Bush's War

PBS's FRONTLINE runs a major documentary retrospective.

An extensive archive of FRONTLINE's excellent work on Iraq and the President's so-caled War on Terror is here.

Dick Cheney to the American public:

Fuck you people.

Anniversary edition

Five




Fucking




Years





Five years too many, or just a down payment the next 100?

Leading to War

A new film and accompanying web site documents the ways in which the Bush-Cheney administration misled us into war in Iraq. Not a new story, of course, but hardly passe. The evidence is very well organized and presented here and includes a video record of important statements by top administration officials.

Professor Fate, I mean Feith, writes a book

in which Himself, in a valiant attempt to make the world safe for democracy, is absolved of responsibility for the monumental cluterfuck in Iraq, and the real villains (Powell, Armitage, and the CIA) are charged with undermining an otherwise sound policy.

You will recall that Professor Fate, I mean Feith, is one of the Dueling Douchebags of Georgetown University.

Professor Fate, I mean Feith, has apparently set out to do for scholarship what he has done for foreign policy.

Proof of absence: al Qaeda and Saddam unconnected

The invaluable McClatchy News Service reports on a new Pentagon study which definitively shows to be true what many of us have been arguing all along:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

...President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.

So, in spite of what they have been telling us for years, and the bullshit that McCain peddles about al Qaeda in Iraq, I guess this means it's pretty well fucking confirmed:

No connection before the Cheney-Bush invasion created a reason and an opportunity for al Qaeda to establish a presence in Iraq.

Damn it.

I'm still angry about this.

A three Trillion dollar war

according to the estimates of Stiglitz and Bilmes in the Washington Post.

When the numbers get this big, I have to remind myself that a trillion is a million times a million. So we're talking about a million piles of a million dollars, times three.

And what have we bought?

Four thosand dead American troops, tens of thousands wounded or maimed, many more psychologically traumatized.

Hundreds of thousdands of dead Iraqis, massive destruction of social infrastructure, societal disintegration and endemic conflict, millions displaced, misery beyond measure.

A priceless propaganda victory for militant jihadists, a respite for al Qaeda to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan, America less safe from terrorism than before the war.

Geopolitical destabilization of the Middle East, and intensified tensions with Iran.

Food for the hungry? No.

Hospitals and health care? Nuh-uh.

Schools and teachers? Nope.

What a deal.