I'm on the right, but I was always skeptical of the Iraq War.
I'll never forget when Kucinich was on some Sunday morning chat show in around 2004, and a Bush apologist was flaunting photos of old chemical weapons receptacles that were found in Iraq, arguing that there really were WMD.
Kucinich politely asked if he could have the photos…
I'm on the right, but I was always skeptical of the Iraq War.
I'll never forget when Kucinich was on some Sunday morning chat show in around 2004, and a Bush apologist was flaunting photos of old chemical weapons receptacles that were found in Iraq, arguing that there really were WMD.
Kucinich politely asked if he could have the photos, the hack agreed, and Kucinich asked the cameraman to zoom in on one. It showed a long, rusted out metal canister, looking like something you'd see in a scrap metal yard.
Kucinich asked, just slightly raising his voice, "We went to war--over this?"
The Bushee started stuttering and hemming and hawing and otherwise showing what a direct hit it was.
Saddam Hussein was between a rock and a hard place. He didn't have a nuclear program after 1981 aside from a pile of yellowcake and some high level wastes at Osirak, surrounded by a huge dirt berm you can see on a Google Maps satellite shot. He had a small bioweapons program. He had chemical weapons. But he had UN inspectors breathing down his neck on one side and Iran on the other. He feared a loss of deterrence vis a vis Iran if he came clean about what little he actually had. So he prevaricated. When actually invaded, he made drug deals with the most likely leaders - strangely enough the Iranians and the Syrians. Most of the chemical weapons left (mostly artillery shells) after the wars and his internal use of it went to Syria, and most of that was either used or destroyed by now. The remnants of his nuclear program were removed from Iraq by the US in 2008 or so. The bioweapons program I know nothing about where it went, but it wasn't huge and basically amounted to weaponized anthrax. Not that that is nothing, but it's not the world-ending threat we once thought it was.
Kucinich's political stuff in 2004 might have seemed poignant but it was pretty ill informed.
I understood Kucinich's point to be that there was not a sufficient national security reason to invade. It sounds like you might agree with that, but only in hindsight.
But there were quite a few savvy players (including people on the right like Bob Novak) who smelled a rat and tried to raise the alarm before the invasion.
Personally never cared about the whole Iraq weapons canard. I always saw it as a casus belli. I wanted to take down two countries hard. THEN LEAVE!! The mistake as I see it was staying around to make those two shit hole countries (classic Trump) into electoral paradises. Only idiot DC swamp rats could believe that. It did make a lot of people rich though.
After 911 I felt the most expeditious effective way to “fight terrorism”(terrorism being a technique not an ideology) was to hammer two countries. Then leave. Then make it policy(unofficial) that if your country shielded terrorists or financed terrorists something very bad would happen to you, your family, or your country. Possibly all three. That was my preferred policy. Unpleasant but effective.
Funny how the main source of both terrorists and their financing - then and now (Saudi Arabia) was not on that list. It is like as if after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor US decided to invade and occupy Portugal for example.
Nothing about US policy in ME makes any sense - for any rational person it looks extremely counterproductive to US interests. Until you start looking at it from the Israeli interest angle and then all US actions make perfect sense suddenly.
In 1920, almost no standing Army, 9 prisons for the entire country focused on the most violent criminals and the image of America abroad was missionaries helping provide medical care to the Chinese during the boxer rebellion from a couple decades prior.
One hundred years later in 2020, 2.5 million citizens held in over 1000 prisons of filthy state cages for a range of crimes to include being mentally ill. An endless supply of military grade weapons supporting an internal paramilitary army supplied through the 1033 program. The American image abroad is a drone smashing into a wedding party.
You can't declare war abroad without it leading to a war on your own people. Violence isn't just messy, it's a fire impossible to isolate, or control.
"Our presence in Iraq has not blown back at home....yet."
Gulf War I vet Tim McVeigh conducted the OKC bombing in 1995.
When you teach and train people that violence is an effective problem-solving tool -- through both military and cultural indoctrination, as the US does -- don't be surprised when they use violence to solve problems. The chickens have roosted and will be roosting for some time.
Very fair and cogent analysis of the situation. The Iraq fiasco was an extraordinarily stupid move by Bush, but everyone who screamed “No blood for oil” was completely missing the point-Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran-they will sell oil to the dude who pissed on their collective grandmas graves if the price is right.
The reality is more likely that after installing Saddam's regime in 1978, Rumsfeld, Cheney and HW Bush and their pals decided to attack their own puppet government -just to have a show and spend those sweet, sweet defense dollars.
Nothing more than a banana republic that was used for a couple of decades to pressure Iran, Syria, Yemen, and whoever was nearby and at odds with US policy. I'm looking at you, Turkey. The primary goal though was oil fields to drain.
When you factor in that it was a US-controlled dictatorship since 1978, the Iraq Wars equate to genocide for profit. I don't judge servicemen and women who served in that theater, and know quite a few. Most of them agree that it wasn't necessary or justified.
Just another act in a play the US Dept. of State was putting on involving a wave of grabs to consolidate resources and power. Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan and they halted briefly at Syria because of Russia's pipeline plans. So they "partnered up" to "destroy ISIS/ISIL", taking turns dropping expensive ordinance all over the place.
«Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply.»
I think that misses completely the points, because the 2nd Iraq war had been long planned by Cheney and the Deep State, and like the attacks on various other countries, from Serbia to Lybia, it had a main purpose: showing that the USA can wreck a country to intimidate the others. After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever...
As to oil, the USA is in essence an "hydraulic empire", and needs to show it controls the flow of oil worldwide, and control here means the ability to stop that flow. Just having the ability to buy that oil is not enough. Consider the Nordstream 2 case:
* Germany has built both a terminal terminal for gas transported from the USA and Qatar by USA ships, and a terminal for gas pipelined from Russia, so it has a backup for either option.
* The USA government objects to that because it says having terminal for both american and russian gas *reduces the security of Germany* over the option of depending only on american supplied gas.
* The obvious real reasoning is that if the german government ever steps out of line, and they have only a terminal for gas transported by american controlled ships, the USA government can reroute the ships to other countries, and 20-30% of german industry is wiped out, and many millions of houses freeze in winter.
This is a great overview. Thanks for talking the time to write it. I have two questions:
1. The Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of WWII with Europe in 1944 established the US dollar as the world currency for all commodities, so why would we need an agreement from the Saudi's in the 1970's to "only buy oil is dollars" when that was already the only acceptable unit of exchange at the time? Given the enormous profits the Saudi's were making from oil in the 1970's combined with their lack of infrastructure, only the US had financial markets deep enough to hold the value from their oil wealth in the form of treasuries. They found themselves in the same situation as the Japanese in the 1980's and the Chinese now. They may not like it or us, but we are the only country in the world with reserves large enough to store trillions in a form that can later be converted back to usable currency.
2. You mentioned Nixon took us off the Gold Standard because we could not pay our debts to Europe, but inflation was running at such a high rate our debt was essentially being erased without us paying hardly a cent. Gold, however, was trading at over $2000 an ounce due to this inflation, so Nixon was forced to take us off the Gold Standard because it was simply unaffordably to store gold at that cost and to do so would have only caused the price to go higher. The world begged him to exit the gold standard for their own sake since some were pegged to the dollar and all of them handled all exchanges in US currency (back to the Brenton Woods agreement mentioned above).
FYI the removal happened under Bush, they gave out pretty unit citations to everyone involved telling us that we were responsible, and I quote, for "removing Saddam Hussein's nuclear program from Iraq". Someone was trying to airbrush history, but it's true with a lot of asterisks and caveats. They handed out the unit citations a week or two before Obama was inaugurated.
The Osirak reactor was fueled with HEU and set up to produce plutonium at the time it was hit. The Iraqis bought a separation rig in 1979. The conclusion is obvious. That wasn't a reactor intended for civilian uses. The Israelis hit it in 1981 and blew it to smithereens. That's what McCall got out of there, at least within the limits of moon suits and the like. I imagine the reactor itself is still hot, too hot for that
To his "credit", Saddam never restarted the program. Truthfully, that might not be by choice, but it's true nonetheless. They took bulldozers and put up a several hundred foot high berm around the reactor and called it a day. I was there; I have pictures. You can see the fortifications atop the berm from the satellite shots, it looks rather pathetic now. A lot of human remains in the area at the time. About a mile east from the Tigris, ~15 klicks SE of central Baghdad. Google names it "Atomic Energy Organization", can't miss it.
Did you know that Iraq uses about one fifth of their extracted oil for local energy. They have so much natural gas that they burn off (waste) more of it than they can use for electric and export. They didn't need nuclear power then and don't need it now.
You're a captive of your biases. I'll finish up this conversation with a quote from Saddam Hussein in one of his private conversations, the minutes of which were captured in 2003.
In a 1982 conversation Hussein stated that, "Once Iraq walks out victorious [over Iran], there will not be any Israel." Of Israel's anti-Iraqi endeavors he noted, "Technically, they [the Israelis] are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq."
That berm is proof that the reactor had something in it. Otherwise, why bother. It was a lot of work to do.
Nuclear plants don’t explode when bombed. At worst, they melt down. The configuration of fuel rods is not set up to sustain an explosive chain reaction.
The common narrative is that Bush lied as a pretext to invade Iraq. The truth is more difficult to find and understand. Saddam refused to prove the WMD reports false. In a Western court of law it is not incumbent upon the accused to prove his innocence. The arena was one not at all understood in the West, and Saddam proved to be grand master in his game.
Saddam ran the most successful deception operation since the XX Committee in World War II. He believed that unless Iran concluded he had WMD it would invade and conquer Iraq. For Iran to come to that conclusion, everybody had to come to that conclusion. It could not succeed if even one country's intelligence service could prove the contention wrong.
He was assured by senior members of government in both France and Russia, paid agents, that Bush was a fool and they could easily control Bush to protect Iran. Oops.
This is documented by an FBI Agent's debriefing of Saddam; the agent's story was documented by a major US Network (ABC, IIRC). The entire deception operation is documented and in storage at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. How it has escaped a demand for public release is puzzling.
The Network never again broadcast the agent's story, and not a single other news source has carried the story. That one is neither puzzling nor mysterious.
Otherwise, I, too, have been a Kucinich fan for years. He makes his decisions based on principles, not short-term personal or partisan gains. His positions were less important to me than his decision-making process.
I think the revulsion over the 2nd Gulf War can't be understood purely in terms of the WMDs.
Many people now forget the anthrax scare that followed soon after the Twin Towers attack. What people do remember is that a group opportunists that always wanted a war with Iraq and always wanted something like the Patriot Act, the TSA and Homeland security and mass surveillance of the American people leveraged our fear into their standing wish list of authoritarian resolutions we are all now stuck with. It's a repeat of the American people discovering after WWI that the British were actually using the Lusitania to transport weapons at the time the Germans attacked it. People felt duped because they were.
I think that's why many people aren't very interested in the true history of the WMD's. When they say the WMD were a lie, they are actually referring to a series of lies more nebulous that never sat quite right with them.
People like DK at the time are a proxy for those who stood against all of that whether people realize it or not.
Being actually part of WMD cleanup in Iraq, I agree with you. I never thought the things I found there were somehow a justification for what was done over the prior (at the time) 6 or 7 years.
At a high level, of course, everything is a lie. There are always caveats and counterexamples one could bring up to everything that bubbles to the surface in government or media. I'm reminded of Voltaire, "History is the lie commonly agreed upon". Large narratives are never the objective truth.
I was against it (and Afghanistan) from the very beginning but I went over and did my part in it anyway. My reason was that we would never do what was required to win either war, and just get a bunch of people killed for no good reason. Guess what, I was right.
Have voted straight party line Republican my whole life*, but not because I agree with very much the party is for. It just tends to screw things up more to vote that way, and especially in the age of Trump.
* Except for that one youthful indiscretion of voting for Clinton in '92. Sue me. Bush was puking on the Japanese prime minister and Perot sounded like he was nuts.
That's the entire US experience in a nut shell. Anyone wanting to do anything that disturbs the socioeconomic pecking order is made to sound like a nut via the branch of the CIA we call the press.
Who knew voting could be made into blackmail where you just vote for the least damaging tyrant to your demographic knowing all the while you're merely choosing whose friends and family we're going to make rich this cycle while they rubber stamp the pre-approved agenda from the DAVOS crowd.
Perot was kind of a nut though. Very easy to caricature. The thing that did him in for me was leaving the campaign and then reentering late in the summer. Absent that, he would have gotten my vote.
He was dodging the heat that the press was hurling at him. Not a very well thought out tactic at all.
The thing is it takes a nut to not cave into the pressure of the cabal.
I think it's pretty irrelevant now though.
We're just along for the ride now and when you see this level of ineptitude you arrive at a point where you just have to admit you live in the same kind of banana republic the empire has set up everywhere else around the world.
Why wouldn't they use the same secret sauce at home that they do everywhere else ?
Look at how our foreign policy is now domestic policy....
I think we've gone beyond individual countries and are well into setting up corporate industrial zones within a one world government and single currency.
I think that was the globalist intent. There are a fair number of countries who are not interested in baking in the current pecking order. Some have nuclear arsenals. This doesn't sound like a winning hand for the globalists.
Realistically though, how do you get money out of politics? Serious question. Even avowedly anti-capitalistic regimes end up making their leadership rich.
You force the corporate TV and radio stations to give equal blocks of free airtime to all candidates who qualify for ballot status in enough states to have a statistical chance of winning. Why then would you need gobs of campaign cash? It’s the monopolist broadcasting corporations that rake in all that dark campaign money. The public airwaves have been hijacked to corrupt our own election system. We need to take them back.
Who decides who qualifies as a candidate ? These "parties" are in complete control of who advances and what script they must follow in order to stay on the gravy train.
I, personally, called the National Guard office and was asked what military training I had. I told the Lt. Col. who answered my exprience was with NASA, not any of the armed forces and was very politely declined and asked not to call back. This man's army doesn't need computer programmers with over 600 hours experience crewing high altitude aircraft.
I am not a conscientious objector by any standard that I consider appropriate. It would be an insult to conscientious objectors of faith for me to claim so.
I did what I did because it was for people I knew and cared for, not because it was for patriotism or some national goal. Just like most everyone else. My story was a female CW3 who had already done three tours in SWA who was going to be sent back for a fourth unless I would cover for her under orders. I did it. She separated and got a nice job with the FAA.
I'm on the right, but I was always skeptical of the Iraq War.
I'll never forget when Kucinich was on some Sunday morning chat show in around 2004, and a Bush apologist was flaunting photos of old chemical weapons receptacles that were found in Iraq, arguing that there really were WMD.
Kucinich politely asked if he could have the photos, the hack agreed, and Kucinich asked the cameraman to zoom in on one. It showed a long, rusted out metal canister, looking like something you'd see in a scrap metal yard.
Kucinich asked, just slightly raising his voice, "We went to war--over this?"
The Bushee started stuttering and hemming and hawing and otherwise showing what a direct hit it was.
Damn, I was impressed.
Saddam Hussein was between a rock and a hard place. He didn't have a nuclear program after 1981 aside from a pile of yellowcake and some high level wastes at Osirak, surrounded by a huge dirt berm you can see on a Google Maps satellite shot. He had a small bioweapons program. He had chemical weapons. But he had UN inspectors breathing down his neck on one side and Iran on the other. He feared a loss of deterrence vis a vis Iran if he came clean about what little he actually had. So he prevaricated. When actually invaded, he made drug deals with the most likely leaders - strangely enough the Iranians and the Syrians. Most of the chemical weapons left (mostly artillery shells) after the wars and his internal use of it went to Syria, and most of that was either used or destroyed by now. The remnants of his nuclear program were removed from Iraq by the US in 2008 or so. The bioweapons program I know nothing about where it went, but it wasn't huge and basically amounted to weaponized anthrax. Not that that is nothing, but it's not the world-ending threat we once thought it was.
Kucinich's political stuff in 2004 might have seemed poignant but it was pretty ill informed.
I understood Kucinich's point to be that there was not a sufficient national security reason to invade. It sounds like you might agree with that, but only in hindsight.
But there were quite a few savvy players (including people on the right like Bob Novak) who smelled a rat and tried to raise the alarm before the invasion.
Personally never cared about the whole Iraq weapons canard. I always saw it as a casus belli. I wanted to take down two countries hard. THEN LEAVE!! The mistake as I see it was staying around to make those two shit hole countries (classic Trump) into electoral paradises. Only idiot DC swamp rats could believe that. It did make a lot of people rich though.
After 911 I felt the most expeditious effective way to “fight terrorism”(terrorism being a technique not an ideology) was to hammer two countries. Then leave. Then make it policy(unofficial) that if your country shielded terrorists or financed terrorists something very bad would happen to you, your family, or your country. Possibly all three. That was my preferred policy. Unpleasant but effective.
So you wanted the US to “hammer” Saudi Arabia, then leave the region? Would have been better policy, at least.
Funny how the main source of both terrorists and their financing - then and now (Saudi Arabia) was not on that list. It is like as if after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor US decided to invade and occupy Portugal for example.
Very good point. Not sure why we treat SA with kid gloves other then need for oil. In addition any attack on Mecca might inflame millions of Muslims
Nothing about US policy in ME makes any sense - for any rational person it looks extremely counterproductive to US interests. Until you start looking at it from the Israeli interest angle and then all US actions make perfect sense suddenly.
In 1920, almost no standing Army, 9 prisons for the entire country focused on the most violent criminals and the image of America abroad was missionaries helping provide medical care to the Chinese during the boxer rebellion from a couple decades prior.
One hundred years later in 2020, 2.5 million citizens held in over 1000 prisons of filthy state cages for a range of crimes to include being mentally ill. An endless supply of military grade weapons supporting an internal paramilitary army supplied through the 1033 program. The American image abroad is a drone smashing into a wedding party.
You can't declare war abroad without it leading to a war on your own people. Violence isn't just messy, it's a fire impossible to isolate, or control.
"Our presence in Iraq has not blown back at home....yet."
Gulf War I vet Tim McVeigh conducted the OKC bombing in 1995.
When you teach and train people that violence is an effective problem-solving tool -- through both military and cultural indoctrination, as the US does -- don't be surprised when they use violence to solve problems. The chickens have roosted and will be roosting for some time.
Very fair and cogent analysis of the situation. The Iraq fiasco was an extraordinarily stupid move by Bush, but everyone who screamed “No blood for oil” was completely missing the point-Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran-they will sell oil to the dude who pissed on their collective grandmas graves if the price is right.
The reality is more likely that after installing Saddam's regime in 1978, Rumsfeld, Cheney and HW Bush and their pals decided to attack their own puppet government -just to have a show and spend those sweet, sweet defense dollars.
Nothing more than a banana republic that was used for a couple of decades to pressure Iran, Syria, Yemen, and whoever was nearby and at odds with US policy. I'm looking at you, Turkey. The primary goal though was oil fields to drain.
When you factor in that it was a US-controlled dictatorship since 1978, the Iraq Wars equate to genocide for profit. I don't judge servicemen and women who served in that theater, and know quite a few. Most of them agree that it wasn't necessary or justified.
Just another act in a play the US Dept. of State was putting on involving a wave of grabs to consolidate resources and power. Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan and they halted briefly at Syria because of Russia's pipeline plans. So they "partnered up" to "destroy ISIS/ISIL", taking turns dropping expensive ordinance all over the place.
The show goes on, of course.
«Saddam would happily have sold the US all the oil we wanted w/ zero need to invade for control. The invasion was about daddy issues and dick waving, NOT ensuring a constant oil supply.»
I think that misses completely the points, because the 2nd Iraq war had been long planned by Cheney and the Deep State, and like the attacks on various other countries, from Serbia to Lybia, it had a main purpose: showing that the USA can wreck a country to intimidate the others. After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever...
As to oil, the USA is in essence an "hydraulic empire", and needs to show it controls the flow of oil worldwide, and control here means the ability to stop that flow. Just having the ability to buy that oil is not enough. Consider the Nordstream 2 case:
* Germany has built both a terminal terminal for gas transported from the USA and Qatar by USA ships, and a terminal for gas pipelined from Russia, so it has a backup for either option.
* The USA government objects to that because it says having terminal for both american and russian gas *reduces the security of Germany* over the option of depending only on american supplied gas.
* The obvious real reasoning is that if the german government ever steps out of line, and they have only a terminal for gas transported by american controlled ships, the USA government can reroute the ships to other countries, and 20-30% of german industry is wiped out, and many millions of houses freeze in winter.
"After Iraq was wrecked and Saddam executed, Ghaddafi became extraordinarily eager to whatever..."
For all the good that did him the end.
I think Bashar looked at the end-game of Saddam's and Muammar's careers and was like, "Nah, the US can keep its ball. Not playing."
Just ask the Native Americans - every single treaty with them has been broken by US government. An absolutely incredible record. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-broken-treaties
This is a great overview. Thanks for talking the time to write it. I have two questions:
1. The Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of WWII with Europe in 1944 established the US dollar as the world currency for all commodities, so why would we need an agreement from the Saudi's in the 1970's to "only buy oil is dollars" when that was already the only acceptable unit of exchange at the time? Given the enormous profits the Saudi's were making from oil in the 1970's combined with their lack of infrastructure, only the US had financial markets deep enough to hold the value from their oil wealth in the form of treasuries. They found themselves in the same situation as the Japanese in the 1980's and the Chinese now. They may not like it or us, but we are the only country in the world with reserves large enough to store trillions in a form that can later be converted back to usable currency.
2. You mentioned Nixon took us off the Gold Standard because we could not pay our debts to Europe, but inflation was running at such a high rate our debt was essentially being erased without us paying hardly a cent. Gold, however, was trading at over $2000 an ounce due to this inflation, so Nixon was forced to take us off the Gold Standard because it was simply unaffordably to store gold at that cost and to do so would have only caused the price to go higher. The world begged him to exit the gold standard for their own sake since some were pegged to the dollar and all of them handled all exchanges in US currency (back to the Brenton Woods agreement mentioned above).
I could document this and the rest but I choose not to. Do your own research. Hint, "Operation McCall".
Not my fault you are ill-informed.
FYI the removal happened under Bush, they gave out pretty unit citations to everyone involved telling us that we were responsible, and I quote, for "removing Saddam Hussein's nuclear program from Iraq". Someone was trying to airbrush history, but it's true with a lot of asterisks and caveats. They handed out the unit citations a week or two before Obama was inaugurated.
The Osirak reactor was fueled with HEU and set up to produce plutonium at the time it was hit. The Iraqis bought a separation rig in 1979. The conclusion is obvious. That wasn't a reactor intended for civilian uses. The Israelis hit it in 1981 and blew it to smithereens. That's what McCall got out of there, at least within the limits of moon suits and the like. I imagine the reactor itself is still hot, too hot for that
To his "credit", Saddam never restarted the program. Truthfully, that might not be by choice, but it's true nonetheless. They took bulldozers and put up a several hundred foot high berm around the reactor and called it a day. I was there; I have pictures. You can see the fortifications atop the berm from the satellite shots, it looks rather pathetic now. A lot of human remains in the area at the time. About a mile east from the Tigris, ~15 klicks SE of central Baghdad. Google names it "Atomic Energy Organization", can't miss it.
Did you know that Iraq uses about one fifth of their extracted oil for local energy. They have so much natural gas that they burn off (waste) more of it than they can use for electric and export. They didn't need nuclear power then and don't need it now.
You're a captive of your biases. I'll finish up this conversation with a quote from Saddam Hussein in one of his private conversations, the minutes of which were captured in 2003.
In a 1982 conversation Hussein stated that, "Once Iraq walks out victorious [over Iran], there will not be any Israel." Of Israel's anti-Iraqi endeavors he noted, "Technically, they [the Israelis] are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq."
That berm is proof that the reactor had something in it. Otherwise, why bother. It was a lot of work to do.
Nuclear plants don’t explode when bombed. At worst, they melt down. The configuration of fuel rods is not set up to sustain an explosive chain reaction.
The common narrative is that Bush lied as a pretext to invade Iraq. The truth is more difficult to find and understand. Saddam refused to prove the WMD reports false. In a Western court of law it is not incumbent upon the accused to prove his innocence. The arena was one not at all understood in the West, and Saddam proved to be grand master in his game.
Saddam ran the most successful deception operation since the XX Committee in World War II. He believed that unless Iran concluded he had WMD it would invade and conquer Iraq. For Iran to come to that conclusion, everybody had to come to that conclusion. It could not succeed if even one country's intelligence service could prove the contention wrong.
He was assured by senior members of government in both France and Russia, paid agents, that Bush was a fool and they could easily control Bush to protect Iran. Oops.
This is documented by an FBI Agent's debriefing of Saddam; the agent's story was documented by a major US Network (ABC, IIRC). The entire deception operation is documented and in storage at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. How it has escaped a demand for public release is puzzling.
The Network never again broadcast the agent's story, and not a single other news source has carried the story. That one is neither puzzling nor mysterious.
Otherwise, I, too, have been a Kucinich fan for years. He makes his decisions based on principles, not short-term personal or partisan gains. His positions were less important to me than his decision-making process.
Areslentjust now
I think the revulsion over the 2nd Gulf War can't be understood purely in terms of the WMDs.
Many people now forget the anthrax scare that followed soon after the Twin Towers attack. What people do remember is that a group opportunists that always wanted a war with Iraq and always wanted something like the Patriot Act, the TSA and Homeland security and mass surveillance of the American people leveraged our fear into their standing wish list of authoritarian resolutions we are all now stuck with. It's a repeat of the American people discovering after WWI that the British were actually using the Lusitania to transport weapons at the time the Germans attacked it. People felt duped because they were.
I think that's why many people aren't very interested in the true history of the WMD's. When they say the WMD were a lie, they are actually referring to a series of lies more nebulous that never sat quite right with them.
People like DK at the time are a proxy for those who stood against all of that whether people realize it or not.
Being actually part of WMD cleanup in Iraq, I agree with you. I never thought the things I found there were somehow a justification for what was done over the prior (at the time) 6 or 7 years.
At a high level, of course, everything is a lie. There are always caveats and counterexamples one could bring up to everything that bubbles to the surface in government or media. I'm reminded of Voltaire, "History is the lie commonly agreed upon". Large narratives are never the objective truth.
Now that's a lie - it commonly agreed that Napoleon said that :-)
Heh. Napoleon was a great man and I admire a lot of what he said, but even if he did, it was taken from Voltaire, which he would have read.
I was against it (and Afghanistan) from the very beginning but I went over and did my part in it anyway. My reason was that we would never do what was required to win either war, and just get a bunch of people killed for no good reason. Guess what, I was right.
Have voted straight party line Republican my whole life*, but not because I agree with very much the party is for. It just tends to screw things up more to vote that way, and especially in the age of Trump.
* Except for that one youthful indiscretion of voting for Clinton in '92. Sue me. Bush was puking on the Japanese prime minister and Perot sounded like he was nuts.
That's the entire US experience in a nut shell. Anyone wanting to do anything that disturbs the socioeconomic pecking order is made to sound like a nut via the branch of the CIA we call the press.
Who knew voting could be made into blackmail where you just vote for the least damaging tyrant to your demographic knowing all the while you're merely choosing whose friends and family we're going to make rich this cycle while they rubber stamp the pre-approved agenda from the DAVOS crowd.
Perot was kind of a nut though. Very easy to caricature. The thing that did him in for me was leaving the campaign and then reentering late in the summer. Absent that, he would have gotten my vote.
He was dodging the heat that the press was hurling at him. Not a very well thought out tactic at all.
The thing is it takes a nut to not cave into the pressure of the cabal.
I think it's pretty irrelevant now though.
We're just along for the ride now and when you see this level of ineptitude you arrive at a point where you just have to admit you live in the same kind of banana republic the empire has set up everywhere else around the world.
Why wouldn't they use the same secret sauce at home that they do everywhere else ?
Look at how our foreign policy is now domestic policy....
I think we've gone beyond individual countries and are well into setting up corporate industrial zones within a one world government and single currency.
How about you ?
I think that was the globalist intent. There are a fair number of countries who are not interested in baking in the current pecking order. Some have nuclear arsenals. This doesn't sound like a winning hand for the globalists.
Realistically though, how do you get money out of politics? Serious question. Even avowedly anti-capitalistic regimes end up making their leadership rich.
You force the corporate TV and radio stations to give equal blocks of free airtime to all candidates who qualify for ballot status in enough states to have a statistical chance of winning. Why then would you need gobs of campaign cash? It’s the monopolist broadcasting corporations that rake in all that dark campaign money. The public airwaves have been hijacked to corrupt our own election system. We need to take them back.
Who decides who qualifies as a candidate ? These "parties" are in complete control of who advances and what script they must follow in order to stay on the gravy train.
Ahh!...but therein lies the rub! How can they qualify without equitable media exposure?
I, personally, called the National Guard office and was asked what military training I had. I told the Lt. Col. who answered my exprience was with NASA, not any of the armed forces and was very politely declined and asked not to call back. This man's army doesn't need computer programmers with over 600 hours experience crewing high altitude aircraft.
So they let me off. I wasn't grateful.
I am not a conscientious objector by any standard that I consider appropriate. It would be an insult to conscientious objectors of faith for me to claim so.
I did what I did because it was for people I knew and cared for, not because it was for patriotism or some national goal. Just like most everyone else. My story was a female CW3 who had already done three tours in SWA who was going to be sent back for a fourth unless I would cover for her under orders. I did it. She separated and got a nice job with the FAA.