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Friday,
December 23, 2011 The End of the Bush-Cheney Disaster in Iraq "Just think of
what happened after 9/11. Immediately before there was any assessment there
was glee in the [Bush-Cheney] administration because now we can invade
Iraq." Ron Paul, U.S.
Congressman (R-Tex.) and 2012 Republican presidential candidate “After the war [against Iraq] has ended, the United
States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have
to rebuild America's image around the globe.” Sen. Robert
Byrd, (D-W.Va), March 19, 2003 “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by
August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end... Through this period
of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the Status
of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of
2011.” President Barack
Obama, Friday, February 27, 2009 The Obama administration officially put an
end
to the Iraq war on Thursday December 15, 2011, close to nine
years after the March 20, 2003 military invasion of Iraq, dubbed “shock-and-awe.” I had not
intended to comment on the end of this most unnecessary war, but since I
wrote a book to explain how it all came about, I feel that I
must say something. Analysts have
begun to describe this war, launched on false pretenses, as “the Biggest
Mistake In American Military History.” Indeed, beginning right after 9/11 and throughout
2002, the Bush-Cheney administration had its mind firmly set to invade Iraq
military, and no fact, law or argument could deter it from doing so. In that, it was following the blueprint that neocons
and pro-Israel "Likudniks" under the leadership of Paul Wolfowitz
(Bush's future deputy secretary of defense) and Lewis "Scooter"
Libby (Cheney’s future chief of staff) had drafted in 2000 under the auspices
of “The Project for the New American Century”, in a report
entitled "Rebuilding
America's Defenses, Strategy: Forces and Resources For a New Century". This was a neo-conservative imperial project that became
officially the “Bush
Doctrine”. Its goal was
to project, as far as possible into the future, the "unipolar
advantageous position" that the United States inherited after the
break-up of the Soviet Union, in December 1991. It was really a hubristic and bare-knuckle strategy
of world hegemony, based upon unilateral interventionism—militarily,
economically and politically—by the U.S. It was an "America
First" doctrine, based not upon modern international law, but rather on
a solipsistic approach to American interests and the elementary principle of
brute force. In fact, it was a giant step backward that could have
consequences for decades to come. In the book that
I wrote in 2003 to denounce such a suicidal shift in American foreign policy
(see: The
New American Empire), I pointed out that “the
'Bush Doctrine' was a near identical reenactment of the infamous 1968 Soviet
Union's 'Brezhnev Doctrine', which ...paved the way for the [Soviet] invasion Afghanistan in
1979.” Ultimately, it also led to the demise of
the Soviet Union. Contrary to what some still think, the war against Iraq
did not arise from a generous desire to promote democracy around the world.
In fact, “spreading democracy” was little more than a domestic
war propaganda slogan. After the events
of 9/11, the policy was to divert the war against international terrorism and
the al Qaeda network, and turn it towards the real big prize, i.e. Iraq, its
armaments and its oil. In the spirit of the newly designed “Bush
Doctrine”, it was obvious that the war against international terrorism
offered a strategic opportunity to promote American interests around the
world. Nobody can
understand why so many lies, so many distortions and so many artifices were
used by the Bush-Cheney administration and its sycophants in the media to
justify the illegal invasion of Iraq, a country that had no connection to
9/11 whatsoever, if one does not understand the policy that prepared it. But here we are
with that most unnecessary war and what are the results? This is a war
that destroyed
a country, killed hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants and drove 4,500
American soldiers to their death and severely injured 30,000 more. This was a war that did not improve U.S. National
Security to any extent, because it has now made Islamist Iran the primary
influence in the Middle East region. Moreover, this
is a war that seriously diminished the United States'
global
credibility and moral posture around
the world. Finally, this is
a war that has also contributed in breaking the U.S. economy, because it caused the U.S. government's fiscal
deficit to spiral out of control and because that deficit was mainly financed
with foreign debt. All considered, except for the war
profiteers who filled their pockets, this so-called Iraq war was an
unmitigated disaster. ____________________________ Dr. Rodrigue
Tremblay, an economist,
is the author of the book “The
Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, Please visit the book site at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted, Friday, ecember 23, 2011, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction
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