Instead of emptying toilets in some prison somewhere, these war criminals are still jockeying for jobs. Washington is truly an astonishing place.
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I still remember pretty clearly the lines that these people spun for the public. Lines like how the war was going to be quick and easy, how Iraq would become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, how oil revenue would pay for the entire operation, how we would be greeted as liberators, how Saddam was just inches away from having a whole host of nasty weapons [including strong hints that some of the weapons might possibly maybe be nuclear]. And not one of those lines ended up being true. Not a single damn one.
If there was even an ounce of justice in this world, these guys would all be rotting in a jail somewhere.
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Not really. They were pretty blunt on the idea of taking over the world. Actually Ray McGovern said that George HW Bush referred to the Neocons as âthe effing craziesâ. Thatâs why he told his kid to dump Rummy and bring in Gates. I donât see how any of that equals becoming a 9/11 conspiracy nut like the Loose Change dicks or Richard Gage.
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Seems everybody but Sen. Grahamâs running for the hills on Iraq. Lindsey was just on CNN bloviating about how all the mess in Iraq is Obamaâs sole fault (ignoring that it was begun by Bush I and continued under Bush IIâŠgotta love that repub revisionist history). Lindsey further said âWe need 10,000 troops on the ground right now to train up some Iraqis to be soldiersâ again ignoring that we spent a decade and a lot of blood and treasure doing exactly that. Lindsey has to have a mental condition to miss recent history that badly.
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I remember reading the first issue of the New Yorker after 9/11. Before the end of the day Woolsey and others were trying to use the attack as an excuse to immediately attack Iraq, even though no one was entirely sure what had happened yet.
The moment the Supreme Court selected Bush as president, war with Iraq was inevitable.
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âYou donât get to make decisions in hindsight. You take the best available intelligence and you make the best decision you can at that point in time. Hindsight is not a part of the game, so I think itâs an unfair question to ask.â
Funny all those guys got it so wrong, because I and everybody I knew at the time knew exactly what was going to come out of that invasion, because we listened to the people who knew what was going on in Iraq, not the people who had already said years before that the path to the NEW American Empire starts there.
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Among the prominent Iraq War figures TPM contacted: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Douglas J. Feith, Bill Kristol, Scooter Libby, Peter Feaver, Bruce Jackson, and Stephen Cambone. They all either declined to comment or did not respond to TPMâs request for comment.
What? No Hillary Clinton? She was a staunch Iraqi war supporter thoughâŠletâs be fair here, shall we?
And it will all be paid for with Iraq oil money!
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I just love how the âhindsight is unfairâ and âit does us no good to rehash a decade old argumentâ is the response from the very party who went batshit over Benghazi and demanded investigation after investigation.
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I, for one, would just as soon have the thugs in power. I have known lots of for-real biker thugs, Angels and Bandidos, in the old days. They are a bit unpredictable, but considerably more honorable, as a class, than Republican politicians.
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As it is, I wonder if Jeb Bush will be the greatest casualty in the near future. By running, he has brought the Iraq War back into the limelight and the Republicans will make him pay for that by treating him like a dinosaur from yesterday that needs to be brushed aside, kind of like Bob Dole was in 1996.
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PLEEZZZ!!
Like dick and co. didnât make up the whole damn thing.
There was no mistakes. The Iraq invasion was a cheney wet dream just waiting to happen.
And, stupidly, we let it happen. By we, I mean the gop/bags pushing for it, the dems rolling over like rugs, the press and media and banging the war drums for it.
The Iraq invasion was a WAR CRIME!! They lied, people died.
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One correction to your list. Iraq was not the war that 9/11 suckered us into; Afghanistan was. Iraq was a war they started on their own because they are insane warmongers. It was a self-inflicted wound for the US, and a blunder for the ages (not to mention a wholly criminal act), but it was not mandated by 9/11.
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Just as the entirety of American media from Bill OâReilly to Jim Leher ignored the fact that hundreds of UNSCOM inspectors had been back on the the ground and scouring every suspected WMD manufacturing or storage facility for four months prior to the invasion so they are still mum on that fact. Those inspectors followed leads supplied by intell orgs of multiple countries and came up with nothing at every site. There was no intell failure, it was policy failure on a devastating level for Iraq and the US and now the entire Middle East.
Be very afraid, if another bush gets the SCOTUS to give him the presidency, like they did W, all these same cast of characters will be backâŠwith a vengeance.
And, all with Cabinet positions.
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Do any of this cast of characters travel freely around the world?
A large part of what happened in Iraq was that the neocons seemed to think of themselves as movie heroes, that the plot was set and if they embarked on this great adventure that after 2 hours or maybe 3 weeks, after lots of exciting trials and tribulations, they would win out in the end, right would be established, and peace, prosperity and unfettered capitalism would reign for a thousand years, with them in charge.
It seems never to have occurred to them that this might entail some serious work on their part. They were astonishingly incompetent, seeming to have no idea how to go about this thing they had committed OUR lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to.
These people couldnât have run a trucking company.
There has and maybe never will be a better example of what happens to a nation when it allows democracy to be stolen. If we werenât such a nation of sheep we would have stormed the Supreme Court and demanded justice after Bush v. Gore. If Gore hadnât been such a sheep he would never have caved. I was astonished and felt profoundly cheated, as did millions.
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Everyone always seems to forget about this nugget. Richard Perle associate Laurent Murawiecâs
presentation to the Defense Policy Board about how we need to take over Saudi Arabia. Final cryptic slide read:
Iraq is the tactical pivot
Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot
Egypt the prize
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Though 9/11 was touted as the raison dâĂȘtre to invade Iraq. Remember how one of the hijackers was connected to Saddam with made up intelligence that didnât make any sense to people somewhat familiar with Middle East politics and a working knowledge of Islam.
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I thought Mr. Pillarâs comments at the end of the article are the most telling:
âWe have somewhat similar debate going on right now with Iran â the fact that having a nuclear program doesnât by itself constitute a case to do any one thing â to go to war, to negotiate or whatever,â Pillar said. âYou have to argue the pros and cons.â
According to Pillar, the broader back-and-forth proves that we âare still stuck in the framework that the war promoters in the Bush administration gave us,â in that perceived threat alone justifies an invasion.
Preemptive war was what made this decision by President Bush so heinous. The list of bad things is almost too long to list and itâs still growing. It unleashed the torrent of awful we see in ISIS in Iraq AND Syria. It prolonged any struggle against Islamic radicalism. It damaged our relationships with allies. It set a precedent that countries should attack one another when, as Mr. Pillar points out, a threat is perceived.
Now this whole conversation on the right and the media shows a kind of delusion going on for both entities. Itâs not just the intelligence was bad. Itâs that all of the other stuff was also way worse. All of this was being argued by war critics before and after the invasion. Itâs apparently still being ignored today. As much as 9/11 marked the beginning of a new threatening era, the invasion marked the descent into a destabilized world. Thatâs not President Obamaâs fault. Heâs just trying to keep us only knee deep in the muck rather than in over our heads.
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