If the invasion of Iraq was just an innocent mistake, some questions need to be answered
The biggest lie about this brutal invasion of a country which posed zero threat is that the invasion itself wasn't based on deception, but was, in fact, an innocent mistake.
Democrats lied about Iraq. Republicans lied about Iraq. Democrats continue to lie about Iraq. Republicans continue to lie about Iraq. Both of these parties make up the majority of our political process, and for the most part, the government as a whole. Therefore, the government lied, and continues lying, about Iraq.
The biggest lie about this brutal invasion of a country which posed zero threat is that the invasion itself wasn't based on deception, but was, in fact, an innocent mistake.
Jonah Goldberg, for example, writes in the Los Angeles Times: "If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003."
But what didn't we know then that we know now? US intelligence agencies seemed confident that Iraq was practically harmless, but nonetheless sought to find reasons to the contrary as a result of pressure from the Bush administration. And US news networks, desperate for ratings and eager to appear patriotic in the post-9/11 world, refused to allow voices critical of the administration on-air. Some even went so far as to cancel the shows of people questioning the war effort, such as MSNBC canning Phil Donahue, referring to him as a "difficult face" for the network when "our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
But let's pretend that the invasion was, in fact, just a mishap. Supposing this is the case, some important questions need to be asked.
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why did prominent neoconservatives who later joined the Bush administration advocate for the removal of Saddam Hussein?
In the 1990s, the Project for the New American Century, an influential neoconservative think tank, published a letter to President Clinton urging war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein, referring to him as a "hazard" to a significant portion of the world's supply of oil. The letter called for the US to go to war alone, insisting that it should not be "crippled" by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council. Out of 18 signatories, 10 later joined the Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretaries of State Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, Undersecretaries of State John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky, presidential adviser for the Middle East Elliott Abrams, Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, and George W. Bush's special Iraq envoy Zalmay Khalilzad.
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why was Saddam Hussein an obsession within the Bush administration prior to the 9/11 attacks?
Former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. ... It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Go find me a way to do this'."
Former CIA director under the Bush administration, George Tenet, said: "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat."
Less than two months after the Bush administration came into office, they were considering arming opposition groups inside Iraq.
In April 2001, during the Bush administration's first counter-terrorism meeting, the topic was not Osama Bin Laden, but Saddam Hussein and how to remove him from power.
Former Bush administration Counterterrorism "tsar" Richard Clarke said that between March and May 2001, Bush officials discussed creating a casus belli for war with Iraq.
In a 2007 interview with radio show host Jon Elliott, Clarke said:
"Prior to 9/11, a number of people in the White House were saying to me, you know this administration, particularly Cheney, but also Bush and people like Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, are really intent on going to war with Iraq. And this was the whispered conversations in the National Security Council staff. Early on in the administration people I knew and trusted in the administration were saying to me, 'You know. They're really going to do it. They are going to go to war with Iraq.' And I was flabbergasted. Why would you want to do that of all the things in the world that one could choose to do? And how are we going to do it? How are we going to cause that provocation? And there was some discussion of 'Well maybe we'll keep flying aircraft over Iraq and maybe one day one of them will be shot down.' And some of the talk I was hearing in the March, April, May timeframe, 'Maybe we'll do something that is so provocative and do it in such a way that our aircraft will be shot down.' And then we'll have an excuse to go to war with Iraq."
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why was Saddam Hussein an obsession within the Bush administration on the day of 9/11?
CBS reports that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. "Go massive," he is quoted as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
On September 17th, 2001, the Bush administration asked that contingency plans for attacking Iraq be prepared, including a plan to seize oil fields.
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why did the Bush administration first tie 9/11 to Iraq, and then later deny ever trying to make such a connection?
In 2004, Bush said: "Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all."
In 2005, Bush said: "There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11. I've never said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq."
In 2004, Cheney said: "There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early 90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials."
In 2009, Cheney said: "On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that."
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why did the US build a $750 million city-sized embassy in the country, equipped with its own tennis court, basketball court, swimming pool, and private air force?
See photos here.
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why did the US prop up and support Nouri al-Maliki, Saddam Hussein's replacement, who was arguably just as brutal?
As reported by John Glaser:
"The Obama administration has kept largely quiet about Maliki's behavior, aside from about $2 billion in annual aid and tens of billions in military assistance. While this keeps the halls of power in Washington and the oil corporations happy, even the best case scenarios are damning, for Iraqi citizens as well as the geopolitics of the region.
'Maliki is heading towards an incredibly destructive dictatorship, and it looks to me as though the Obama administration is waving him across the finishing line,' Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the London School of Economics said earlier this year. 'Meanwhile, the most likely outcomes, which are either dictatorship or civil war, would be catastrophic because Iraq sits between Iran and Syria.'
According to Tollast, the strength of al-Qaeda in Iraq has doubled over the past year. Instead of carrying counter-terrorism - 'essentially the art of increasing political legitimacy, isolating terrorists from their support base and then eliminating them' - Maliki has been using his security forces in a way that undermines their political legitimacy and reinforces their support base. And as far as civil war goes: angered Kurds and Sunnis say their disenfranchisement has never been greater. This increases the chances more Iraqis will join the latent insurgency still underway there."
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why has there been no official apology for the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians?
According to Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, the invasion killed at least 190,000 people, including US troops, contractors, and Iraqi civilians, and will cost the United States $2.2 trillion, a figure that far exceeds the initial 2002 estimates by the US Office of Management and Budget of $50-$60 billion.
A September 2012 study published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology that focused on maternity hospitals in the Iraqi cities of Basra and Fallujah recorded a devastating number of birth defects in the past decade. The study also indicated that childhood leukemia and other types of cancers are on the rise. These mutations, which by some estimates surpass the number seen following the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, are suspected of stemming from the use of certain US munitions.
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why was the Obama administration desperately trying to keep US troops in the country prior to withdrawing them back in 2010?
Obama's supporters assert that his withdrawal of troops form the country was the result of a campaign promise kept, but the answer is far more complicated. In reality, the Obama administration was working right up until the very end to maintain the presence of US troops in the country, but failed to do so as a result of the Iraqi government's refusal to grant US troops legal immunity from Iraqi law.
If the invasion of Iraq was an accident, why are US oil companies now operating inside of the country and profiting off its vast supply of resources?
In 2008, The Independent reported:
"Nearly four decades after the four biggest Western oil companies were expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein, they are negotiating their return. By the end of the month, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total will sign agreements with the Baghdad government, Iraq's first with big Western oil firms since the US-led invasion in 2003."
'Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq's oil market,' said Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry analyst, in 2012. 'But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973.'"
The fact that public officials continue to call this invasion a mistake is not merely an insult to the intelligence of the American people, but worse, a betrayal of the worst kind, and not one limited to a particular political party. If our government would lie to us about a war that has largely bankrupted our economy and killed hundreds of thousands of people, then what else might they be lying to us about? If our government remains so unapologetically defiant in admitting its deception, then why do they deserve our continued loyalty and support?
Update - 10/23/2014: More evidence that the invasion of Iraq wasn't a mistake has surfaced since the publication of this article, primarily in the form of the US and its allies returning to the oil-rich country. Support for this re-invasion has been fueled by a media blitz of ISIS beheading footage, which outraged the public so much that it now endorses returning to Iraq.
Two important points: First, US troops in Iraq now have legal immunity from Iraqi law, something they failed to obtain when Obama tried to keep them there the first time around, and second, calls for re-invasion in the US primarily surfaced only after ISIS began threatening operations of US oil companies now doing business in Iraq.