed as early as the Fall of 1999: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it... If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it."

When the 2001-09-11 attacks on the United States occurred, Bush clearly saw that event as a kind of "instant political capital", and seized his opportunity to push through an invasion while the American people and their elected representatives were unlikely to question his undocumented justifications, most of which turned out later to be false (and some of which he knew to be false at the time), nor to notice that he had not in fact met the requirements set by Congress when they provisionally authorized the war.

The war officially began in 2003 with the US invasion of Iraq; the invasion phase officially ended on 2003-05-01, with Bush's arrival on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner. The US has continued to occupy Iraq despite mounting costs in both dollars and lives and despite growing opposition both within the US and internationally.

The ongoing "war" in Iraq, with its vaguely-defined and diffuse enemy ("terrorists"), is a companion peace to Bush's war on terror, successor to the war on drugs which had more or less reached the end of its political usefulness. They are both used as a dependable excuse, swallowed only by the very gullible, to continue excessive, corrupt, and illegal government activities (including torture) without oversight or responsibility. The occupation itself continues to claim lives and run up costs (and a budget deficit) now in the trillions of dollars, with inescapable and devastating long-term effects on the US economy.

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[edit] Filed Links

  • 2008-07-10 /S/D/ Bush's Banned Interview: An Insight Into Insanity “The video shows Bush at the absolute peak of his arrogance -- convinced of his own rhetoric about Iraq, flooded with confidence from international subservience to American power, and high off a crushing military victory that reinforced his childish fantasies of American power and preeminence. .. The problem was, Coleman was having none of it, and what transpired was a unique insight into the warped brain of the least respected and most hated president in the history of the United States.” Classic Bushism: "My job is to do my job." Page with direct video link: 2006-11-13 BANNED Pres. Bush Interview
  • 2008-07-01 /S/D/ Obama on pride -- and dissent -- in America “Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans – all were defended as expressions of patriotism, and those who disagreed with their policies were sometimes labeled as unpatriotic. .. In other words, the use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the Republic. Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s – in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. ... Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views – these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that dissent does not make one unpatriotic, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America's traditions and institutions. And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments – a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.”
  • 2008-05-27 /S/D/ White House 'puzzled' by ex-spokesman's book bashing Bush “The White House Wednesday said it was "puzzled" by a former spokesman's memoir in which he accuses the Bush administration of being mired in propaganda and political spin and at times playing loose with the truth. .. In excerpts from a 341-page book to be released Monday, Scott McClellan writes on the war in Iraq that Bush "and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war." ... White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called McClellan's description of his time at the White House "sad." .. "Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," Perino said. "For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."” Of course they're puzzled; they didn't realize that reality might apply to them. Also, the pseudo-pity attack against McClellan is a completely typical authoritarian defense, all ad hominem and no substance (much less acknowledgement).
  • 2008-05-02 /S/D/ Ex-Iraq commander accuses Bush Administration of 'gross incompetence' “In a new memoir set to be published May 6, the former commander of US forces in Iraq provides new intimate details of the goings-on at high levels of the Bush Administration in the first year of the Iraq war. .. His sharp tongued conclusion: "Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."”
  • 2008-03-24 /S/D/ The conservative case for Barack Obama by Andrew J. Bacevich: “Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives — and the state of the conservative movement — they could do worse.”
  • 2008-03-18 /S/D/ The Iraq War Is Killing Our Economy “To date, the government has spent more than $522 billion on the war, with another $70 billion already allocated for 2008. .. With just the amount of the Iraq budget of 2007, $138 billion, the government could instead have provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million Americans who are uninsured. What's more, we could have added 30,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers and built 400 schools in which they could teach.”
  • 2008-02-10 /S/D/ Army stifles critique of postwar Iraq planning “The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret. .. That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corp., a federally financed center that conducts research for the military.” (And much making of lame excuses ensued.)
  • 2008-02-08 /S/D/ After Hard-Won Lessons, Army Doctrine Revised “The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield.” Well, better late than never...
  • 2007-11 /S/D/ A Death in the Family by Christopher Hitchens: "Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author measures his words against a family's grief and a young man's sacrifice."
  • 2007-03-08 /S/D/ The Deserter's Tale “I would say to us it's "they're guilty till they're proven innocent", to us all Muslims were terrorists. That's the way we were taught and it's the way we conducted our business. ... We had no justification after all them homes that I raided, there was no justification. I felt that we were more antagonising, causing in my picture to myself, we had become the terrorists. I wasn't getting terrorised. I was more doing the terrorising. ... Raiding the homes, taking their sons and their husbands. If they were over five foot tall they were sent off regardless of whether anything was found in that house or not.”
  • 2007-03-05 /S/D/ The Redirection by Seymour M. Hersh: “Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” Points out that the Iraq War benefits Iran, but seems to assume that nobody could have foreseen this -- when it was in fact predicted by David Brin (and possibly others), who suggested at the time that this fact should be used to obtain concessions from Iran thus making the present situation less likely. The fact that this was not done adds to the case that the Bush administration is actually looking for excuses to go to war rather than trying to prevent it.
  • 2006-11-13 /S/D/ BANNED Pres. Bush Interview “This is a video I found of an Irish TV interview with President Bush. I later found out that this interview was not shown on American television because it was banned! Why you ask, take a look and see...” Commentary: Ben Cohen
  • 2006-09-23 /S/D/ Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat “A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” ... “It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.”
  • 2006-03-20 /S/D/ Pro-Israel lobby in U.S. under attack “Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School, and author of "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy," are leading figures American in academic life. .. They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and "has a stranglehold" on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate. .. And they say that the Lobby works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life.” repost, with comments and additional links. Apparently one of the points made by the book is that the US-Iraq War was not about oil.
  • 2005-07-08 /S/D/ Best of the Web Today (by James Taranto) "Root, Root, Root for the Bomb Team": “That's right, the Times is complaining that "wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism"! Now granted, one can talk of the root causes of terrorism without slipping into liberal weeniedom. This column has long endorsed the theory that terrorism springs from the tyrannical and fanatical political culture that prevails in most of the Arab and Muslim worlds. The Bush administration subscribes to this theory too, which is why it has embarked upon a strategy of democratization, a key element of which was regime change in Iraq. .. Do the editorialists at the Times disagree with this theory? No, apparently they are completely oblivious to it. First they complain about the failure to deal with "root causes," then they scratch their collective head over why we're "mired in Iraq."”
  • 2005-01-12 /S/D/ The Torture Myth “Worse, you'll have the other side effects of torture. It "endangers our soldiers on the battlefield by encouraging reciprocity." It does "damage to our country's image" and undermines our credibility in Iraq. That, in the long run, outweighs any theoretical benefit. Herrington's confidential Pentagon report, which he won't discuss but which was leaked to The Post a month ago, goes farther. In that document, he warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees in Iraq, that their activities could be "making gratuitous enemies" and that prisoner abuse "is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry." Far from rescuing Americans, in other words, the use of "special methods" might help explain why the war is going so badly.” Includes quotes from US military officers (retired and not) supporting this thesis.

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[edit] Articles

  • 2007-01-22 "The Iraq War and the Sicilian Campaign" by Brent T. Ranalli, Part I and Part II: a history lesson from 415 BC, in which Athens, a "superpower" of the day, was ultimately destroyed by over-investment in an ill-considered war

[edit] Opinion

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[edit] Humor

  • 2007-05-17 I Drew This: some people warned the Bush supporters that invading Iraq would be a bad idea. The Bush supporters did it anyway, and then declared victory when there had hardly been enough time to see how things were going to shape up. Then, when the situation finally blew up in their faces, the Bush supporters blamed the nay-sayers for being defeatist.
  • Apple Presents the iRack from MadTV
  • We Want Iraq (originally written for the 1991 Gulf War)
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