War

Americans turned against the Iraq war.

""We went into Iraq without properly anticipating the consequences of being there and without properly understanding the culture of Iraq," said Gordon Adams, a professor of foreign policy at American University in Washington. "Poor planning and poor knowledge combined to prolong that conflict way past what it should have been. ... We created a lot of damage and didn't leave anything terribly healthy behind.""

Another powerful example of the fatal conceit of central planners.

"Coming in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush White House's case for war, particularly the argument about weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, initially won widespread public and political support. In October 2002, the House of Representatives voted 296-133 and the Senate voted 77-23 to authorize the use of force against Iraq. A March 2003 Pew Research Center poll indicated that 72 percent of U.S. adults supported the decision to attack Iraq. But that opinion changed dramatically as the war dragged on. By February 2008, Pew had found that 58 percent believed it was the wrong decision.
For the war-weary American public, the most lasting legacy may be lingering cynicism and a loss of trust in government authorities as well as a reluctance to intervene militarily on such a scale or undertake nation-building in the future."

Better late than never.

Ten years later, the anti-Iraq-war people continue lying as badly as the pro-war people.

"Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, the war criminals are still at large. Saddam Hussein is dead and buried, but the cabal that lied us into war is still around – and not only that, they are mocking us from their podiums in the media, justifying and obscuring their crimes."

How are they war criminals? What part of congress declared war don't you understand? That war should never have happened, but that's no reason to lie about it. Intelligence agencies all over the west, corrupt as they are, said Saddam had weapons. We know he had weapons because the US sold him weapons. We know he had weapons because US troops found weapons. What he didn't have was stockpiles of weapons. And there's the key. While I'm sure a couple obscure guys knew he had no stockpiles of weapons, nobody else did. Hussein himself thought he had stockpiles of weapons. Hussein had so buried his program, he didn't know what was going on, but he thought he had one, and so did everybody else. He ordered his troops to use them. I'm sick of the lies from both sides. Here's what Kay had to say:

"Chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay complained Sunday that initial reaction to his interim report on Iraqi weapons focused too much on the failure to find chemical or biological weapons and not enough on secret laboratories and rocket programs investigators have found. "

Guess what. There is no legal reckoning for the people who fomented war because Congress went along with it and declared it. That's like asking where is the reckoning for anti-war liars. There's none their either. Frankly, all of them profit from lying. They could all be prosecuted for fraud. But neither side is ever going to be prosecuted and whining about it isn't going to change anything.

Margolis is right only if you look at the Iraq war from a socialist perspective.

"The only victor of war with Iraq War, I wrote, would be Israel, whose nuclear monopoly and regional domination would be assured. So it has come to be. "

Halliburton was a victor. Blackwater was a victor. The CIA was victor. The Pentagon was a victor. Anybody who profited was a victor. Surrender the socialism, and you'll the truth.

"Iraq was split into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. Anger against the US reached new intensity. The titanic bill for the Iraq War was $1 trillion, all of its hidden in the ballooning US national debt. Nearly 5,000 US soldiers were killed; some 50,000 wounded, many with grave brain injuries. Iraqi casualties are uncertain, though the total is likely over one million."

The earlier article claimed 100,000 Iraqis dead. It's obscene we don't know the number. If you invade a country, bring in killers behind you, start a civil war, kill bunches of civilians while all the other factions do the same, you should at least honor the dead enough to count their bodies. Who am I kidding? Asking invaders and killers to honor anybody is stupid.

"Once among the most advanced Arab nations, much of Iraq today is ruined. At least it no longer threatens its neighbors. "

Which was the Israeli government's goal from the beginning.

"The politicians who concocted this war, namely George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, have escaped any criminal censure for misleading their people into a conflict whose goal was to grab Iraq’s vast oil reserves and crush an enemy of Israel. "

Here we go again. Where's the law against politicians misleading people? Please show it to me so I can imprison them all.

"Similarly, the many print and TV journalists and commentators who acted as cheer-leaders for the war and its bodyguard of lies remain prominently in public view today. So too the so-called military experts who championed the war. Instead of slinking away after the war, they simply switched their aim to Iran."

These people did what their bosses wanted. Why should they be fired for a job well done?

"The small number of American journalists, Mideast analysts, CIA and State Department experts who dared challenge Bush’s absurd claims about Iraq’s supposed nukes and "drones of death" lost their jobs and have been sidelined to this day."

That's because they failed to do what their bosses wanted. Life isn't that hard to understand.

"Bush’s modern-day Crusade against Iraq discredited the mainstream media in the eyes of many younger Americans and led to their growing reliance on their internet. Polls showed that only 24% of Americans trusted media to tell them the facts. The US media, with key exceptions, had followed the old Soviet media in acting as a mouthpiece for the government instead of a tribune for the public. "

This is an oxymoron. As a Soviet dissident once explained, in the USSR, nobody believed the media. There was only one outlet and everybody knew it was controlled by the government, so nobody believed it. What he learned when he came to the US was that the US government was smarter, and it allowed many outlets as long as they all promoted the government position. That fooled Americans into believing lies Soviet serfs would never have believed.

" While bridges and roads across America were crumbling, the US was spending $80 billion on "rebuilding" Iraq."

This is another fallacy. Roads and bridges were falling apart before the wars to. Those wars didn't take money from repair. That money would have been wasted some other way. Politicians don't make money off repairing roads and bridges.