Defining the war in Iraq

There are none so blind as those who will not see.” John Heywood

If you are looking for one word that would sum up the manner in which the Bush administration has conducted the war in Iraq, may I suggest “inexcusable”? For instance, the 9/11 terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was the chief excuse used by Bush, et al, to justify starting this war, and yet, it has been shown time and again that absolutely no one from that country played any part in this attack, no matter how minor. The conspirators were from Saudi Arabia, who planned the attack in Afghanistan, with the blessings of that country’s government at that time, the Taliban. So far as a connection between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida, the group responsible for 9/11, there was none then, and there is none now, despite the repeated attempts of the neo-cons who planned and implemented this war, to establish one. All of this is inexcusable.

In the days prior to the declaration of war against Iraq, the country was solidly behind the Bush administration. Of course, none of the so-called mainstream media did much to question any of the reasons given by the Bush administration for this war. The coverage by the mainstream media, if anything, led many Americans to falsely assume that Hussein’s regime had been behind the 9/11 attacks, and that it had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) despite reports from the U. N. inspections team on the ground in Iraq, led by Hans Blix, a native of Sweden, which showed that none existed. The President, himself, did little to discourage such thinking, considering the false intelligence cited in his 2003 State of the Union address, wherein he claimed that Hussein had been seeking to buy uranium from the African country of Niger, presumably to build and explode an atomic bomb in a major American city. The Bush administration was only too glad to exploit its advantages prior to the war, and considering that the gravest decision any leader must make is whether or not to go to war, this is inexcusable.

In planning for the invasion, the Bush administration was warned by many of its leading military officers at the time, to include the then Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff, Gen. John M Shalikashvili, that it was using too few troops for the invasion. For daring to question his boss, the General was forced into early retirement. Inexcusable.

His Secretary of State, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and planner for Dessert Storm, Colin Powell, warned that if the U. S. invaded, like the Pottery Barn rule of “You break it, you bought it!”, once we were in, the country would be ours to rebuild. He, too, was ignored. And because no plan for effective reconstruction was ever devised, the country was made ripe for the insurgency that is thwarting the military’s best efforts at stabilization. The electrical grid works haphazardly at best, leaving large sections of the country with only sporadic power in one of the hottest countries in the world. Clean water for most Iraqis is a memory, leaving residents with little or no choice but to use contaminated water, which in turn, lead to the spread of disease. As a result, infant mortality is an all-time high. Unemployment, too, is at an unimaginable level. Couple this with the fact that the Iraqi army was turned loose following the initial invasion, and you can understand why the insurgency continues. Again, all of this is completely inexcusable.

It would be possible to go on and on in this fashion, for some time, and in so doing, it could conceivably be quite a spell before you would have to repeat yourself. For instance, there were billions of dollars given to the interim government in Iraq that simply disappeared. No one knows where this money went to, and the Bush administration has suggested that since it was “Iraqi money”, it (the Bush administration) is not responsible for keeping track of it. The biggest question is this: How much of that money has gone to finance Al Qaida, the group that the Bush administration insists is very much a part of the on-going war there? There can be no doubt that the current Iraqi government has been infiltrated by members of the insurgency, as suicide bomber have gained access to supposedly safe areas, such as the so-called Green Zone, that walled-off section of Iraq, reserved for American civilian and military leaders. Considering that the Bush administration has always insisted that this war, which it calls a “central front in the war on terror” is being fought to insure our national security, such carelessness, is inexcusable..

Far from having learned their lesson in any of the tragic missteps they have made along the way, those in charge of this ill-conceived, poorly-planned war continue to stumble along, in the same fashion as Drew Barry’s character in “Fifty First Dates”. The only excuse imaginable for the latest outrage would be chronic amnesia. The latest news from the Pentagon is, to use another word, unbelievable. The U. S. military, in attempting to get a viable Iraqi security force on the ground, turned over a huge cache of weapons to them. Somewhere along the way, some 30 percent, or around 190,000 weapons, that include lethal automatic rifles such as the AK 47, have, like the billions of dollars already mentioned, simply disappeared. And the scary part is this, no one knows for certain that the same insurgency that has so plagued the military’s effort at securing the peace in Iraq, does not have possession of them. Yep. You’re right. This is inexcusable.

It is hard to keep track of all the Bush administration has squandered in its misadventures in Iraq. There was the general good-will that existed the world over following 9/11. It is gone. There was the trust that the American public reposed in it prior to the declaration of war in Iraq. Gone. And the money spent there with no results to show for it, over $600,000,000,000 so far, and threatening to top $1,000,000,000,000, also gone. This money was wasted, BTW, while America’s infrastructure continues to crumble, but with no money left to repair it, now. Hence the state of New Orleans, two years after Katrina. Hence the collapse of the bridge in Minnesota. Hence the continuing decline of the number of Americans who trust their government to do the right thing, And this is the most inexcusable thing of all.