So sad to see some otherwise bright people not quite up to scratch with the ongoing attempt by the US at regime change in Venezuela.
Maybe they've never heard of the CIA coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), or Chile (1973), to name but the tip of the US regime change iceberg last century. But surely, Iraq (2003), Honduras (2009), Libya (2011), and Syria (2011-) have lingered in their memory?
I wish.
So here, I think, is really all you really need to know about what's going on in Venezuela, which is to say all you really need to know about what is going on in the minds of the neocon/ziocon crazies who hold the levers of power in Washington:
"Every ten years or so, the US needs to pick up some small, crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Learn those words by heart. They're standard operating procedure for imperial America, and for as long as it believes it has an unfettered right to interfere in, undermine, sanction, or invade other countries in order to facilitate its global corporate agenda of pillage and plunder, they will remain relevant.
The words, of course, come from US neocon warmonger Michael Ledeen, at a time when he was salivating at the prospect the 2003 US invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq.
Since that time, Ledeen has been pleased to see the devastation of Libya, and no doubt still has his hopes set on that of Syria. While Iran is currently in his cross hairs, no one, including Venezuela, is safe from the neocon/ziocon lust for blood and domination. As the following full-throated howl from Ledeen makes abundantly clear.
(And do I really need to point out here, that for Ledeen - and Trump neocons/ziocons Bolton, Pompeo and Pence - 'tyrants' are those who resist being rolled by the Americans, and 'would-be revolutionaries' are CIA assets such as Venezuela's current US puppet, Juan Guaido?)
"The tyrants are in a jam, and Machiavelli pronounced tyranny the most unstable form of regime. I'd welcome stronger odors of rot in Caracas and Tehran, but there are some even so. I believe we must act. Speeches and sanctions are not likely to suffice. Our allies and the would-be revolutionaries have well-justified suspicions that, when their lives are on the line, the United States will not send in the Marines. Or even the Air Force. Hope they're wrong." (From What does a successful revolution smell like? Faster, please!, pjmedia.com, 1/3/19)
Get it?
Showing posts with label Michael Ledeen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Ledeen. Show all posts
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Thus Spake M'Lord Turnbull
"Malcolm Turnbull will declare that Muslim armies must lead the fight against Islamic State as he commits Australia to a long fight to destroy the group's power base..." (Muslim armies must lead ISIS fight: PM, David Crowe, The Australian, 19/1/16)
Hello?
AUSTRALIA, the US, Britain etc, egged on by Ziocon chickenhawks whose notion of foreign policy is that "every ten years or so the US needs to pick up some small, crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,"* do just that with Iraq in 2003, releasing the genie of sectarianism there and turning Iraq into a playpen for first AQI, and now IS... and then along comes M'Lord Turnbull, declaring that Muslims must get down on their hands and knees and clean up the bloody mess...
Oh, and:
"Mr Turnbull will also acknowledge the link between the terrorists and Islam..."
... but not the link between the sectarian terrorists and US foreign policy forged by Ronald Reagan and Bushama in Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria respectively.
[*The 'Ledeen Doctrine']
Hello?
AUSTRALIA, the US, Britain etc, egged on by Ziocon chickenhawks whose notion of foreign policy is that "every ten years or so the US needs to pick up some small, crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,"* do just that with Iraq in 2003, releasing the genie of sectarianism there and turning Iraq into a playpen for first AQI, and now IS... and then along comes M'Lord Turnbull, declaring that Muslims must get down on their hands and knees and clean up the bloody mess...
Oh, and:
"Mr Turnbull will also acknowledge the link between the terrorists and Islam..."
... but not the link between the sectarian terrorists and US foreign policy forged by Ronald Reagan and Bushama in Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria respectively.
[*The 'Ledeen Doctrine']
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
I'm Tony, I'm From Australia & I'm Here to Help
According to rambammed (2014) Sydney Morning Herald journalist, David Wroe, PM Tony Abbott used "conspicuously strong language to slam the post-2003 handling of Iraq led by the US administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and supported by former prime minister John Howard, Mr Abbott's political mentor." (Abbott blasts Iraq's post-war 'chaos', 6/1/15).
These are Abbott's words, cited by Wroe in his report:
"Iraq is a country which has suffered a very great deal. First, decades of tyranny under Saddam Hussein. Then, the chaos and confusion that followed the American-led invasion. Most recently, the tumult, the dark age, which has descended upon northern Iraq as a result of the the Da'esh death cult. But Australia will do what we can to help."
To begin with the highlighted sentence. The problem here is Abbott's use of the passive voice. It obscures the direct connection between the American-led invasion and the "chaos and confusion" that followed it. It suggests that, well, war is war, and that, to use an expression beloved of Abbott, 'shit happens'. There is no recognition in Abbott's words that the "chaos and confusion" was in fact meant to happen, was, in fact, the actual goal of the invasion.
As I've pointed out in many posts over the years, the whole point of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq was to destroy it as a functioning nation and break it into mutually hostile, sectarian statelets (a process bluntly described by neocon warmonger Michael Ledeen as 'cauldronization') on behalf of Israel. (See, for example, my posts Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze (22/12/08), Revolted (3/12/09), Neocons: No Beautiful Dreamers (19/6/14) & 30 US Neocons Screw 13 Million+ Arabs for Israel (4/11/14))
Abbott's take on the 2003 invasion is, in fact, a misrepresentation, and entirely in keeping with his 2009 characterisation of it as an altruistic war of liberation. (See my 17/6/14 post Iraq According to Abbott: 2003-2014.) (Notice too, how Abbott omits all mention of the horrendous suffering inflicted on Iraqis by draconian sanctions imposed on the country following the first Gulf War of 1990-91.)
Unsurprisingly, the rest of Abbott's words - on Saddam and on Islamic State - also misrepresent Iraqi history.
To take the former first, I've written many times before on the theme of Iraq under Saddam vs Iraq under the US boot, tendering testimony after testimony to the effect that life under Saddam was heaven compared to the hell which followed his overthrow. Just click on the 'Saddam' label below if you wish to read any of them. Here's another. The speaker, Scottish civil engineer Chris Walker, worked in Iraq in the 1980s:
"The majority of Iraqis had a very good life under Saddam by any normal standards, including our own. That he himself was an absolute bastard there is no doubt and the large minority of Iraqis who suffered under him suffered terribly. Those who opposed him at a political level often paid with their lives, as they have done in Iraq since time began... Saddam's position and that of the Baath was that in order to have a secularist Iraq he had to have a policy of brutal repression, not least of those we might now call Islamists, especially but not exclusively Shia religionists. However, those religious people who did not challenge his political hegemony such as the Christians of Iraq were left largely to their own devices. The Christians of Baghdad represented the largest Christian community in the Middle East. If you looked across the skyline of Baghdad you could see as many Christian symbols as Islamic.
"Even with the austerities of war (with Iran), for an Iraqi living his daily life was good. Medical services were the best in the region and free. Education was also free and to Western standards. Utilities were very good, especially water. Standard of living generally would be at the level of an Eastern European country at the same time (ie 1980s) and alcohol freely available at corner shops. They even manufactured their own beer (Ferido). Middle-class people enjoyed a life-style as good as blue collar workers here. Her daily life was different from that of his, inasmuch as religious mores kicked in. But if she was from a non-religious background, at least in emphasis, these differences were small. She could drive, shop and conduct her daily life in a normal way... Although 50% of all marriages were mixed - Sunni and Shi'ite - there is no doubt that Sunnis were the ones who enjoyed the more privileged existence, and while middle class Shia did exist in numbers, middle-class tended to connote Sunni middle-class. The poorest tended to be overwhelmingly Shia... I have tried to convey some sense of light and shade here. It is a million miles away from the Baghdad/Iraq of today and from that represented here [in the UK] before the war. But the Land of the Two Rivers has been destroyed as 'freedom and democracy' have been introduced by philistines." (You'll find the full interview with Chris Walker (An interview with Chris Walker) at duncanmcfarlane.org
Finally, notice how the "Da'esh death cult" and its "dark age" (the American aggression and occupation presumably being something of a 'light age'), simply "descended upon" Iraq, meteor-like, seemingly out of the blue. Not so. The hard truth is as follows:
"IS must be understood as the worst of the succession of US military campaigns since the 9/11 era - the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US war in Iraq was primarily responsible for creating the conditions for foreign Islamic extremists to flourish in that country. Furthermore, the groups that coalesced ultimately around IS learned how to create 'adaptive organisations' from a decade of fighting US troops, as then Defence Intelligence Director Michael Flynn has observed. And finally, the US made IS the formidable military force that it is today by turning over billions of dollars of equipment to a corrupt and incompetent Iraqi army that has now collapsed and turned over much of its weaponry to the jihadi terrorists." (The real politics behind the US war on IS, Gareth Porter, middleeasteye.net, 2/1/15)
Far from being strong, slamming words, Abbott's speech is, as you'd expect from a supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a complete evasion of the truth.
These are Abbott's words, cited by Wroe in his report:
"Iraq is a country which has suffered a very great deal. First, decades of tyranny under Saddam Hussein. Then, the chaos and confusion that followed the American-led invasion. Most recently, the tumult, the dark age, which has descended upon northern Iraq as a result of the the Da'esh death cult. But Australia will do what we can to help."
To begin with the highlighted sentence. The problem here is Abbott's use of the passive voice. It obscures the direct connection between the American-led invasion and the "chaos and confusion" that followed it. It suggests that, well, war is war, and that, to use an expression beloved of Abbott, 'shit happens'. There is no recognition in Abbott's words that the "chaos and confusion" was in fact meant to happen, was, in fact, the actual goal of the invasion.
As I've pointed out in many posts over the years, the whole point of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq was to destroy it as a functioning nation and break it into mutually hostile, sectarian statelets (a process bluntly described by neocon warmonger Michael Ledeen as 'cauldronization') on behalf of Israel. (See, for example, my posts Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze (22/12/08), Revolted (3/12/09), Neocons: No Beautiful Dreamers (19/6/14) & 30 US Neocons Screw 13 Million+ Arabs for Israel (4/11/14))
Abbott's take on the 2003 invasion is, in fact, a misrepresentation, and entirely in keeping with his 2009 characterisation of it as an altruistic war of liberation. (See my 17/6/14 post Iraq According to Abbott: 2003-2014.) (Notice too, how Abbott omits all mention of the horrendous suffering inflicted on Iraqis by draconian sanctions imposed on the country following the first Gulf War of 1990-91.)
Unsurprisingly, the rest of Abbott's words - on Saddam and on Islamic State - also misrepresent Iraqi history.
To take the former first, I've written many times before on the theme of Iraq under Saddam vs Iraq under the US boot, tendering testimony after testimony to the effect that life under Saddam was heaven compared to the hell which followed his overthrow. Just click on the 'Saddam' label below if you wish to read any of them. Here's another. The speaker, Scottish civil engineer Chris Walker, worked in Iraq in the 1980s:
"The majority of Iraqis had a very good life under Saddam by any normal standards, including our own. That he himself was an absolute bastard there is no doubt and the large minority of Iraqis who suffered under him suffered terribly. Those who opposed him at a political level often paid with their lives, as they have done in Iraq since time began... Saddam's position and that of the Baath was that in order to have a secularist Iraq he had to have a policy of brutal repression, not least of those we might now call Islamists, especially but not exclusively Shia religionists. However, those religious people who did not challenge his political hegemony such as the Christians of Iraq were left largely to their own devices. The Christians of Baghdad represented the largest Christian community in the Middle East. If you looked across the skyline of Baghdad you could see as many Christian symbols as Islamic.
"Even with the austerities of war (with Iran), for an Iraqi living his daily life was good. Medical services were the best in the region and free. Education was also free and to Western standards. Utilities were very good, especially water. Standard of living generally would be at the level of an Eastern European country at the same time (ie 1980s) and alcohol freely available at corner shops. They even manufactured their own beer (Ferido). Middle-class people enjoyed a life-style as good as blue collar workers here. Her daily life was different from that of his, inasmuch as religious mores kicked in. But if she was from a non-religious background, at least in emphasis, these differences were small. She could drive, shop and conduct her daily life in a normal way... Although 50% of all marriages were mixed - Sunni and Shi'ite - there is no doubt that Sunnis were the ones who enjoyed the more privileged existence, and while middle class Shia did exist in numbers, middle-class tended to connote Sunni middle-class. The poorest tended to be overwhelmingly Shia... I have tried to convey some sense of light and shade here. It is a million miles away from the Baghdad/Iraq of today and from that represented here [in the UK] before the war. But the Land of the Two Rivers has been destroyed as 'freedom and democracy' have been introduced by philistines." (You'll find the full interview with Chris Walker (An interview with Chris Walker) at duncanmcfarlane.org
Finally, notice how the "Da'esh death cult" and its "dark age" (the American aggression and occupation presumably being something of a 'light age'), simply "descended upon" Iraq, meteor-like, seemingly out of the blue. Not so. The hard truth is as follows:
"IS must be understood as the worst of the succession of US military campaigns since the 9/11 era - the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US war in Iraq was primarily responsible for creating the conditions for foreign Islamic extremists to flourish in that country. Furthermore, the groups that coalesced ultimately around IS learned how to create 'adaptive organisations' from a decade of fighting US troops, as then Defence Intelligence Director Michael Flynn has observed. And finally, the US made IS the formidable military force that it is today by turning over billions of dollars of equipment to a corrupt and incompetent Iraqi army that has now collapsed and turned over much of its weaponry to the jihadi terrorists." (The real politics behind the US war on IS, Gareth Porter, middleeasteye.net, 2/1/15)
Far from being strong, slamming words, Abbott's speech is, as you'd expect from a supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a complete evasion of the truth.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Laptop Bombardier
"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today [2002]. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists." Michael Ledeen - quoted in Stephen J Sniegoski, Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, & the National Interest of Israel, 2008, p 209)
Given his key role in the crime against humanity which is the Anglo-American invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq, Tony Blair's just-published autobiography, Tony Blair: A Journey, is rightly receiving some attention in the press. Although I haven't yet read it, I was particularly struck, in the following press report, by this reference to George W Bush's Svengali, Vice-President Dick Cheney:
"While lashing out at his successor, Gordon Brown, he praises his wartime ally George W Bush as intelligent and principled, although he reveals that others in the Bush administration had a hankering for invading Middle Eastern countries beyond Iraq. In a chilling insight into the mood of the Bush White House, Blair says vice-president Dick Cheney 'would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it - Hezbollah, Hamas etc. In other words, he thought the world had to be made anew and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency. He was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We're coming after you so change or be changed'." (Blair's book reveals background to war, Peter Wilson, The Australian, 2/9/10)
Neocon bastards like Cheney, and his offsiders, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, whom Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to in 2002 as "fucking crazies," are nothing if not consistent. For example, if Cheney and Wolfowitz had had their way at the time of the first Gulf War (1991), Iraq might have been 'cauldronized' over a decade earlier:
"[Secretary of Defense] Cheney's secret team came up with Operation Scorpion, an elaborate plan that involved sending US troops to remote regions west of Baghdad, from which they could, presumably, threaten Saddam. [Commander of Coalition Forces General Norman] Schwarzkopf got wind of the scheme and pointed out that it would be impossible to supply troops who were dispatched to the distant deserts of western Iraq. [President George H W] Bush and [Secretary of State James] Baker, who recognized the diplomatic disaster that the plan to depose an Arab leader would create, backed the general, and Operation Scorpion was quickly consigned to the dustbin of history - although Cheney and [Under-Secretary of Defense for policy Paul] Wolfowitz would continue to entertain fantasies about 'decapitating' Saddam and imposing 'regime change'. The Operation Scorpion plot raised real questions about Cheney's capacity to contribute to the war effort. Schwarzkopf would later express his frustration with Cheney's Operation Scorpion scheming, observing, 'I wondered whether Cheney had succumbed to the phenomenon I'd observed among some secretaries of the army. Put a civilian in charge of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied with setting policy but wants to out-general the generals'. Duly chastened, Cheney, whom the Washington Post took to referring to as 'the desk-chair warrior', faded from the forefront of the Iraq effort." (The Rise & Rise of Richard B Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History, John Nichols, 2004, pp 116-117)
Given his key role in the crime against humanity which is the Anglo-American invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq, Tony Blair's just-published autobiography, Tony Blair: A Journey, is rightly receiving some attention in the press. Although I haven't yet read it, I was particularly struck, in the following press report, by this reference to George W Bush's Svengali, Vice-President Dick Cheney:
"While lashing out at his successor, Gordon Brown, he praises his wartime ally George W Bush as intelligent and principled, although he reveals that others in the Bush administration had a hankering for invading Middle Eastern countries beyond Iraq. In a chilling insight into the mood of the Bush White House, Blair says vice-president Dick Cheney 'would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it - Hezbollah, Hamas etc. In other words, he thought the world had to be made anew and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency. He was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We're coming after you so change or be changed'." (Blair's book reveals background to war, Peter Wilson, The Australian, 2/9/10)
Neocon bastards like Cheney, and his offsiders, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, whom Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to in 2002 as "fucking crazies," are nothing if not consistent. For example, if Cheney and Wolfowitz had had their way at the time of the first Gulf War (1991), Iraq might have been 'cauldronized' over a decade earlier:
"[Secretary of Defense] Cheney's secret team came up with Operation Scorpion, an elaborate plan that involved sending US troops to remote regions west of Baghdad, from which they could, presumably, threaten Saddam. [Commander of Coalition Forces General Norman] Schwarzkopf got wind of the scheme and pointed out that it would be impossible to supply troops who were dispatched to the distant deserts of western Iraq. [President George H W] Bush and [Secretary of State James] Baker, who recognized the diplomatic disaster that the plan to depose an Arab leader would create, backed the general, and Operation Scorpion was quickly consigned to the dustbin of history - although Cheney and [Under-Secretary of Defense for policy Paul] Wolfowitz would continue to entertain fantasies about 'decapitating' Saddam and imposing 'regime change'. The Operation Scorpion plot raised real questions about Cheney's capacity to contribute to the war effort. Schwarzkopf would later express his frustration with Cheney's Operation Scorpion scheming, observing, 'I wondered whether Cheney had succumbed to the phenomenon I'd observed among some secretaries of the army. Put a civilian in charge of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied with setting policy but wants to out-general the generals'. Duly chastened, Cheney, whom the Washington Post took to referring to as 'the desk-chair warrior', faded from the forefront of the Iraq effort." (The Rise & Rise of Richard B Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History, John Nichols, 2004, pp 116-117)
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
'We came in naive...'
"Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize." Michael Ledeen (The Wall Street Journal, 9/4/02)
In his report on the "American drawdown" in Iraq, the Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeough has cited some truly gob-smacking stuff:
"In a pre-departure interview with The New York Times, the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, tapped into these [gloomy] assessments [by Iraqi civilians (quoted earlier in McGeough's report)]. 'We came in naive about what the problems were in Iraq. I don't think we understood what I call the societal devastation', he said, alluding to the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and international sanctions which, from 1990-2003, decimated the middle classes. 'And then we attacked to overthrow the government'."
We came in naive, did we? No we didn't. We knew exactly what we were doing: we invaded Iraq not for any of the specious reasons given at the time (WMDs etc), and not even for regime change as such, but to destroy it root and branch, both as a nation and a society. (See my 3/12/09 post Revolted)
We didn't understand the societal devastation resulting from the Iran-Iraq War? Yet without our propping up of Saddam in that war, including providing the ingredients for his chemical and biological weapons arsenal, the Iranians would have finished him off in the 80s.
We didn't understand the societal devastation resulting from the Gulf War? Really? Didn't our ambassador tell Saddam in April 1990 that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your disagreement with Kuwait," giving him a virtual green light to invade? Didn't we allow Israel to attack and occupy its neighbours and get away with it, thus suggesting to Saddam that he could do the same? And didn't we subject Iraq's civilian infrastructure to saturation bombing?
We didn't understand the societal devastation of international sanctions? Yet we were responsible for using the UN to starve and degrade Iraqi society from 1990 to 2003, resulting in the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children.
And we came in naive after all that?
"Acknowledging America's failure to understand Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions, the commander was surprisingly frank when asked if the invasion and its aftermath had exacerbated them: 'I don't know... all these issues that we didn't understand and that we had to work our way through. And did that cause it to get worse? Maybe'."
Maybe?!
"These Iraqi and American sentiments and their implications for the future were reflected in the judgment of a Western diplomat. 'There are a lot of really good people here', he said in the air-conditioned comfort of his blast wall-protected office. 'But a lot have left and won't come back. You think they have all this resource wealth and a history of education and expertise, and you wonder, how could they get it wrong. But looking at their history, sometimes it's Iraqis who are most pessimistic. They see 1,000 years of violence and they say it won't change'." (Seven years, 100,000 lives, $700b, 31/8/10)
How could they - the Iraqis - get it wrong?!
And last, but by no means least, here's the ultimate in stomach-churning sentences from Bushama's stomach-churning Address on Iraq: "[Those Americans who died/served in Iraq] stared into the darkest of human creations - war - and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace." (nytimes.com)
In his report on the "American drawdown" in Iraq, the Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeough has cited some truly gob-smacking stuff:
"In a pre-departure interview with The New York Times, the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, tapped into these [gloomy] assessments [by Iraqi civilians (quoted earlier in McGeough's report)]. 'We came in naive about what the problems were in Iraq. I don't think we understood what I call the societal devastation', he said, alluding to the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and international sanctions which, from 1990-2003, decimated the middle classes. 'And then we attacked to overthrow the government'."
We came in naive, did we? No we didn't. We knew exactly what we were doing: we invaded Iraq not for any of the specious reasons given at the time (WMDs etc), and not even for regime change as such, but to destroy it root and branch, both as a nation and a society. (See my 3/12/09 post Revolted)
We didn't understand the societal devastation resulting from the Iran-Iraq War? Yet without our propping up of Saddam in that war, including providing the ingredients for his chemical and biological weapons arsenal, the Iranians would have finished him off in the 80s.
We didn't understand the societal devastation resulting from the Gulf War? Really? Didn't our ambassador tell Saddam in April 1990 that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your disagreement with Kuwait," giving him a virtual green light to invade? Didn't we allow Israel to attack and occupy its neighbours and get away with it, thus suggesting to Saddam that he could do the same? And didn't we subject Iraq's civilian infrastructure to saturation bombing?
We didn't understand the societal devastation of international sanctions? Yet we were responsible for using the UN to starve and degrade Iraqi society from 1990 to 2003, resulting in the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children.
And we came in naive after all that?
"Acknowledging America's failure to understand Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions, the commander was surprisingly frank when asked if the invasion and its aftermath had exacerbated them: 'I don't know... all these issues that we didn't understand and that we had to work our way through. And did that cause it to get worse? Maybe'."
Maybe?!
"These Iraqi and American sentiments and their implications for the future were reflected in the judgment of a Western diplomat. 'There are a lot of really good people here', he said in the air-conditioned comfort of his blast wall-protected office. 'But a lot have left and won't come back. You think they have all this resource wealth and a history of education and expertise, and you wonder, how could they get it wrong. But looking at their history, sometimes it's Iraqis who are most pessimistic. They see 1,000 years of violence and they say it won't change'." (Seven years, 100,000 lives, $700b, 31/8/10)
How could they - the Iraqis - get it wrong?!
And last, but by no means least, here's the ultimate in stomach-churning sentences from Bushama's stomach-churning Address on Iraq: "[Those Americans who died/served in Iraq] stared into the darkest of human creations - war - and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace." (nytimes.com)
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