Dave Lindorff has again written a very important article. See my comments in double brackets and and italics.
Ronald
Thanks to JG for spotting this one.
http://desip.igc.org
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Dave Lindorff wote:(excerpt)
So many apparently stupid decisions were made by people who should clearly have been too smart to make them, from leaving hundreds of tons of high explosives unguarded to cashiering all of Iraq's army and most of the country's civil service managers, that it boggles the mind to think that these could have been just dumb ideas or incompetence. (L. Paul Bremer, for instance, who made the "dumb" decision about dismantling the Iraqi army, prior to becoming Iraq's occupation viceroy, had headed the nation's leading risk assessment consultancy, and surely knew what all the risks were of his various decisions.)
Dave Lindorff: Was Iraq War a 'Blunder' or Was It Treason?
by Dave Lindorff, co-author of "The Case for Impeachment"
Published on BuzzFlash (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles)
New Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), is calling President Bush's invasion of Iraq a "stark blunder" and says that his new scheme to send 21,500 more troops into the mess he created is just digging the hole deeper.
I wonder though.
It seems ever more likely to me that this whole mess was no blunder at all.
People are wont to attribute the whole thing to lack of intelligence on the president's part, and to hubris on the part of his key advisers. I won't argue that the president is a lightweight in the intellect department, nor will I dispute that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and that whole neocon gang have demonstrably lacked the virtues of reflection and humility. But that said, I suspect that the real story of the Iraq War is that Bush and his gang never really cared whether they actually would "win" in Iraq. In fact, arguably, they didn't really want to win.
What they wanted was a war. [[They wanted permanent war. 911 was their vehicle. From the beginning they insisted that it was a WAR on terror, not a police action.]]
If the war they started had ended quickly with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that would have served their purposes, at least for the short term. Bush would have emerged from a short invasion and conquest a national hero, would have handily won re-election in 2004, and would have gone on to a second term as a landslide victor. But if it went badly, as it has, they figured he would still come out ahead. He would be a wartime president, and he'd make full use of that role, expansively misdefining his "commander in chief" title to imply authority over the Congress and the courts, to grab power heretofore unheard of for a president. [[At a certain moment, certainly by the time they cashiered their first pro-counsel, Jay Garner, they needed a rationale to stay, create permanent bases, and continue their overriding mission which was to destroy Iraq. They had two reasons.
1.They are about destruction. What does it mean to say that the Bush-Cheney (Rumsfeld) administration is about destruction? It means they are nihilists. That means they believe in destruction for its own sake. They pretend to believe that reconstruction will follow destruction. Their understanding of Year Zero is that first everything will be destroyed and then a new reborn society will follow. But their track record for reconstruction is what it is.
2.They wanted to ensure Israel's domination of the Middle East by crushing any possiblilty of a challenging Arab power.]]
This, I suspect, was the grand strategy underlying the attack on Iraq.
If I'm right, there may have been method to the madness of not building up enough troops for the invasion to insure that U.S. forces could occupy a destroyed Iraq and help it rebuild; method to the madness of allowing looters free sway to destroy the country's remaining post-invasion infrastructure; method to the madness, even, of allowing remnant forces of Hussein's to gather up stockpiles of weapons and even high-density explosives, so they could mount an effective resistance and drag out the conflict.
So many apparently stupid decisions were made by people who should clearly have been too smart to make them, from leaving hundreds of tons of high explosives unguarded to cashiering all of Iraq's army and most of the country's civil service managers, that it boggles the mind to think that these could have been just dumb ideas or incompetence. (L. Paul Bremer, for instance, who made the "dumb" decision about dismantling the Iraqi army, prior to becoming Iraq's occupation viceroy, had headed the nation's leading risk assessment consultancy, and surely knew what all the risks were of his various decisions.)
We expect a measure of idiocy from our elected leaders and their appointees, but not wholesale idiocy!
This disaster has been so colossal, it almost had to have been orchestrated.
If that's the case, Congress should be taking a hard look at not just the latest installment of escalation, but at the whole war project, beginning with the 2002 campaign to get it going. Certainly throwing 21,500 new troops into the fire makes no sense whatever. If 140,000 of the best-equipped troops in the world can't pacify Iraq, 160,000 aren't going to be able to do it either. You don't need to be a general to figure that out. Even a senator or representative ought to be able to do it. So clearly Congress should kill this plan.
Since it's not about "winning" the war, it has to be about something else. My guess would be it's about either dragging things out until the end of 2008, so Bush can leave office without having to say he's sorry. But of course, it could also be about something even more serious: invading Iran. [[Yes of course. Iran is next if Congress will allow him, but I'm afraid that train has already left the station. It's about permanent war. Their projected war against Iran will allow them to stay in Iraq and their war against Iran will allow them to stay in Iraq if a wider war against Russia and China -- not to mention other lesser powers has not already begun.]]
We know Bush is trying mightily to provoke Iran. He has illegally attacked an Iranian consulate in Iraq (an act of war), taking six protected consular officials there captive. He is sending a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf, and is setting up Patriot anti-missile missile bases along Iran's western border. This buildup has all the earmarks of a pre-invasion. All that's needed now is a pretext -- a real or faked attack on an American ship, perhaps, ala the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" that launched America into the Vietnam War.
The way I see it, either way the president is committing treason, because he is sending American troops off to be killed for no good reason other than for aggrandizing power he shouldn't have, and/or simply covering his own political ass.
[[Yes it's treason just like 911 and so many more of the crimes committed by this outlaw regime. But it's not about aggrandizing power: they already have all the power. It's about using their power to make war, to destroy. And it's not realpolitick or for any vicious but self serving reason. It's about destruction and suicide. All that is necessary to understand destruction as their motive is to consider the implications of endless war. Endless war means self destruction as well.]]
Treason is the number one impeachable crime under the Constitution, and we're at a point where Congress is going to have to act or go down in history as having acquiesced in the worst presidential crime in the history of the nation. [[It's even more than that. It's about survival. Once we attack Iran, the consequences could include nuclear war -- just as the Israelis have recently warned.]]
DAVE LINDORFF is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net [1] and at www.counterpunch.org [2].
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Source URL:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/articles/contributors/734
Links:
[1] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/
[2] http://www.counterpunch.org/
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