"Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State



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Topic: Politics > Politics-USA
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Date: 06 May 2007 04:45:18 PM
Object: "Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State
The Kissinger Connection
Patrick Foy, May 04, 2007
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_kissinger_connection/
You may have noticed that George Tenet prefers to talk about the
aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", to wit, the U.S. occupation
and the Iraqi insurgency. He admits that the CIA did get some things
wrong-such as certifying the existence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq when, in fact, those weapons and stockpiles had been destroyed
years before, under UN supervision. In the next breath, Tenet takes
pride that the CIA began warning the Administration early on about the
insurgency. He deeply regrets that the White House, the National
Security Council, and the Pentagon were not interested, and ignored
the warnings.
What happened, it seems to me, was that prior to the invasion, Tenet
was acting the part of a politician and policy maker, enabling a dumb
project with bogus justifications. He was a participant in a fraud.
Everybody was on board. Why would any CIA Director be at an Oval
Office brainstorming session, trying to make the case for a preemptive
war, and proclaim that the effort should be a "slam dunk"? Under any
context, this remark is out of context for a CIA director. Afterward,
to hear him tell it, he took on the traditional CIA Director's role as
an impartial intelligence gatherer, and reverted to the facts. Quite a
change. Did he expect his former co-conspirators to respect the truth
and reality post invasion, when they had been consumed with mendacity
pre invasion? The same characters were in place and running the show.
A similar dichotomy applies to the Democratic Establishment in
Congress, pre and post invasion. This is important. It is a major
reason which explains why there will be no impeachment of Bush and
Cheney. As best exemplified by John Kerry in his 2004 Presidential
campaign against G.W. Bush, the Washington Democrats, with few
exceptions, have been content and comfortable to criticize the
execution of the policy, that is, ?the conduct? of the war during the
occupation. The Democrats thereby imply that they would somehow have
done a better job. Up until relatively recently in this long war,
there has been only mild criticism of the terrible idea to go to war
in the first place, and no effort to examine the real motives behind
the decision to invade. The Democrats don't go there, except to say
that they were misled. Why not?
As is well known but often conveniently forgotten, the Democratic
Leadership in both houses of the U.S. Congress made a calculated
political decision to authorize the Cheney/Bush White House to invade
Iraq. The vote for war took place on Capital Hill on October 11th,
2002. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader
Richard Gephardt led the charge. Senators Hillary Clinton, Diane
Feinstein, Joe Biden, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Joe Lieberman,
among other ambitious Democratic mediocrities, big shots and
blowhards, voted to authorize this ruinous war.
There was only one principled Senator of either party who stood up to
the juggernaut, and made a fight of it. That man was Senator Robert
Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. He attempted to mount a filibuster
against the war resolution, but he was cut off by a 75 to 25 vote.
Byrd was regarded as an eccentric, a foolish old timer. He steadfastly
refused to succumb to the hysteria. He knew what he was talking about,
and recognized the Administration's pack of lies for what it was when
it was proffered. Byrd should now be regarded as a hero. He was right
all along, but at the time his views were ridiculed.
Supposedly, all those brilliant Democrats in the Senate who voted to
invade Iraq were alarmed by the Administration's full-court-press
propaganda campaign about Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass
destruction". This is most unlikely. It assumes a level of ignorance
and gullibility which is not credible. It is more likely that the
Democrats and the brain-dead Republicans voted to invade and take over
Iraq not because they regarded Saddam as a threat to the United
States, but rather because, first and foremost, (a) they felt
Washington could get away with it and (b) because the political payoff
for war in the Congressional midterm elections of 2002 was deemed
significant.
If you voted against the Administration, you could be smeared as soft
on terrorism and national security. More important, you would be
bucking the outsized political clout of the Israel Lobby, which was
pushing for war on Iraq to the max, and had been for years. Moreover,
after a decade of devastating economic sanctions, Iraq was going to be
a cake walk, in any event. So it was a low risk proposition. To the
professional politicians making their career calculations, the
downside of launching the war appeared small and very manageable. The
upside was impressive.
Well, the invasion itself, the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of
Saddam, was a cake walk from a military standpoint. In point of fact,
the U.S. won that war. This victory was a foregone conclusion. But
Washington is not getting away with it. The rub has been the
aftermath, the occupation and pacification of the country. That is the
problem which confronts America today, an urban guerilla war, fueled
by religious fanaticism and Arab nationalism. On top of that is a
sectarian civil war among the inhabitants of the occupied country.
The UK medical journal The Lancet estimated back in September, 2006
that Iraq has endured over 600,000 deaths since the conflict began,
and the UN has reported the displacement of 1.5 million Iraqis inside
the country. These are some of the fruits of "Operation Iraqi
Freedom". For the average Iraqi, it has been a disaster. The Democrats
on Capitol Hill and everybody else are now focused upon how to deal
with this catastrophe. The Democrats cannot address their initial,
intellectually dishonest "me too" support for the invasion of Iraq in
2002 without drawing attention to their own gross hypocrisy and
negligence. Instead, like George Tenet, they dwell upon the aftermath
of the invasion and the current predicament.
Fine. Let's focus upon the aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", the
occupation, which every sane, objective observer now agrees is a train
wreck. Who was in charge of that phase? It turns out that the
granddaddy of the American foreign policy establishment, the former
Secretary of State for Richard Nixon, the Mitteleuropa import, Dr.
Henry Kissinger, was a prime architect of the occupation. This is
something extraordinary which has been kept under wraps.
If nothing else, Bob Woodward's last fat book on Iraq, State of
Denial, has performed a valuable public service by ejecting the
furtive Kissinger from the shadows. Woodward reports that vice
president ***** Cheney confided to him (Woodward) in the summer of
2005: "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody
else. He just comes by and I guess at least once a month, Scooter
[Libby] and I sit down with him." [Page 406.] Woodward goes on to
state: "The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple
of months, making the former secretary the most regular and frequent
outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs."
Why has this fact been kept sub rosa? One wonders. Why did Cheney
telephone Woodward and blast him for revealing it in the book, before
hanging up on him? What is going on behind the scenes? Rest assured,
something rotten.
Please note that it was Kissinger's prot=E9g=E9 and partner, Ambassador L.
Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, the Managing Director of Kissinger
Associates, Inc. for more than a decade, whom Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
placed in charge of the occupation of Iraq when Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
inexplicably cashiered the honest and fair-minded Lt. General Jay
Garner, after scarcely a few weeks on the job. An item from the
Sunday Telegraph of London dated October 15th, 2006 ["There was a plan
for Iraq, but it was torn up"] is most informative. It summarizes the
Kissinger connection to the Green Zone in Baghdad, as uncovered by
Woodward...
When, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the retired US Army
General Jay Garner was asked to take over the post-war humanitarian
mission, he certainly possessed the credentials for the job. In 1991
he had headed Operation Provide Comfort, rescuing thousands of ethnic
Kurds in northern Iraq after the first Gulf war. Who better, then, for
the American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to appoint to the job
second time round.
Garner drew up detailed plans and, at his first briefing with
President Bush, outlined three essential "musts" that would, he
asserted, ensure a smooth transition after the war. The first "must",
he said, was that the Iraqi military should not be disbanded. The
second "must" was that the 50,000-strong Ba'ath party machine that ran
government services should not be broken up or its members proscribed.
If either were to happen, he warned, there would be chaos compounded
by thousands of unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. And the third
"must", he insisted, was that an interim Iraqi leadership group, eager
to help the United States administer the country in the short term,
should be kept on-side.
Initially, no one disagreed, according to State of Denial, the new
book by the veteran Washington reporter, Bob Woodward. But within
weeks of the invasion, Garner's tenure as head of the post-war
planning office was over: he was replaced by Paul Bremer, a terrorism
expert and prot=E9g=E9 of Henry Kissinger. Bremer immediately
countermanded all three of Garner's "musts". [My emphasis.] When,
eventually, Garner confronted Rumsfeld, telling him: "There is still
time to rectify this," Rumsfeld refused to do so.
And who was assisting Dr. Kissinger to program the new U.S. proconsul
in Baghdad? Who was Paul Bremer's primary contact at the Pentagon,
overseeing the occupation from Washington, with the blessing of Don
Rumsfeld? None other than the award winning hyperZionist zealot,
Douglas "clean break" Feith, the man who had advised Likud icon, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Bibi Nut & Yahoo) to attack Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon in 1996 and tear up the Oslo "peace process". Even
Bibi regarded that advice as over the top.
According to Woodward's initial book on the Bush Administration and
the Iraq war, Plan of Attack, Douglas J. Feith, Esq., was
characterized by General Tommy Franks, as "the f***ing stupidest guy
on the face of the earth". Perhaps U.S. General Franks, the man who
directed the invasion of Iraq on the ground, misunderstood where Feith
was coming from and what his priorities were. To Franks, Feith only
looked stupid, because Franks did not understand him.
Feith was a prot=E9g=E9 of "neocon" geopolitical grandee, Richard Perle.
Feith is on the Advisory Board of the (U.S.) Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs. Feith is a face card in the deck of the
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, headquartered
in Jerusalem. The law office he founded in 1986, Feith & Zell, is
based in Israel, catering to Jewish-American "settlers" on the West
Bank. Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was aide-de-camp to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, has stated he looked upon Feith as a card-carrying
member of the Likud party. How did these important items in Feith's
background qualify him to oversee the U.S. military? In his capacity
as the "undersecretary for policy" at the Pentagon, Doug Feith was the
number three civilian in charge of the entire U.S. Defense
establishment, behind Professor Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld. Was
that appropriate? Whose idea was it to put him there, creating such an
obvious and enormous conflict of interest? Inquiring minds would like
to know.
If "Operation Iraqi Freedom" may accurately be regarded as Wolfowitz's
War in its conception, then the aftermath of the war should be viewed
as the Kissinger-Feith Occupation. It is the aftermath to the
conquest, highlighted by the disastrous ukases delivered by
Kissinger's partner and frontman in Baghdad, Paul "Jerry" Bremer,
which has effectively destroyed Iraq as a nation-state, brought about
an internecine civil war, and created a quagmire for the United States
military as well as a serious drain on the U.S. Treasury. The
Democrats love to denounce this phase of the conflict, the occupation,
but without naming names, aside from Bush and Cheney. Kissinger's
invisible hand in the undertaking was completely unknown until
Woodward blew Kissinger's cover. But most everyone on Capital Hill,
every casual Washington intenditore, and every member of the American
foreign policy community knew that Wolfowitz and Feith were the point
men in charge of Iraq.
Could all of this destruction, bloodshed and anarchy in Iraq be due to
gross incompetence? Is Doug Feith really "the f***ing stupidest guy on
the face of the earth"? Or is he something else? Is Henry Kissinger
the realpolitik genius which the Establishment press presumes him to
be, or is he something more? Why was Paul Wolfowitz suddenly
transferred from the Pentagon to the sanctums of the World Bank, when
it became clear that Iraq was a debacle? Wolfowitz is not a banker or
an economist. Like Kissinger, Wolfowitz is a history professor,
specializing in international relations.
While we are asking perplexing questions, here are a few more. Is it
possible that the entire fraudulent enterprise of Iraq--from "shock
and awe" to "cut and run"--is not an accident caused by ignorance,
hubris and mistakes? Could it be that the tragic end-result for Iraq
and its people is not considered a disaster in certain geopolitical
circles? Has it dawned on anybody that the destruction of oil-rich
Iraq as a viable entity in the Middle East may have been on the short
list of somebody's private agenda, an agenda perhaps unknown even to
Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld and the ever-clueless G.W. Bush?
Do not forget that the immiserization of Iraq by Washington commenced
not with Wolfowitz's War in 2003, but with the slaughter of Operation
Desert Storm in 1991. It continued most dramatically but quietly with
the meddlesome and insane policy of embargo and sanctions carried out
during the reign of the "liberal" Democrat, Bill Clinton, and his
meretricious Middle East foreign policy team of Samuel "Sandy" Berger,
Madeleine "it's worth it" Albright, Dennis Ross, and Australian
import, Martin Indyk. This appalling chapter in U.S. Middle East
policy has been delineated in the 1998 book by the English writer,
Geoff Simons, entitled The Scourging of Iraq. A few lines from the
preface to the second edition will give you and idea of what the
people giving orders inside the White House were doing to Iraq in
America's name...
The US-contrived economic siege of Iraq has now lasted well over seven
years, as I write, with, according to all estimates, millions of
casualties--perhaps 2,000,000 dead through starvation and disease,
more than half of them children, and many millions more emaciated,
traumatized, sick, dying....
The United States is the conscious architect of this years-long
genocide. Knowingly, with a cruel and cynical resolve, US officials
work hard to withhold relief from a starving and diseased people. And
the grotesque facts are not even disputed by Washington. Madeleine
Albright, now Secretary of State, was prepared to assert in public
that the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified.
All this because Saddam Hussein deposed the Emir of Kuwait, the fake
statelet concocted by the British, which every leader of Iraq going
back to the 1930's had regarded as a province of Iraq? All this
because Saddam was a bad guy? Was Saddam a bad guy when he engaged in
a near ten-year war against Iran, a war in which Washington supplied
him with all manner of weaponry and material via Washington's special
envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, while at the same time, Tel Aviv provided
Tehran with similar supplies from its American stockpiles? Was Saddam
a bad guy then? Was he somehow a worse guy when he invaded Kuwait?
What does Kuwait have to do with anything? Was the brouhaha over
Kuwait a cover story and a godsend for those in Tel Aviv and
Washington who were seeking an excuse to destroy Iraq, after its war
with Iran had run its course? It looks that way.
Of the Clinton years, the scourging of Iraq, one would do well to stop
at this vantage point and ask three basic questions. (1) What in the
world could possibly have motivated or justified the U.S. Government
to take such a drastic course of action, resulting in the deaths of so
many innocent civilians? (2) Why was there no outcry and virtually no
protest in America against this policy at the time it was being
carried out? (3) Were the American people deliberately kept in the
dark about what was going on? These same three questions should be
asked now, concerning current policies, which have resulted in the
crucifixion of Iraq, perpetrated under the nominal leadership of G.W.
Bush, but at the actual direction of Richard Cheney and his cabal of
"neocons".
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. There is absolutely no
accountability for this whole affair. None. Not for Clinton or his
handlers and enablers. Not for Wolfowitz and Feith, who have left the
Pentagon and washed their hands of the whole business. Not for *****
Cheney and George Bush, who are twisting in the wind, with nowhere to
hide. Not for the Democrats who voted for Wolfowitz's War, who then
capitalized on the war to regain control of Capital Hill in 2006, and
who hope to ride that wave to regain the White House in 2008.
And not for the teflon Professor Kissinger, who worked with Cheney and
Bush in secret to devise an endgame for this outrageous and consistent
policy--a policy spanning three Presidents and both political parties.
Note that Kissinger can correctly point out that he was just offering
advice from the sidelines and has no official responsibility for
anything. Last but not least, there is no accountability whatever for
Washington's Israel Lobby and its minions, fronts and fellow
travelers, whose fingerprints are all over the crime scene.
Do not hold your breath waiting for a long-overdue Congressional
investigation into how and why America was railroaded into invading
Iraq and who is responsible for destroying that country in the
aftermath of the invasion, because there is not going to be one. Not
now, not ever, no matter who is in charge of Congress.
Everybody is guilty, going back to 1990. Some individuals and groups
are just far more guilty than others. Mission accomplished, indeed.
But whose mission was it, what has been accomplished, and at what
cost? It is clear that Uncle Sam has been taken for a ride, big time.
The Iraqis, the American troops on the ground, and the American
taxpayers are paying the price, in spades. There is no end in sight.
Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.
.

User: "can_o_worms"

Title: Re: "Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State 06 May 2007 05:54:02 PM
On 6 May 2007 14:45:18 -0700,
wrote:

The Kissinger Connection
Patrick Foy, May 04, 2007
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_kissinger_connection/

You may have noticed that George Tenet prefers to talk about the
aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", to wit, the U.S. occupation
and the Iraqi insurgency. He admits that the CIA did get some things
wrong-such as certifying the existence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq when, in fact, those weapons and stockpiles had been destroyed
years before, under UN supervision. In the next breath, Tenet takes
pride that the CIA began warning the Administration early on about the
insurgency. He deeply regrets that the White House, the National
Security Council, and the Pentagon were not interested, and ignored
the warnings.

What happened, it seems to me, was that prior to the invasion, Tenet
was acting the part of a politician and policy maker, enabling a dumb
project with bogus justifications. He was a participant in a fraud.

Of course he was just as lying war profiteer James Woolsley was
another pick for CIA director during Clinton's tenure. Slick Willy's
administration formalized the policy of regime change in Iraq. See
signatures at bottom:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
CIA Directors are political appointments and Tenet was always
a regime-change freindly toady.....that's why Clinton appointed
guys like Tenet and Woolsey.

Everybody was on board. Why would any CIA Director be at an Oval
Office brainstorming session, trying to make the case for a preemptive
war, and proclaim that the effort should be a "slam dunk"? Under any
context, this remark is out of context for a CIA director. Afterward,
to hear him tell it, he took on the traditional CIA Director's role as
an impartial intelligence gatherer, and reverted to the facts. Quite a
change. Did he expect his former co-conspirators to respect the truth
and reality post invasion, when they had been consumed with mendacity
pre invasion? The same characters were in place and running the show.

A similar dichotomy applies to the Democratic Establishment in
Congress, pre and post invasion. This is important. It is a major
reason which explains why there will be no impeachment of Bush and
Cheney. As best exemplified by John Kerry in his 2004 Presidential
campaign against G.W. Bush, the Washington Democrats, with few
exceptions, have been content and comfortable to criticize the
execution of the policy, that is, ?the conduct? of the war during the
occupation. The Democrats thereby imply that they would somehow have
done a better job. Up until relatively recently in this long war,
there has been only mild criticism of the terrible idea to go to war
in the first place, and no effort to examine the real motives behind
the decision to invade. The Democrats don't go there, except to say
that they were misled. Why not?

As is well known but often conveniently forgotten, the Democratic
Leadership in both houses of the U.S. Congress made a calculated
political decision to authorize the Cheney/Bush White House to invade
Iraq. The vote for war took place on Capital Hill on October 11th,
2002. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader
Richard Gephardt led the charge. Senators Hillary Clinton, Diane
Feinstein, Joe Biden, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Joe Lieberman,
among other ambitious Democratic mediocrities, big shots and
blowhards, voted to authorize this ruinous war.

There was only one principled Senator of either party who stood up to
the juggernaut, and made a fight of it. That man was Senator Robert
Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. He attempted to mount a filibuster
against the war resolution, but he was cut off by a 75 to 25 vote.
Byrd was regarded as an eccentric, a foolish old timer. He steadfastly
refused to succumb to the hysteria. He knew what he was talking about,
and recognized the Administration's pack of lies for what it was when
it was proffered. Byrd should now be regarded as a hero. He was right
all along, but at the time his views were ridiculed.

Supposedly, all those brilliant Democrats in the Senate who voted to
invade Iraq were alarmed by the Administration's full-court-press
propaganda campaign about Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass
destruction". This is most unlikely. It assumes a level of ignorance
and gullibility which is not credible. It is more likely that the
Democrats and the brain-dead Republicans voted to invade and take over
Iraq not because they regarded Saddam as a threat to the United
States, but rather because, first and foremost, (a) they felt
Washington could get away with it and (b) because the political payoff
for war in the Congressional midterm elections of 2002 was deemed
significant.

If you voted against the Administration, you could be smeared as soft
on terrorism and national security. More important, you would be
bucking the outsized political clout of the Israel Lobby, which was
pushing for war on Iraq to the max, and had been for years. Moreover,
after a decade of devastating economic sanctions, Iraq was going to be
a cake walk, in any event. So it was a low risk proposition. To the
professional politicians making their career calculations, the
downside of launching the war appeared small and very manageable. The
upside was impressive.

Well, the invasion itself, the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of
Saddam, was a cake walk from a military standpoint. In point of fact,
the U.S. won that war. This victory was a foregone conclusion. But
Washington is not getting away with it. The rub has been the
aftermath, the occupation and pacification of the country. That is the
problem which confronts America today, an urban guerilla war, fueled
by religious fanaticism and Arab nationalism. On top of that is a
sectarian civil war among the inhabitants of the occupied country.

The UK medical journal The Lancet estimated back in September, 2006
that Iraq has endured over 600,000 deaths since the conflict began,
and the UN has reported the displacement of 1.5 million Iraqis inside
the country. These are some of the fruits of "Operation Iraqi
Freedom". For the average Iraqi, it has been a disaster. The Democrats
on Capitol Hill and everybody else are now focused upon how to deal
with this catastrophe. The Democrats cannot address their initial,
intellectually dishonest "me too" support for the invasion of Iraq in
2002 without drawing attention to their own gross hypocrisy and
negligence. Instead, like George Tenet, they dwell upon the aftermath
of the invasion and the current predicament.

Fine. Let's focus upon the aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", the
occupation, which every sane, objective observer now agrees is a train
wreck. Who was in charge of that phase? It turns out that the
granddaddy of the American foreign policy establishment, the former
Secretary of State for Richard Nixon, the Mitteleuropa import, Dr.
Henry Kissinger, was a prime architect of the occupation. This is
something extraordinary which has been kept under wraps.

If nothing else, Bob Woodward's last fat book on Iraq, State of
Denial, has performed a valuable public service by ejecting the
furtive Kissinger from the shadows. Woodward reports that vice
president ***** Cheney confided to him (Woodward) in the summer of
2005: "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody
else. He just comes by and I guess at least once a month, Scooter
[Libby] and I sit down with him." [Page 406.] Woodward goes on to
state: "The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple
of months, making the former secretary the most regular and frequent
outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs."

Why has this fact been kept sub rosa? One wonders. Why did Cheney
telephone Woodward and blast him for revealing it in the book, before
hanging up on him? What is going on behind the scenes? Rest assured,
something rotten.

Please note that it was Kissinger's protégé and partner, Ambassador L.
Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, the Managing Director of Kissinger
Associates, Inc. for more than a decade, whom Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
placed in charge of the occupation of Iraq when Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
inexplicably cashiered the honest and fair-minded Lt. General Jay
Garner, after scarcely a few weeks on the job. An item from the
Sunday Telegraph of London dated October 15th, 2006 ["There was a plan
for Iraq, but it was torn up"] is most informative. It summarizes the
Kissinger connection to the Green Zone in Baghdad, as uncovered by
Woodward...

When, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the retired US Army
General Jay Garner was asked to take over the post-war humanitarian
mission, he certainly possessed the credentials for the job. In 1991
he had headed Operation Provide Comfort, rescuing thousands of ethnic
Kurds in northern Iraq after the first Gulf war. Who better, then, for
the American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to appoint to the job
second time round.

Garner drew up detailed plans and, at his first briefing with
President Bush, outlined three essential "musts" that would, he
asserted, ensure a smooth transition after the war. The first "must",
he said, was that the Iraqi military should not be disbanded. The
second "must" was that the 50,000-strong Ba'ath party machine that ran
government services should not be broken up or its members proscribed.
If either were to happen, he warned, there would be chaos compounded
by thousands of unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. And the third
"must", he insisted, was that an interim Iraqi leadership group, eager
to help the United States administer the country in the short term,
should be kept on-side.

Initially, no one disagreed, according to State of Denial, the new
book by the veteran Washington reporter, Bob Woodward. But within
weeks of the invasion, Garner's tenure as head of the post-war
planning office was over: he was replaced by Paul Bremer, a terrorism
expert and protégé of Henry Kissinger. Bremer immediately
countermanded all three of Garner's "musts". [My emphasis.] When,
eventually, Garner confronted Rumsfeld, telling him: "There is still
time to rectify this," Rumsfeld refused to do so.

And who was assisting Dr. Kissinger to program the new U.S. proconsul
in Baghdad? Who was Paul Bremer's primary contact at the Pentagon,
overseeing the occupation from Washington, with the blessing of Don
Rumsfeld? None other than the award winning hyperZionist zealot,
Douglas "clean break" Feith, the man who had advised Likud icon, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Bibi Nut & Yahoo) to attack Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon in 1996 and tear up the Oslo "peace process". Even
Bibi regarded that advice as over the top.

According to Woodward's initial book on the Bush Administration and
the Iraq war, Plan of Attack, Douglas J. Feith, Esq., was
characterized by General Tommy Franks, as "the f***ing stupidest guy
on the face of the earth". Perhaps U.S. General Franks, the man who
directed the invasion of Iraq on the ground, misunderstood where Feith
was coming from and what his priorities were. To Franks, Feith only
looked stupid, because Franks did not understand him.

Feith was a protégé of "neocon" geopolitical grandee, Richard Perle.
Feith is on the Advisory Board of the (U.S.) Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs. Feith is a face card in the deck of the
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, headquartered
in Jerusalem. The law office he founded in 1986, Feith & Zell, is
based in Israel, catering to Jewish-American "settlers" on the West
Bank. Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was aide-de-camp to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, has stated he looked upon Feith as a card-carrying
member of the Likud party. How did these important items in Feith's
background qualify him to oversee the U.S. military? In his capacity
as the "undersecretary for policy" at the Pentagon, Doug Feith was the
number three civilian in charge of the entire U.S. Defense
establishment, behind Professor Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld. Was
that appropriate? Whose idea was it to put him there, creating such an
obvious and enormous conflict of interest? Inquiring minds would like
to know.

If "Operation Iraqi Freedom" may accurately be regarded as Wolfowitz's
War in its conception, then the aftermath of the war should be viewed
as the Kissinger-Feith Occupation. It is the aftermath to the
conquest, highlighted by the disastrous ukases delivered by
Kissinger's partner and frontman in Baghdad, Paul "Jerry" Bremer,
which has effectively destroyed Iraq as a nation-state, brought about
an internecine civil war, and created a quagmire for the United States
military as well as a serious drain on the U.S. Treasury. The
Democrats love to denounce this phase of the conflict, the occupation,
but without naming names, aside from Bush and Cheney. Kissinger's
invisible hand in the undertaking was completely unknown until
Woodward blew Kissinger's cover. But most everyone on Capital Hill,
every casual Washington intenditore, and every member of the American
foreign policy community knew that Wolfowitz and Feith were the point
men in charge of Iraq.

Could all of this destruction, bloodshed and anarchy in Iraq be due to
gross incompetence? Is Doug Feith really "the f***ing stupidest guy on
the face of the earth"? Or is he something else? Is Henry Kissinger
the realpolitik genius which the Establishment press presumes him to
be, or is he something more? Why was Paul Wolfowitz suddenly
transferred from the Pentagon to the sanctums of the World Bank, when
it became clear that Iraq was a debacle? Wolfowitz is not a banker or
an economist. Like Kissinger, Wolfowitz is a history professor,
specializing in international relations.

While we are asking perplexing questions, here are a few more. Is it
possible that the entire fraudulent enterprise of Iraq--from "shock
and awe" to "cut and run"--is not an accident caused by ignorance,
hubris and mistakes? Could it be that the tragic end-result for Iraq
and its people is not considered a disaster in certain geopolitical
circles? Has it dawned on anybody that the destruction of oil-rich
Iraq as a viable entity in the Middle East may have been on the short
list of somebody's private agenda, an agenda perhaps unknown even to
Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld and the ever-clueless G.W. Bush?

Do not forget that the immiserization of Iraq by Washington commenced
not with Wolfowitz's War in 2003, but with the slaughter of Operation
Desert Storm in 1991. It continued most dramatically but quietly with
the meddlesome and insane policy of embargo and sanctions carried out
during the reign of the "liberal" Democrat, Bill Clinton, and his
meretricious Middle East foreign policy team of Samuel "Sandy" Berger,
Madeleine "it's worth it" Albright, Dennis Ross, and Australian
import, Martin Indyk. This appalling chapter in U.S. Middle East
policy has been delineated in the 1998 book by the English writer,
Geoff Simons, entitled The Scourging of Iraq. A few lines from the
preface to the second edition will give you and idea of what the
people giving orders inside the White House were doing to Iraq in
America's name...

The US-contrived economic siege of Iraq has now lasted well over seven
years, as I write, with, according to all estimates, millions of
casualties--perhaps 2,000,000 dead through starvation and disease,
more than half of them children, and many millions more emaciated,
traumatized, sick, dying....

The United States is the conscious architect of this years-long
genocide. Knowingly, with a cruel and cynical resolve, US officials
work hard to withhold relief from a starving and diseased people. And
the grotesque facts are not even disputed by Washington. Madeleine
Albright, now Secretary of State, was prepared to assert in public
that the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified.

All this because Saddam Hussein deposed the Emir of Kuwait, the fake
statelet concocted by the British, which every leader of Iraq going
back to the 1930's had regarded as a province of Iraq? All this
because Saddam was a bad guy? Was Saddam a bad guy when he engaged in
a near ten-year war against Iran, a war in which Washington supplied
him with all manner of weaponry and material via Washington's special
envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, while at the same time, Tel Aviv provided
Tehran with similar supplies from its American stockpiles? Was Saddam
a bad guy then? Was he somehow a worse guy when he invaded Kuwait?
What does Kuwait have to do with anything? Was the brouhaha over
Kuwait a cover story and a godsend for those in Tel Aviv and
Washington who were seeking an excuse to destroy Iraq, after its war
with Iran had run its course? It looks that way.

Of the Clinton years, the scourging of Iraq, one would do well to stop
at this vantage point and ask three basic questions. (1) What in the
world could possibly have motivated or justified the U.S. Government
to take such a drastic course of action, resulting in the deaths of so
many innocent civilians? (2) Why was there no outcry and virtually no
protest in America against this policy at the time it was being
carried out? (3) Were the American people deliberately kept in the
dark about what was going on? These same three questions should be
asked now, concerning current policies, which have resulted in the
crucifixion of Iraq, perpetrated under the nominal leadership of G.W.
Bush, but at the actual direction of Richard Cheney and his cabal of
"neocons".

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. There is absolutely no
accountability for this whole affair. None. Not for Clinton or his
handlers and enablers. Not for Wolfowitz and Feith, who have left the
Pentagon and washed their hands of the whole business. Not for *****
Cheney and George Bush, who are twisting in the wind, with nowhere to
hide. Not for the Democrats who voted for Wolfowitz's War, who then
capitalized on the war to regain control of Capital Hill in 2006, and
who hope to ride that wave to regain the White House in 2008.

And not for the teflon Professor Kissinger, who worked with Cheney and
Bush in secret to devise an endgame for this outrageous and consistent
policy--a policy spanning three Presidents and both political parties.
Note that Kissinger can correctly point out that he was just offering
advice from the sidelines and has no official responsibility for
anything. Last but not least, there is no accountability whatever for
Washington's Israel Lobby and its minions, fronts and fellow
travelers, whose fingerprints are all over the crime scene.

Do not hold your breath waiting for a long-overdue Congressional
investigation into how and why America was railroaded into invading
Iraq and who is responsible for destroying that country in the
aftermath of the invasion, because there is not going to be one. Not
now, not ever, no matter who is in charge of Congress.

Everybody is guilty, going back to 1990. Some individuals and groups
are just far more guilty than others. Mission accomplished, indeed.
But whose mission was it, what has been accomplished, and at what
cost? It is clear that Uncle Sam has been taken for a ride, big time.
The Iraqis, the American troops on the ground, and the American
taxpayers are paying the price, in spades. There is no end in sight.

Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.

.
User: "A Veteran"

Title: Re: "Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State 07 May 2007 11:24:46 PM
In article <12ms3399b6scm6liilqbj63772n7suhodm@4ax.com>,
can_o_worms <can_o_worms@bogus.com> wrote:

The United States is the conscious architect of this years-long

genocide. Knowingly, with a cruel and cynical resolve, US officials
work hard to withhold relief from a starving and diseased people. And
the grotesque facts are not even disputed by Washington. Madeleine
Albright, now Secretary of State, was prepared to assert in public
that the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified.

Remember the James Bond movie "Goldfinger" >
He didn't have to steal the gold in Fort Knox all he had to do was take
it off the market and his gold would be worth zillions.$
Sound like the M.E. OIL situation?
bush and the OIL boyz have de-stabilized the area for "Greed"
.
User: "can_o_worms"

Title: Re: "Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State 07 May 2007 11:41:01 PM
On Mon, 07 May 2007 21:24:46 -0700, A Veteran <georgek@humboldt1.com>
wrote:

In article <12ms3399b6scm6liilqbj63772n7suhodm@4ax.com>,
can_o_worms <can_o_worms@bogus.com> wrote:

The United States is the conscious architect of this years-long

genocide. Knowingly, with a cruel and cynical resolve, US officials
work hard to withhold relief from a starving and diseased people. And
the grotesque facts are not even disputed by Washington. Madeleine
Albright, now Secretary of State, was prepared to assert in public
that the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified.


Remember the James Bond movie "Goldfinger" >
He didn't have to steal the gold in Fort Knox all he had to do was take
it off the market and his gold would be worth zillions.$
Sound like the M.E. OIL situation?
bush and the OIL boyz have de-stabilized the area for "Greed"

No it doesn't really sound like oil. Sounds like making
sure an Iraqi regime doesn't ever make nukes for Israel's
sake......same as I thought when Clinton formalized
a policy of regime change in '98 after being lobbied
by neoconservatives.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
If oil interests were calling the shots, they would have
bought oil from Saddam because Saddam had no
problem pumping oil out of Iraq as do we.
Saddam would play ball with us. Neoconservatives
and pro-Israel donors didn't want to play ball with Saddam.
That's who never forgave Bush Senior for not taking
Saddam out of power in Gulf war 1.
Bush senior is who is much closer to the oil companies
so why was the Carlyle Group was against it? And the
Carlyle Group dwarfs Halliburton.
Why was Frank Carlucci, of the Carlyle Group against the
war, as well as Jim Baker, much closer to the oil companies
than anybody in the administration, Brent Scowcroft, why
were they against the war?
"Oil" is a very small part of funding for neoconservative
think tanks that shill for the Bush Administration's policy of
preemtive Middle East regime change, advocated in the
2002 and 2006 National Security Strategy, as compared to
defense contractors.
Oil can't pump out of unstable environments and oil
people know it. Oil pipelines have, of course, always
been prime targets in war as they are now.They have to
uncap wells now that we're in there but they didn't push
for the original occupation (unlike what Democrats tell
you) like defense contractors will and AIPAC Democrats
don't oppose military spending bills.
The "Military Industrial Complex" still lives as better
explained by Philip Giraldi of Cannistraro Associates:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?articleid=10699
The Israel Lobby and Pro Israel neoconservatives, which
are a part of the lobby, are who push for regime changes in
the Middle East concerning regimes which threaten the
security interests of Israel and the Israel lobby, unlike what
Noam Chomsky will tell you, was always in the way of oil
interests.
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1432
And AIPAC Democrats didn't just give a green light to
Bush for an attack on Iran at his discretion for oil interests,
after all....They did it for the Israel Lobby.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/03/17/aipac-democrats-give-bush-free-hand-to-attack-iran/
.



User: ""

Title: Re: "Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State 08 May 2007 12:53:40 AM
On May 6, 5:45 pm,
wrote:

The Kissinger Connection
Patrick Foy, May 04, 2007http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_kissinge=

r_connection/


You may have noticed that George Tenet prefers to talk about the
aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", to wit, the U.S. occupation
and the Iraqi insurgency. He admits that the CIA did get some things
wrong-such as certifying the existence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq when, in fact, those weapons and stockpiles had been destroyed
years before, under UN supervision. In the next breath, Tenet takes
pride that the CIA began warning the Administration early on about the
insurgency. He deeply regrets that the White House, the National
Security Council, and the Pentagon were not interested, and ignored
the warnings.

What happened, it seems to me, was that prior to the invasion, Tenet
was acting the part of a politician and policy maker, enabling a dumb
project with bogus justifications. He was a participant in a fraud.
Everybody was on board. Why would any CIA Director be at an Oval
Office brainstorming session, trying to make the case for a preemptive
war, and proclaim that the effort should be a "slam dunk"?

Why is not to too difficult. Since the only people who
get any kind of US military intelligence funding are agencies who
send sports economic-analogy representative cranks to White House
meetings.
Since they're the only people who have even
the vaguest of clues what these Dan Rather-esque ramblings mean.
Under any

context, this remark is out of context for a CIA director. Afterward,
to hear him tell it, he took on the traditional CIA Director's role as
an impartial intelligence gatherer, and reverted to the facts. Quite a
change. Did he expect his former co-conspirators to respect the truth
and reality post invasion, when they had been consumed with mendacity
pre invasion? The same characters were in place and running the show.

A similar dichotomy applies to the Democratic Establishment in
Congress, pre and post invasion. This is important. It is a major
reason which explains why there will be no impeachment of Bush and
Cheney. As best exemplified by John Kerry in his 2004 Presidential
campaign against G.W. Bush, the Washington Democrats, with few
exceptions, have been content and comfortable to criticize the
execution of the policy, that is, ?the conduct? of the war during the
occupation. The Democrats thereby imply that they would somehow have
done a better job. Up until relatively recently in this long war,
there has been only mild criticism of the terrible idea to go to war
in the first place, and no effort to examine the real motives behind
the decision to invade. The Democrats don't go there, except to say
that they were misled. Why not?

As is well known but often conveniently forgotten, the Democratic
Leadership in both houses of the U.S. Congress made a calculated
political decision to authorize the Cheney/Bush White House to invade
Iraq. The vote for war took place on Capital Hill on October 11th,
2002. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader
Richard Gephardt led the charge. Senators Hillary Clinton, Diane
Feinstein, Joe Biden, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Joe Lieberman,
among other ambitious Democratic mediocrities, big shots and
blowhards, voted to authorize this ruinous war.

There was only one principled Senator of either party who stood up to
the juggernaut, and made a fight of it. That man was Senator Robert
Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. He attempted to mount a filibuster
against the war resolution, but he was cut off by a 75 to 25 vote.
Byrd was regarded as an eccentric, a foolish old timer. He steadfastly
refused to succumb to the hysteria. He knew what he was talking about,
and recognized the Administration's pack of lies for what it was when
it was proffered. Byrd should now be regarded as a hero. He was right
all along, but at the time his views were ridiculed.

Supposedly, all those brilliant Democrats in the Senate who voted to
invade Iraq were alarmed by the Administration's full-court-press
propaganda campaign about Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass
destruction". This is most unlikely. It assumes a level of ignorance
and gullibility which is not credible. It is more likely that the
Democrats and the brain-dead Republicans voted to invade and take over
Iraq not because they regarded Saddam as a threat to the United
States, but rather because, first and foremost, (a) they felt
Washington could get away with it and (b) because the political payoff
for war in the Congressional midterm elections of 2002 was deemed
significant.

If you voted against the Administration, you could be smeared as soft
on terrorism and national security. More important, you would be
bucking the outsized political clout of the Israel Lobby, which was
pushing for war on Iraq to the max, and had been for years. Moreover,
after a decade of devastating economic sanctions, Iraq was going to be
a cake walk, in any event. So it was a low risk proposition. To the
professional politicians making their career calculations, the
downside of launching the war appeared small and very manageable. The
upside was impressive.

Well, the invasion itself, the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of
Saddam, was a cake walk from a military standpoint. In point of fact,
the U.S. won that war. This victory was a foregone conclusion. But
Washington is not getting away with it. The rub has been the
aftermath, the occupation and pacification of the country. That is the
problem which confronts America today, an urban guerilla war, fueled
by religious fanaticism and Arab nationalism. On top of that is a
sectarian civil war among the inhabitants of the occupied country.

The UK medical journal The Lancet estimated back in September, 2006
that Iraq has endured over 600,000 deaths since the conflict began,
and the UN has reported the displacement of 1.5 million Iraqis inside
the country. These are some of the fruits of "Operation Iraqi
Freedom". For the average Iraqi, it has been a disaster. The Democrats
on Capitol Hill and everybody else are now focused upon how to deal
with this catastrophe. The Democrats cannot address their initial,
intellectually dishonest "me too" support for the invasion of Iraq in
2002 without drawing attention to their own gross hypocrisy and
negligence. Instead, like George Tenet, they dwell upon the aftermath
of the invasion and the current predicament.

Fine. Let's focus upon the aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", the
occupation, which every sane, objective observer now agrees is a train
wreck. Who was in charge of that phase? It turns out that the
granddaddy of the American foreign policy establishment, the former
Secretary of State for Richard Nixon, the Mitteleuropa import, Dr.
Henry Kissinger, was a prime architect of the occupation. This is
something extraordinary which has been kept under wraps.

If nothing else, Bob Woodward's last fat book on Iraq, State of
Denial, has performed a valuable public service by ejecting the
furtive Kissinger from the shadows. Woodward reports that vice
president ***** Cheney confided to him (Woodward) in the summer of
2005: "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody
else. He just comes by and I guess at least once a month, Scooter
[Libby] and I sit down with him." [Page 406.] Woodward goes on to
state: "The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple
of months, making the former secretary the most regular and frequent
outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs."

Why has this fact been kept sub rosa? One wonders. Why did Cheney
telephone Woodward and blast him for revealing it in the book, before
hanging up on him? What is going on behind the scenes? Rest assured,
something rotten.

Please note that it was Kissinger's prot=E9g=E9 and partner, Ambassador L.
Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, the Managing Director of Kissinger
Associates, Inc. for more than a decade, whom Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
placed in charge of the occupation of Iraq when Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
inexplicably cashiered the honest and fair-minded Lt. General Jay
Garner, after scarcely a few weeks on the job. An item from the
Sunday Telegraph of London dated October 15th, 2006 ["There was a plan
for Iraq, but it was torn up"] is most informative. It summarizes the
Kissinger connection to the Green Zone in Baghdad, as uncovered by
Woodward...

When, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the retired US Army
General Jay Garner was asked to take over the post-war humanitarian
mission, he certainly possessed the credentials for the job. In 1991
he had headed Operation Provide Comfort, rescuing thousands of ethnic
Kurds in northern Iraq after the first Gulf war. Who better, then, for
the American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to appoint to the job
second time round.

Garner drew up detailed plans and, at his first briefing with
President Bush, outlined three essential "musts" that would, he
asserted, ensure a smooth transition after the war. The first "must",
he said, was that the Iraqi military should not be disbanded. The
second "must" was that the 50,000-strong Ba'ath party machine that ran
government services should not be broken up or its members proscribed.
If either were to happen, he warned, there would be chaos compounded
by thousands of unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. And the third
"must", he insisted, was that an interim Iraqi leadership group, eager
to help the United States administer the country in the short term,
should be kept on-side.

Initially, no one disagreed, according to State of Denial, the new
book by the veteran Washington reporter, Bob Woodward. But within
weeks of the invasion, Garner's tenure as head of the post-war
planning office was over: he was replaced by Paul Bremer, a terrorism
expert and prot=E9g=E9 of Henry Kissinger. Bremer immediately
countermanded all three of Garner's "musts". [My emphasis.] When,
eventually, Garner confronted Rumsfeld, telling him: "There is still
time to rectify this," Rumsfeld refused to do so.

And who was assisting Dr. Kissinger to program the new U.S. proconsul
in Baghdad? Who was Paul Bremer's primary contact at the Pentagon,
overseeing the occupation from Washington, with the blessing of Don
Rumsfeld? None other than the award winning hyperZionist zealot,
Douglas ...

read more =BB

.
User: "can_o_worms"

Title: Re: "Mission Accomplished" For the Neocons: Iraq has been Destroyed as a Nation-State 08 May 2007 08:14:03 AM
On 7 May 2007 22:53:40 -0700, "zzbunker@netscape.net"
<zzbunker@netscape.net> wrote:

On May 6, 5:45 pm,

wrote:

The Kissinger Connection
Patrick Foy, May 04, 2007http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_kissinger_connection/

You may have noticed that George Tenet prefers to talk about the
aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", to wit, the U.S. occupation
and the Iraqi insurgency. He admits that the CIA did get some things
wrong-such as certifying the existence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq when, in fact, those weapons and stockpiles had been destroyed
years before, under UN supervision. In the next breath, Tenet takes
pride that the CIA began warning the Administration early on about the
insurgency. He deeply regrets that the White House, the National
Security Council, and the Pentagon were not interested, and ignored
the warnings.

What happened, it seems to me, was that prior to the invasion, Tenet
was acting the part of a politician and policy maker, enabling a dumb
project with bogus justifications. He was a participant in a fraud.
Everybody was on board. Why would any CIA Director be at an Oval
Office brainstorming session, trying to make the case for a preemptive
war, and proclaim that the effort should be a "slam dunk"?


Why is not to too difficult. Since the only people who
get any kind of US military intelligence funding are agencies who
send sports economic-analogy representative cranks to White House
meetings.
Since they're the only people who have even
the vaguest of clues what these Dan Rather-esque ramblings mean.

Speaking of Dan Rather: Rather is another *****
media pundit who helped shove us into the war in
Iraq. The Iraq war was the bipartisan political task
to do throughout the '90s for Israel's sake and Rather
was right onboard with the lies.
Check out this interview with Dan Rather just after 9-11.
I got this from one of Justin Raimondo's articles at antiwar.com
http://www.nyjtimes.com/cover/terror/DaveandDan.htm
(excerpt from 2001 interview of Dan Rather by Dave Letterman)
Dave: Right.
Dan: We now know that Saddam Hussein, we mentioned,
you know, if he isn't connected to this, he's connected to
any other things. He's part of this "hate America" thing.
You have to understand that Saddam Hussein is somebody
I have sat this close, eye to eye. When his feet hit the floor
every morning, he dreams of leading a victorious Arab army
into Jerusalem, and he sees himself as the new Saladin.
And his hate is deep for us. I don't even like to use the word
"hate," but, you know, this is what we're dealing with, and
we have to wake up.
It's a new... It's a new place now, and we're headed to a
new place, David.
"Time" magazine had a wonderful essay this week, and said,
you know, "we're going now to a new place where, you know,
even the songs we sing will have a completely different meaning."
For example, you know, "America the Beautiful": Who can sing
now, with the same meaning we had before, one stanza of that
that goes "O beautiful, for patriots' dream, that sees beyond the
years, thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed
by human tears." We can never sing that song...
( Sobs )
....Again that way. David, you've been terrific to have me tonight.
I'm so sorry for this.
Dave: It's fine.
Dan: The hour grows late.
(end of excerpt)

Under any

context, this remark is out of context for a CIA director. Afterward,
to hear him tell it, he took on the traditional CIA Director's role as
an impartial intelligence gatherer, and reverted to the facts. Quite a
change. Did he expect his former co-conspirators to respect the truth
and reality post invasion, when they had been consumed with mendacity
pre invasion? The same characters were in place and running the show.

A similar dichotomy applies to the Democratic Establishment in
Congress, pre and post invasion. This is important. It is a major
reason which explains why there will be no impeachment of Bush and
Cheney. As best exemplified by John Kerry in his 2004 Presidential
campaign against G.W. Bush, the Washington Democrats, with few
exceptions, have been content and comfortable to criticize the
execution of the policy, that is, ?the conduct? of the war during the
occupation. The Democrats thereby imply that they would somehow have
done a better job. Up until relatively recently in this long war,
there has been only mild criticism of the terrible idea to go to war
in the first place, and no effort to examine the real motives behind
the decision to invade. The Democrats don't go there, except to say
that they were misled. Why not?

As is well known but often conveniently forgotten, the Democratic
Leadership in both houses of the U.S. Congress made a calculated
political decision to authorize the Cheney/Bush White House to invade
Iraq. The vote for war took place on Capital Hill on October 11th,
2002. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader
Richard Gephardt led the charge. Senators Hillary Clinton, Diane
Feinstein, Joe Biden, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Joe Lieberman,
among other ambitious Democratic mediocrities, big shots and
blowhards, voted to authorize this ruinous war.

There was only one principled Senator of either party who stood up to
the juggernaut, and made a fight of it. That man was Senator Robert
Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. He attempted to mount a filibuster
against the war resolution, but he was cut off by a 75 to 25 vote.
Byrd was regarded as an eccentric, a foolish old timer. He steadfastly
refused to succumb to the hysteria. He knew what he was talking about,
and recognized the Administration's pack of lies for what it was when
it was proffered. Byrd should now be regarded as a hero. He was right
all along, but at the time his views were ridiculed.

Supposedly, all those brilliant Democrats in the Senate who voted to
invade Iraq were alarmed by the Administration's full-court-press
propaganda campaign about Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass
destruction". This is most unlikely. It assumes a level of ignorance
and gullibility which is not credible. It is more likely that the
Democrats and the brain-dead Republicans voted to invade and take over
Iraq not because they regarded Saddam as a threat to the United
States, but rather because, first and foremost, (a) they felt
Washington could get away with it and (b) because the political payoff
for war in the Congressional midterm elections of 2002 was deemed
significant.

If you voted against the Administration, you could be smeared as soft
on terrorism and national security. More important, you would be
bucking the outsized political clout of the Israel Lobby, which was
pushing for war on Iraq to the max, and had been for years. Moreover,
after a decade of devastating economic sanctions, Iraq was going to be
a cake walk, in any event. So it was a low risk proposition. To the
professional politicians making their career calculations, the
downside of launching the war appeared small and very manageable. The
upside was impressive.

Well, the invasion itself, the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of
Saddam, was a cake walk from a military standpoint. In point of fact,
the U.S. won that war. This victory was a foregone conclusion. But
Washington is not getting away with it. The rub has been the
aftermath, the occupation and pacification of the country. That is the
problem which confronts America today, an urban guerilla war, fueled
by religious fanaticism and Arab nationalism. On top of that is a
sectarian civil war among the inhabitants of the occupied country.

The UK medical journal The Lancet estimated back in September, 2006
that Iraq has endured over 600,000 deaths since the conflict began,
and the UN has reported the displacement of 1.5 million Iraqis inside
the country. These are some of the fruits of "Operation Iraqi
Freedom". For the average Iraqi, it has been a disaster. The Democrats
on Capitol Hill and everybody else are now focused upon how to deal
with this catastrophe. The Democrats cannot address their initial,
intellectually dishonest "me too" support for the invasion of Iraq in
2002 without drawing attention to their own gross hypocrisy and
negligence. Instead, like George Tenet, they dwell upon the aftermath
of the invasion and the current predicament.

Fine. Let's focus upon the aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", the
occupation, which every sane, objective observer now agrees is a train
wreck. Who was in charge of that phase? It turns out that the
granddaddy of the American foreign policy establishment, the former
Secretary of State for Richard Nixon, the Mitteleuropa import, Dr.
Henry Kissinger, was a prime architect of the occupation. This is
something extraordinary which has been kept under wraps.

If nothing else, Bob Woodward's last fat book on Iraq, State of
Denial, has performed a valuable public service by ejecting the
furtive Kissinger from the shadows. Woodward reports that vice
president ***** Cheney confided to him (Woodward) in the summer of
2005: "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody
else. He just comes by and I guess at least once a month, Scooter
[Libby] and I sit down with him." [Page 406.] Woodward goes on to
state: "The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple
of months, making the former secretary the most regular and frequent
outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs."

Why has this fact been kept sub rosa? One wonders. Why did Cheney
telephone Woodward and blast him for revealing it in the book, before
hanging up on him? What is going on behind the scenes? Rest assured,
something rotten.

Please note that it was Kissinger's protégé and partner, Ambassador L.
Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, the Managing Director of Kissinger
Associates, Inc. for more than a decade, whom Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
placed in charge of the occupation of Iraq when Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush
inexplicably cashiered the honest and fair-minded Lt. General Jay
Garner, after scarcely a few weeks on the job. An item from the
Sunday Telegraph of London dated October 15th, 2006 ["There was a plan
for Iraq, but it was torn up"] is most informative. It summarizes the
Kissinger connection to the Green Zone in Baghdad, as uncovered by
Woodward...

When, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the retired US Army
General Jay Garner was asked to take over the post-war humanitarian
mission, he certainly possessed the credentials for the job. In 1991
he had headed Operation Provide Comfort, rescuing thousands of ethnic
Kurds in northern Iraq after the first Gulf war. Who better, then, for
the American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to appoint to the job
second time round.

Garner drew up detailed plans and, at his first briefing with
President Bush, outlined three essential "musts" that would, he
asserted, ensure a smooth transition after the war. The first "must",
he said, was that the Iraqi military should not be disbanded. The
second "must" was that the 50,000-strong Ba'ath party machine that ran
government services should not be broken up or its members proscribed.
If either were to happen, he warned, there would be chaos compounded
by thousands of unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. And the third
"must", he insisted, was that an interim Iraqi leadership group, eager
to help the United States administer the country in the short term,
should be kept on-side.

Initially, no one disagreed, according to State of Denial, the new
book by the veteran Washington reporter, Bob Woodward. But within
weeks of the invasion, Garner's tenure as head of the post-war
planning office was over: he was replaced by Paul Bremer, a terrorism
expert and protégé of Henry Kissinger. Bremer immediately
countermanded all three of Garner's "musts". [My emphasis.] When,
eventually, Garner confronted Rumsfeld, telling him: "There is still
time to rectify this," Rumsfeld refused to do so.

And who was assisting Dr. Kissinger to program the new U.S. proconsul
in Baghdad? Who was Paul Bremer's primary contact at the Pentagon,
overseeing the occupation from Washington, with the blessing of Don
Rumsfeld? None other than the award winning hyperZionist zealot,
Douglas ...

read more »


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