"We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld, (March 30, 2003)
"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [to invade Iraq]."
Downing Street Memo (July 2002)
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
Mark Twain. The Mysterious Stranger 1916
Now Karl Rove, Bush's political brain, says that the Iraq War was "Osama bin Laden’s Idea." —This is crazy.
The fact is that the world was ready to accept a case for destroying and eradicating the terrorist-training camps located in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, after 9/11. That is the reason the United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions to that effect in the fall of 2001 and in early 2002. These were Resolution 1373, adopted on September 28, 2001, and Resolution 1390, passed on January 16, 2002.
But the case for going to war against Iraq is entirely different: It was a fabrication from day one. That is the reason the United Nations Security Council refused to pass a resolution authorizing it, in January 2003. The Bush-Cheney regime nevertheless went ahead with this illegal war and will carry the historical opprobrium for having done so. It took the low moral road, thus reducing the moral stance of western civilization in the world and doing irreparable damage to international law and order. It has also brought discredit on the very institution of representative government and on democracy in general. This is a scandal of high proportions, above and beyond all the crimes being carried out on the ground in Iraq.
The British ambassador to Australia and former British cabinet minister Helen Liddell recently rendered a service to many when she stated the obvious, i.e. that the Bush-Cheney war of aggression against Iraq had little to do with a war against terrorism. The Bush-Cheney regime is marketing any imperialistic and colonialist adventure around the world as an "anti-terrorist" mission and a push for democracy. —This is a lie. It is a propaganda trick to silence critics and chloroform the American public. All these wars of aggression are illegal attempts by the United States and its willing co-conspirators to dominate militarily the strategic oil-rich Middle East and Caspian region in order to displace Russia, China and even Western Europe from this region of the world. It has nothing to do with fighting Islamist terrorism. In fact, it feeds and exacerbates terrorism. Iraq has become a "university of terror".
Therefore, the historical reality remains that the Bush-Cheney regime disregarded truth and international law in order to justify taking military control of oil-rich Iraq, without provocation, even though it knew perfectly well that this country had no ties to the 9/11 attacks nor to bin Laden's terrorist organization, and that it had no weapons of mass destruction. In the process, however, this Karl Rove-inspired Republican regime took partisan advantage of the anger present in America after 9/11 to run two elections, in 2002 and in 2004, on the theme of national security and on a platform of war hysteria, thus profiting immensely politically from this propaganda scam.
Now that hundreds of people die daily in occupied Iraq, that they have triggered a religious and sectarian civil war, and that a majority of Americans have seen through their lies and machinations, the architects of this disaster are trying to shift blame and find new excuses. But to no avail. The truth is now too powerful to be extinguished by crude propaganda tricks and by lies.
For a while, however, the campaign of disinformation and propaganda worked remarkably well. For example, immediately after the events of 9/11, only three percent (3%) of Americans made a link between the terrorist attacks and Iraq; by February 2003, weeks before the March 20, 2003 onset of the Iraq War, a whopping seventy-two percent (72%) of Americans had been persuaded by the Bush-Cheney regime and their sycophants in the media that the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Political analysts will study this propaganda coup for decades to come.
Even the Democrats in Congress—goaded by the pro-Israel Lobby—were suicidally content to go along with the Bush-Cheney's scam until the 2006 elections. They now adopt the majority view that there is no military solution in Iraq, that to believe so will only lead to bad policies and make matters worse, and that a promise to withdraw all American troops from this country is a prerequisite to reintroduce some stability in this ravaged country.
But how many thousands more deaths must occur before sanity prevails?
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Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: http://www.thecodeforglobalethics.com/
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Posted, April 23, 2007, at 5:30 am
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Source: http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1063
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