Bush's IRAQ WAR -The Biggest Fool since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C
- Thread starter muckraker10021
- Start date
g.w. Got the job done. people like the said author are fools. the bush family, cheney, rumsfeld, the sceeza, various corporations, etc. laughing all the way to the bank. some corporations actually made more money than God since 9/11. G.w. Overachieved as president in terms of his goals. U mistaken to think he is stupid. He facilitated the greatest transfer of wealth in world history. The goal of the bush presidency & the iraq war was multifaceted.
1. Regime change in the middle east (iraq, libya, tunisia, syria, egypt, etc).
2. Money, power, respect. Cash in on not only iraq's oil & wealth, but also the U.S.
Yes, they robbed this country blind & put us in mad debt. some folks still don't understand that they been robbed & hoodwinked & left holding the bill. Stay the course? (ridiculous mindless conformity repeating media opinions). some folks still don't understand that the freedom of the iraqi people was intimately tied to the freedom of the american people. Karma is a muthafucka. They played americans, who gave up their freedom in order to destroy iraq who was innocent of 9/11 & weapons of mass destruction, not realizing it was a case of "e tu brutus".
3. They wanted to create a worldwide economic shockwave (through war & control of oil prices) putting countries in debt, them dictating the terms of repayment....austerity...leading to a new econpmic order. They been doing this around the third world since the 50's through the world bank, IMF, etc. but americans fail to notice b/c fake patriotic nationalism prevents americans from giving a shit about other countries. Now the chickens have come home to roost.
4. Take political control of the united states branches of gov't (judicial [supreme court], legislative [congress], executive [president]). They got these on lock. We in a dire battle for the future of this country & the forces of evil got the game on lock. There is an forth branch of the government that never gets mentioned b/c it is inherent; We The People, is the only factor not completely in-check, but they are neutralized through the media's control of information & disinformation. I haven't lost hope, I just don't have much faith in sheep.
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1. Regime change in the middle east (iraq, libya, tunisia, syria, egypt, etc).
2. Money, power, respect. Cash in on not only iraq's oil & wealth, but also the U.S.
Yes, they robbed this country blind & put us in mad debt. some folks still don't understand that they been robbed & hoodwinked & left holding the bill. Stay the course? (ridiculous mindless conformity repeating media opinions). some folks still don't understand that the freedom of the iraqi people was intimately tied to the freedom of the american people. Karma is a muthafucka. They played americans, who gave up their freedom in order to destroy iraq who was innocent of 9/11 & weapons of mass destruction, not realizing it was a case of "e tu brutus".
3. They wanted to create a worldwide economic shockwave (through war & control of oil prices) putting countries in debt, them dictating the terms of repayment....austerity...leading to a new econpmic order. They been doing this around the third world since the 50's through the world bank, IMF, etc. but americans fail to notice b/c fake patriotic nationalism prevents americans from giving a shit about other countries. Now the chickens have come home to roost.
4. Take political control of the united states branches of gov't (judicial [supreme court], legislative [congress], executive [president]). They got these on lock. We in a dire battle for the future of this country & the forces of evil got the game on lock. There is an forth branch of the government that never gets mentioned b/c it is inherent; We The People, is the only factor not completely in-check, but they are neutralized through the media's control of information & disinformation. I haven't lost hope, I just don't have much faith in sheep.
Sent from the terrordome via Tapatalk
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Iraqi oil: Once seen as U.S. boon,
now it’s mostly China’s
An U.S. Army soldier stands guard near a burning oil well in the Rumaylah
Oil Fields in Southern Iraq April 2, 2003. | ARLO K. ABRAHAMSON/U.S. Navy News
McClatchy Newspapers
By Sean Cockerham
March 27, 2013
WASHINGTON — Ten years after the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, the country’s oil industry is poised to boom and make the troubled nation the No.2 oil exporter in the world. But the nation that’s moving to take advantage of Iraq’s riches isn’t the United States. It’s China.
America, with its own homegrown energy bonanza, isn’t going after the petroleum that lies beneath Iraq’s sands nearly as aggressively as is China, a country hungry to fuel its rise as an economic power.
Iraq remains highly unstable in terms of security, infrastructure and politics. Chinese state-owned oil companies appear more willing to put up with that than Americans are.
“The Chinese have a higher tolerance for risk,” said Gal Luft, a co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington research center focused on energy.
The International Energy Agency expects China to become the main customer for Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, recently declared “a new trade axis is being formed between Baghdad and Beijing.” Birol said that about 80 percent of Iraq’s future oil exports were expected to go to Asia, mainly to China.
Iraq’s potential for oil production is huge. The International Energy Agency predicts that Iraqi production will more than double in the next eight years and that the country will be by far the largest contributor to growth in the global oil supply over the next two decades. By the 2030s, the agency expects Iraq to become the second largest global oil exporter, overtaking Russia.
American oil companies, in the meantime, are “barely active” in Iraq, said Robin Mills of Dubai-based Manaar Energy Consulting. There’s Exxon Mobil, which is locked in a dispute with the Iraqi government and is looking to sell at least some of its stake in the giant West Qurna-1 oil field, with the state-owned PetroChina discussed as likely buyer. The other U.S. firm operating in Iraq is Occidental Petroleum Corp., Mills said, a company that has just a minority, non-operating stake in the Zubair oil field.
Iraq hasn’t become the bonanza for big Western international oil companies that some might have expected when the U.S. invaded 10 years ago.
It’s a different story, though, for the U.S. oil field services and engineering companies that have established dominant positions in Iraq. That includes Haliburton, the company that Iraq war booster Dick Cheney led before he became vice president.
Bush administration officials suggested shortly after the invasion that revenue from Iraq’s oil fields could largely pay the cost of rebuilding the country. That turned out to be wrong, and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds ended up going into the reconstruction of Iraq. The war devastated Iraq’s oil industry, as kidnappings, sabotage and attacks on infrastructure made it virtually impossible to do business.
While the industry’s improvement in Iraq since 2009 has been substantial, according to analysts, the country remains a tough place to work. Huge problems remain with infrastructure, security and logistics.
The contract terms the Iraqi government offers oil companies also aren’t attractive, said Trevor Houser, an energy specialist with the New York-based Rhodium Group consulting firm. China is expanding in Iraq because it needs the energy and it doesn’t have alternatives that are as good as those of Western oil companies, he said.
The most profitable places in the world to work as an oil company are the North American unconventional fields – such as shale deposits in the Eastern U.S. – and the deepwater fields in West Africa or the Gulf of Mexico, Houser said. China has limited opportunities in those places, he said, with the state-owned oil company PetroChina lacking the technological sophistication needed for deepwater production.
“The fact that (PetroChina) is expanding in Iraq is not to me a sign of their strength, it’s a sign of their relative weakness,” Houser said.
Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said that nearly a third of the future oil production in Iraq was expected to come from fields that either were directly owned or co-led by Chinese companies.
Oil companies from the U.S. and other Western nations have been more interested in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, a largely autonomous area that doesn’t take orders from Baghdad. Kurdistan offers more stability and better contract terms to the international oil companies, to the fury of the Baghdad government, which is charged with handling international affairs and calls the contracts illegal.
Western oil companies generally have more attractive global investment opportunities than Iraq, said Luft, who’s an adviser to the U.S. Energy Security Council, a nonprofit group that works to lessen dependence on fossil fuels..
They also need to answer to their shareholders, and they see the world differently from the way state-owned Chinese companies do, he said.“The Chinese oil companies are more in tune with the geopolitical agenda of their government and respond less to shareholders,” Luft said. “If Exxon operates somewhere and has to close down operations for a month, that would have an impact on investors. When the Chinese go into one of those places and something bad happens, there is not the consequence in terms of stock.”
Luft said he didn’t see Chinese development of Iraq’s oil as a case of China enjoying the spoils of a war for which the U.S. had paid dearly both in lives and taxpayer dollars.
It’s a myth that U.S. energy security relies on Middle Eastern imports, he said. Oil from the region makes up just a small percentage of what America uses. The U.S. will benefit if China or anyone else can get Iraqi’s huge reserves developed and onto the market, he said. Since oil is a global commodity, he said, more oil on the market brings down prices.
“Energy security is about not only the availability of the resource but also about the cost,” Luft said. “Anything that brings down global oil prices is positive for U.S. energy security.”
SOURCE: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/27/187100/iraqi-oil-once-seen-as-us-boon.html#storylink=cpy
Al Qaeda Parade American Humvees, Tanks, Seize $429m from City’s Central Bank to Make It World’s Richest Terror Force!
Iraq and the Neo-Cons: The Sequel
The neo-cons brought the country the Iraq war based solely on lies and deception and it appears that these dead-enders have burrowed themselves so deeply into the foreign policy establishment that their bullshit views are still widely ventilated
It makes perfect sense that out of the horrors of the war in Iraq a resistance army would arise that is far more pernicious, ruthless, and fanatical than the original enemy the US sought to defeat. The level of sectarian violence Iraq has experienced from 2003 to the present is a direct consequence of the US invasion, which long ago showed the world how wrongheaded the decision to invade was.
We’ve recently heard prattling in the mainstream media about how successful the 2007 “surge” had been in Iraq and how President Barack Obama somehow “failed” because he didn’t follow the neo-con prescription of endless occupation. But the “surge” had not altered the underlying civil and sectarian ruptures in Iraqi society the US invasion unleashed.
Neo-cons and elite media personalities who got everything wrong on Iraq now darken my TV screen telling me to ignore the invasion, the eight-year occupation, the lies about weapons of mass destruction, “mushroom clouds” becoming “smoking guns,” the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and everything else and pretend the war started with General David Petraeus’s miraculous “surge” where everything was wonderful in Iraq until the “dove” Obama pulled the plug.
It’s a nice narrative if your goal is partisan advantage, but like so much else we’ve heard from policy elites regarding Iraq, it has nothing to do with reality.
When placed in the context of the ghastly human costs of the US occupation the “surge” was only a small part of the wider picture. One reason why there was a lull in the car bombs, IEDs, and suicide bombers for a brief time was because the CIA was dispersing millions of US tax dollars via satchels full of cash to the cutthroats, killers, and warlords among the “Arab Awakening” in (Sunni) Anbar Province. Many of these same elements are now part of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The other cause for the cosmetic “success” of the “surge” was that Baghdad had been already ethnically cleansed by the time the “Baghdad Security Plan” was launched in February 2007.
U.S. Destruction of Iraq
You won’t hear anybody on TV talk about the 2.2 million Iraqis who were internally displaced within the country at the time of the “surge” (and another 2 million that fled the country). Along with the steady increase of the refugee population in Iraq came the greater authority and expansion of the sectarian militias.
The leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, reportedly spent years inside one of the many American-run prisons in Iraq. According to the New York Times ISIL’s “rise is directly connected to the American legacy in Iraq. The American prisons were fertile grounds for jihadist leaders, and virtual universities, where leaders would indoctrinate their recruits with hard-line ideologies.” (New York Times, June 15, 2014 p. 11)
After all the car bombs, suicide bombers, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs); after all the torture and collateral murder ; after all the beheadings, massacres, and power drills used as “interrogation” tools; it should come as no surprise that the US invasion of Iraq continues to produce more violence and horror.
The Kenneth Pollacks and the Michael O’Hanlons and the Robert Kagans and the Paul Wolfowitzes and others think-tankers and esteemed members of the commentariat all claim to be great “strategic” thinkers. Yet none of them are asked to explain how they missed the neon signposts that ousting the Sunni government in Baghdad would strengthen the power in the region of the clerical Shia government of Iran.
Nothing proves better the folly (or disingenuousness) of the neo-con “strategic vision” for the Middle East than the United States today being forced to seek assistance from Iran to contain a Sunni jihadist insurgency in Iraq that didn’t even exist until the US invaded.
Since many of the neo-cons cut their teeth inside the Reagan Administration it’s hard to believe they were unacquainted with the “strategic” contours of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. America’s Sunni Arab allies in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia wouldn’t support the US invasion of Iraq, in part, because they saw Saddam Hussein as a buffer against Iranian influence.
So, even based on the neo-cons’ own “strategic” terms the Iraq invasion was a total failure.
Despite their impressive credentials and pedigree, the intellectuals among US foreign policy elites often lack common sense. They tend to see countries not as peoples and cultures and histories, but as pieces on a game board. It’s hard to believe they could be so blind to the idea that invading Iraq would breed heightened nationalism, hatred for the West, and a long-term resistance struggle against military occupation.
The US invasion also initiated the most radical and ill-informed experiment in forced privatization that any imperial power has ever attempted. In 2004, President George W. Bush sent L. Paul Bremer III to act as a kind of Viceroy in Iraq in the guise of the head of something called the “Coalition Provisional Authority.” Bremer is a blueblood corporate guy who apparently didn’t have a clue about the people over which he ruled.
For a time Bremer’s power was total and he didn’t hesitate to use it. Soon he was issuing daily “orders” all designed in one way or another to turn Iraqi society into an Ayn Rand novel. For example, “Order Number 39″ privatized Iraq’s 200 state-owned enterprises; allowed for 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; and gave away unrestricted, tax-free remittances of all profits and other funds to foreign companies (i.e. American and British) working under 40-year ownership licenses.
Bremer’s “Order Number 1,” with its ostensible aim of “de-Baathifying” the Iraqi state, destroyed just about every major governmental institution left standing in Iraq. He disbanded the Iraqi Army and police, cutting off the salaries and pensions of high-ranking officers and enlisted soldiers. With one imperial stroke of his pen Bremer swelled the ranks of the resistance against the American occupation with capable fighters, field engineers, and other security technicians.
And none of Bremer’s “orders” were legal under international laws dating back to 1907 because an occupying power has no right to change the legal system of the country it is occupying.
The car bombs and IEDs that became a permanent fixture of Iraqi life mirrored the exact skill set of the Sunni technocratic class that Bremer sent packing. It has been reported that former officers of the Baath Party are directing some of the Sunni organizations that fight alongside ISIL.
The US-directed power shift in Baghdad gave a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to Iraq’s Shia population to seize and hold power. After all the bloodshed and resistance one of the only viable Iraqi politicians left standing was Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who headed the first EVER Shia government in Baghdad.
Lately, pundits and even State Department officials have been maligning Maliki for “fomenting” sectarian division. But Maliki’s ability to hold power always depended on his ability to establish a modicum of security for ordinary Iraqis while making a credible claim to be standing up for independence and Iraqi nationalism.
Politically, Maliki could not accept the Americans’ Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) granting immunity to American military personnel from Iraqi laws, not after the many killings of innocents at the hands of the Americans and their contractors, (such asHaditha), which enraged Iraqi public opinion. He also couldn’t sign a SOFA with the United States giving Americans carte blanche to do as they please in Iraq when millions of his own people already believed he was a US puppet.
And what could Maliki do after Sunni extremists persisted in setting off car bombs in Shia open markets and neighborhoods? As the leader of the government in Baghdad (such as it is) he has a responsibility to try to provide security.
On February 22, 2006, men wearing Iraqi police uniforms tied up the guards at the al-Askari Shia shrine in Samarra, set up explosive charges around the interior of the structure, and blew it up. This was the spark that expanded the sectarian conflict in Baghdad into a raging civil war. The bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra was carried out not only to punish Shia rivals for power, but also to spark a sectarian bloodletting that would make the place ungovernable for the American occupiers. It was both an act of nationalistic resistance to foreign occupation and a statement against the new US-imposed order that kicked the Sunni Baathists out of the government.
Sunni nationalists sparked civil war, in part, to make the US occupation untenable, or at least uncomfortable. In this sense, the fomenting of chaos for the sake of chaos had a similar aim as the August 20, 2003 cement truck bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed the renowned diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. At the outset, Iraqi resistance fighters (Sunni and Shia) didn’t want the UN to help facilitate stability under American rule.
Taking a trip down memory lane — there was a time in 2003 when neo-cons were actually arguing that it was “good” for the United States military to attract “terrorists” in Iraq like a magnet attracts metal filings because it would be easier to identify them and kill them off. It was in that context of twisted attempts to conjure a “strategic” benefit for the invasion of Iraq in the global “War on Terror” when President George W. Bush said: “Bring ‘Em On.” There was a time when Bush held up an American military action in the city of Tal Afar as a shining symbol of success. Now that city has been lost.
In his 2008 biography of the Iraqi Shia leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, the journalist Patrick Cockburn writes:
<blockquote>
“Each community had isolated enclaves that were too small to be defended. The Shia majority controlled the police, the police commandos, and part of the army. The majority of the dreadful harvest of bodies found dumped in the streets every morning in Baghdad were Sunni, often people picked up at police . . . checkpoints. The main form of Sunni retaliation was vehicle-borne suicide bombs exploded in crowded Shia markets or in places where laborers would gather early in the morning to look for work. On the outskirts of Baghdad it was usually the Sunni who were in the ascendancy because their gunmen controlled all the roads radiating out of Baghdad. Shia workers on their way to work in the capital were regularly slaughtered there.” (Cockburn, Muqtada, p. 182)
“While Bush and Blair were absurdly denying that a civil war was taking place, hundreds of local civil skirmishes were erupting in central Iraq, turning every village, town, and city district into a battlefield. These bloody conflicts were difficult to follow because of the paucity of information and the complexity of Iraq’s sectarian mosaic.” (p. 183)
“Contradictory allegiances were the outcome not just of the byzantine and treacherous nature of Iraqi politics but of the muddled and contradictory nature of American policy in Iraq.” (p. 192)
“American politicians and foreign media focused too exclusively on war and the number killed as the sole indicators of what was wrong in Iraq. Too little attention was paid to other failures, such as the collapse of the food-rationing system, which reduced the millions of Iraqis to a life of malnutrition and near starvation. By the end of 2007 food rations were half what they had been under Saddam Hussein four years earlier. Some five million Iraqis depended on the state-subsidized ration to survive, but two million of these people were no longer being fed because they had been forced to flee their homes.” (p. 193)
“The US government, Iraqi politicians, and the Western media habitually failed to recognize the extent to which hostility to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and, in the eyes of Iraqis, delegitimized the leaders associated with it.” (p. 200)
No elite voice in this country seems capable of coming to terms with the fact that the Iraq war was “lost” the moment it was launched. It was lost because it was based on lies and deception. It was lost because it violated international law. What a pathetic narrative people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham regurgitate this late in the game: that things were “won” in Iraq by Bush the Younger and then “lost” by Obama with the US withdrawal. We lose IQ points even listening to that drivel.</blockquote>
Those who serve the 1 percent among America’s foreign policy elite can be proven wrong, they can fall on their faces, they can fail miserably and repeatedly, cause death and destruction for hundreds of thousands of innocent people, yet they’re never held accountable. In fact, they most likely will be promoted to prominent positions in some future administration. But the kind of interventionist foreign policy the neo-cons and their ilk never tire of advocating has become deeply unpopular outside the Beltway. The intellectuals associated with the “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” claim to understand “history” and believe that democracy can be exported.
They believe they know so much about democracy and its promotion internationally, yet they fail to see that bringing this country to war is the biggest single decision a people can make in a democracy. The nepotism and clubbiness that characterizes American foreign policy elites, and the behind-closed-doors insularity of the “debate” in Washington about the US’s role in the world, are the opposite of “democracy.”
And when these elites pop up on the talk shows calling for more war and how they stand for “democracy” we should remind them that, for now at least, in America there is no longer any popular support for their imperial adventurism.
They’re just going to have to wait a while before they get their next war.
THE AFTERMATH A DECADE LATER
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