Iraq: a War About Nothing

[Octafish]

Here's the truth about the war all good DUers warned the Hill and everybody who'd listen about, way back in 2003:

Iraq: a War About Nothing

by Marie Cocco
Published on Sunday, August 27, 2006 by the Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

WASHINGTON — "Nothing." Rarely does a single word convey so much, and explain so little.

The word leaped from President Bush's lips, dismissive and defiant, as though the questioner should have known better, and perhaps should not have asked. Bush at his Monday news conference made his customary recitation of all the new and supposedly improved reasons why he went to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, concluding that "the terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East."

Then the question came — bold and, frankly, beautiful. "What did Iraq have to do with that?" The president replied: "What did Iraq have to do with what?" Well, with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"Nothing," was Bush's reply. Except that in his mind, the "lesson of Sept. 11" is linked to resentment and hopelessness that roil the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East, nurturing suicide bombers.

And so because of this, Bush said, he invaded Iraq.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0827-23.htm

Bush told a Gold Star Widow there was "nothing" to talk about:

War Widow To Bush: "You're Here To Serve The People. And The People Are Not Being Served With This War."

By Greg Sargent | bio

I just got off the phone with Hildi Halley, a woman from Maine whose husband is a fallen soldier. Yesterday President Bush met with her privately, and news of their meeting was reported in a local Maine paper, the Kennebec Journal. The paper shared few details of the meeting, saying simply that Halley objected to Bush's policies and that she said Bush responded that there was no point in them having a "philosophical discussion about the pros and cons of the war."

SNIP...

Halley, who's also been politically active for Democrats, said she told GOP Senator Olympia Snowe that she'd like a phone call from Bush. Subsequently Halley got a call from White House staffers looking to set up a private meeting. Bush came yesterday.

Halley tells me that she told the President that she's been opposed since "day one" to both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I talked to him about how important this person was to me," Halley recounted, speaking of her husband. "It's not just a soldier who died. Lives are changed forever...I said, `This doesn't make sense to me.'"

"He said, `Terrorists killed three thousand people, we had to go to war.'" Halley continued to me. "I said, `Well, who put the Taliban into power? The United States did.' He said, `I'm not going to have a philosphical debate over politics.' The whole conversation was very gentle."

CONTINUED...

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2006/aug/25/war_widow_to_bush_youre_here_to_serve_the_people_and_the_people_are_not_being_served_with_this_war

Gee. That tells me there's "nothing" between Bush's ears.

Bush's Disdainful Presidency

By Robert Parry
August 26, 2006

The U.S. news media always makes light of George W. Bush’s tendency to put down others through disparaging comments about their personal appearances or by assigning them silly nicknames. It’s just the “inner frat boy” coming out, we’re told.

So, when U.S. News cited “a top insider” describing how Bush likes to fart in the presence of junior White House staffers as a joke on them, the item was given the boys-will-be-boys title: “Animal House in the West Wing.”

According to U.S. News, Bush was just “a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides.” Bush was described, too, as someone who “loves to cuss gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him.”

But Bush’s behavior could be viewed in a less sympathetic light. Given his famous thin skin whenever he feels slighted, his eagerness to demean others could be interpreted as a sign of his dynastic authority, a modern-day droit du seigneur in which he can humiliate others but they can’t return the favor.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/082606.html

Gee. I'm pissed. After reading the above, you should be pissed.



Pass this around to your Republican and Independent friends and family. They'll be pissed, too.

[Hissyspit]

1. Excellent Post.

Actually it's a war that was about a lot of things, but nothing they told the American public it was about or nothing that justified it.

[insanerepubs]

2. How Come

...all of this crazy terror stuff didn't happen when the Big Dog was in charge?

[MadMaddie]

6. Because the Big Dogactually had professionals in all of the agencies

that knew what their jobs were and how to perform their duties of their jobs...the * cabal has removed these professionals or outed important undercover work and prevented themselves from preventing disasters.....

[Octafish]

4. Crimping the oil pipeline, maybe.

It wasn't just to control the "second-biggest oil reserve on the planet." It was to keep supplies down and increase current-day profits, prices and the future value of the remaining oil.

What Palast said:

Big Oil and the Trillion-Dollar War Bonus

Published by Greg Palast August 8th, 2006 in Articles
by Greg Palast
excerpted from, “Armed Madhouse” (Penguin 2006)

It has been a very good war for Big Oil — courtesy of OPEC price hikes. The five oil giants saw profits rise from $34 billion in 2002 to $81 billion in 2004, year two of Iraq’s “transition to democracy.”

But this tsunami of black ink was nothing compared to the wave of $113 billion in profits to come in 2005: $13.6 billion for Conoco, $14.1 billion for Chevron and the Mother of All Earnings, Exxon’s $36.1 billion.

For these record-busting earnings, the industry could thank General Tommy Franks and the troops in Baghdad, the insurgents and their oil-supply-cutting explosives. But, most of all, they had to thank OPEC and the Saudis for keeping the lid on supply even as the planet screamed in pain for crude.

When OPEC raises the price of crude, Big Oil makes out big time. The oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production. In OPEC nations, they have “profit sharing agreements” (PSAs) that give the companies a direct slice of the higher price charged.

More important, the industry has its own reserves whose value is attached, like a suckerfish, to OPEC?s price targets. Here’s a statistic you won’t see on Army recruitment posters: The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil Oil alone by just over $666 billion. (The devil is in the details.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/big-oil-and-the-trillion-dollar-war-bonus

All the oil in the world isn't worth one human life.

Thank you, Hissyspit. These greedy mofos will never tell the truth. It's in their genes:

"There's three things to remember: claim everything, explain nothing, deny everything." -- Prescott Bush, quoting Clare Booth Luce

[whistle]

3. George W Bush is a most contemptible individual and really

...must be impeached and removed from the presidency.

[Octafish]

5. Real AXIS of EVIL: Allen Dulles, the NAZIs and the CIA

From your keypad to Rev Moon's earpiece, whistle.After his father, grandfather and their (Gehlen) Org, George Walker Bush is the worst thing to ever happen to America.

Allen Dulles, the NAZIs and the CIA

Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behavior and that of his clients.

-- Christian Dewar, Making a Killing

Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."

Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."

-- Michael Hasty, Paranoid Shift

The study of the past is beset by uncertainty. Experts on ancient inscriptions can easily get into arguments over whether or not two prominent people with the same name were actually a single individual. The student of modern history doesn't normally run into such problems because our lives today are so well documented. But suppose that most present-day records were to be lost in the course of time, leaving only a few semi-mythic narratives. In that case, future historians might well conclude that the only way to make sense of the twentieth century was by assuming that there were actually two Allen Dulleses.

One Allen Dulles, they would tell us, was the head of a powerful group of covert agents who served the great American Republic at mid-century. The other, who lived and worked slightly earlier, had been dedicated to promoting the interests of the Nazi Reich, which was the sworn enemy of the Americans. Despite the coincidence of names, there could obviously have been no connection between them.

We, with our documentation intact, have no choice but to accept that these two Allen Dulleses were one and the same. But the price of our superior knowledge is that for us the twentieth century threatens to make no sense at all.

How do we begin to untangle this puzzle? Perhaps it would help if we went back to the start.

Allen Welsh Dulles was born to privilege and a tradition of public service. He was the grandson of one secretary of state and the nephew of another. But by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1914, the robber baron era of American history was coming to an an end, ushered out by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act -- which had been used in 1911 to break up Standard Oil -- and by the institution of the progressive income tax in 1913. The ruling elite was starting to view government less as their own private preserve and more as an unwanted intrusion on their ability to conduct business as usual. That shift of loyalties in itself may account for many of the paradoxical aspects of Dulles's career.

CONTINUED...

http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/dulles.html

GANGSTER & TRAITOR

[whistle]

11. Thanks a great link and there is much more....

....in the "Secret History of the Twentieth Century"



<snip>
The Paths to Democracy: Left verses Right
<.....>

The sort of people <the Right> who believe in an implacable enemy that can never be reasoned with or won over are also likely to put their faith in a particular set of responses to that enemy: An unwavering dedication to absolute military superiority. The promotion of a warrior culture, based on hard work and self-denial and suspicious of all forms of pleasure that might weaken the will to fight and die. The rooting out of subversive elements at home, including those who deliberately ally with the enemy, those who are merely prone to craven compromise, and those who threaten to weaken the national resolve by endorsing self-indulgence or the pampering of the unfit.

That, in a nutshell, has been the agenda of the right for the last fifty years, encompassing everything from missile defense and gun ownership, to attacks on abortion and homosexuality, to the branding of liberals as traitors. The right is determined to turn the United States into a single-minded warrior state, and heaven help anyone who stands in their way.

Over those fifty years, various other issues have come and gone as part of the national debate, but finally everything has come down to this one stark alternative. We stand at a moment of decision, and the burning issue before us is whether we will seek to create a peaceful future of equality and tolerance, or whether we will go deeper and deeper into a world of endless war against increasingly invisible enemies, a world in which the poor, the elderly, and even disabled veterans are sacrificed in the name of military readiness and battlefield values.

Following their paranoid worldview, the leaders of the right have made many bad decisions, have allied themselves with unsavory company, and have acted in ways that are blatantly immoral by any standards other than those of all-out war. They have endorsed torture and assassination and have edged dangerously close to genocide. They are harming our country and harming our planet and have made themselves unfit to be part of any civilized discourse. It is time to call them on their falsehoods, to reject their delusions, and to inform them that their behavior will no longer be tolerated in a free society.


Cory Panshin
January 2005

[H2O Man]

7. Through the Shot Glass ....

"The new propaganda strategy will be right out of Lewis Carroll: If we leave the country that had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again."
-- Frank Rich; Return to the Scene of the Crime; NY Times; 8-27-06

[Octafish]

15. Bush insists Iraq, al Qaeda had 'relationship'

I loathe liars, especially those who claim later to know nothing.

Bush insists Iraq, al Qaeda had 'relationship'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Thursday said that there were "numerous contacts" between Iraq and the terror network.

Bush, in a brief appearance before reporters, was asked why the administration insists that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had a relationship "when even you have denied any connection between Saddam and September 11, and now the September 11 commission says that there was no collaborative relationship at all?"

The president answered:"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Bush reiterated that the administration never said that "the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," he said.

He referred to meetings in Sudan between Iraqi intelligence agents and al Qaeda and said Saddam had connections with organizations considered by the United States to be terror groups -- including Abu Nidal. That group is a spinoff from the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/17/Bush.alqaeda/

NEXT TERM: LEAVENWORTH

[DemReadingDU]

8. and 2624 of our servicemen/women are dead

and for what?

[Karenina]

12. Nothing.

[Octafish]

14. A Brief History of Bush, Harken and the SEC

Bush claims to know ‘nothing’ about his HARKEN inside trading…

A Brief History of Bush, Harken and the SEC

By John Dunbar

WASHINGTON, October 16, 2002 — In 1976, George W. Bush was a freshly minted graduate of the Harvard Business School looking for a job.

He had $20,000 left over from his education trust fund, a well-known last name and some great connections. He decided to follow in his father's footsteps by getting into the oil business, and moved back to his childhood home of Midland, Texas.

The early years

In 1977, Bush organized his first company, Arbusto Energy Inc. (Spanish for bush), an oil exploration venture. After an unsuccessful 1978 run for the House of Representatives, Bush returned to the oil business, attempting to take Arbusto public in 1982 with disappointing results. Bush changed the name of the company to Bush Exploration that same year and struggled on.

Ivy League Underwriter

When Harken was in financial trouble in August 1990, its largest investor helped the company stave off disaster. Aeneas Venture Corp., the venture capital arm of Harvard Management Company, entered into a joint venture with Harken. Harvard Management invests Harvard University's huge endowment.


SNIP…

Another blow

In January 1991, Harken was dealt another setback. The SEC had been reviewing the company's sale of its Aloha subsidiary two years previous, and decided Harken incorrectly accounted for the sale. Harken agreed to issue corrected financial statements for the 1989 fiscal year and for the nine months ending Sept. 30, 1990. The end result in 1989, rather than the $3.3 million loss the company originally reported, it had to admit actual losses of $12.6 million.

Shortly thereafter, on March 4, 1991, the SEC received notice of Bush's June 1990 stock sale. At the time, Bush blamed the delay on the SEC, saying they lost it. Recently, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it was a mix-up by Harken's lawyers. When asked again at a press conference, Bush said I still haven't figured it out completely.

CONTINUED…

http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=196#

KNOW-NOTHING DO-NOTHING
DRUNKEN COKE-WHORE ZERO

[Hissyspit]

9. kick

[Octafish]

16. Enron and the Bushes

Bush claimed he didn’t know Kenny Boy Lay and nothing about ENRON.

So why did he intervene with ENRON's hijacking, I mean, privatizing efforts in Argentina.

Enron and the Bushes

David Corn
The Nation | posted January 17, 2002 (February 4, 2002 issue)

When George W. Bush was first running for governor of Texas, Washington editor David Corn took a look at Bush family activities on behalf of Enron in Argentina--itself now suffering the results of untamed financial markets. We reprint this November 21, 1994, article to show how Enron's connections with the Bushes stretch not just to Washington but around the world. -- The Editors

Several years ago, says Rodolfo Terragno, a former Argentine Cabinet Minister, he received a telephone call from George W. Bush, son of the then-Vice President. When he hung up, Terragno was annoyed, he recalls, for the younger Bush had tried to exploit his family name to pressure Terragno to award a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Enron, an American firm close to the Bush clan.

During this past year, as George W. campaigned across Texas to replace Governor Ann Richards, he portrayed himself as a successful businessman who relied on "individual initiative," not his lineage. Contacted in Buenos Aires, Terragno, now a member of the Chamber of Deputies, offered an account that challenges Bush's campaign image.

In 1988, Terragno was the Minister of Public Works and Services in the government of President Raúl Alfonsín. He oversaw large industrial projects, and his government was considering construction of a pipeline to stretch across Argentina and transport natural gas to Chile. Several US firms were interested, including the Houston-based Enron, the largest natural gas pipeline company in the United States. But Terragno was upset with the corporation's representatives in Argentina. They were pressing Terragno for a deal in which the state-owned gas company would sell Enron natural gas at an extremely low price, and, he recalls, they pitched their project with a half-page proposal--one so insubstantial that Terragno couldn't take it seriously. Terragno let the Enron agents know he was not happy with them.

It was then, Terragno says, that he received the unexpected call from George W. Bush, who introduced himself as the son of the Vice President. (The elder Bush was then campaigning for the presidency.) George W., Terragno maintains, told the minister that he was keen to have Argentina proceed with the pipeline, especially if it signed Enron for the deal. "He tried to exert some influence to get that project for Enron," Terragno asserts. "He assumed that the fact he was the son of the President would exert influence.... I felt pressured. It was not proper for him to make that kind of call."

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020204/corn

Thank you, Hissyspit. I really appreciate you giving a damn.

[leftchick]

10. god, Robert Parry summed the chimp up perfectly

didn't he?

<snip>

“I am the commander, see,” Bush told Woodward. “I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they need to say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

So, Bush had come to see himself as beyond accountability, much as ancient royalty viewed their own powers as unlimited under the divine right of kings. In the traditional droit du seigneur, a nobleman had the right to deflower the bride of a male subject on their first night of marriage.

Now we’re told that George W. Bush has another way of demonstrating his supremacy over subordinates: when new White House aides are brought in to be introduced to the President of the United States, the President farts.

and yes indeed I am pissed. :grr:


Thank You Octafish!

[gratuitous]

13. So Bush is gassing his own people?

Gee, I seem to recall that was the casus belli du jour once upon a time for the invasion of Iraq.

[Octafish]

17. Boosh: 'Nothing Will Hold Us Back'

Remember his lies from Pukefest 2004?

Bush: 'Nothing Will Hold Us Back'

NEW YORK, Sept. 2, 2004

"We are staying on the offensive – striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. And we will prevail."
President Bush

(CBS/AP) President Bush asked voters Thursday to reject John Kerry's "policies of the past," casting himself as a strong and compassionate leader who would use a second term to build a safer and more hopeful nation.

"We are on the path to the future – and we are not turning back," Mr. Bush said in an acceptance speech that brings an end to the Republican National Convention and launches the final eight-week dash for the White House.

"We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back," the president said.

SNIP...

"You face a choice," the president said from a specially built theater-in-the-round stage at New York's Madison Square Garden. "My opponent's policies are dramatically different from ours."

"His policies of tax and spend — of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity — are the policies of the past," Mr. Bush said.

CONTINUED LYING...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/29/politics/main639288.shtml

Thank you for caring, leftchick. You have no idea how much it means to me.

TOTAL ZERO DIPWAD NOTHING

[leftchick]

18. it is my pleasure Octafish

I have learned so much from your fantastic threads over the years. You are a treasure.

and... :yourock:

:)

[Crankie Avalon]

19. It's the Seinfeld of wars...

...and, just like Seinfeld, it's driven by shallow, selfish, maladjusted twits.

[Serial Mom]

20. My thoughts exactly...

At least in the end of Seinfeld, they all got sent to JAIL for being so shallow!

Doubt that will happen with those in this mis-administration!

[spanone]

21. It's a war about OIL and the stealing of it.

[Karenina]

22. Actually it's more a war about hierarchy

in which controlling resources such as oil or "pipelines" if you will, water, food, energy, human resource, is simply a part of the "King of the Hill" game. Included in the "plan" is depopulation which is already well underway.

[Octafish]

23. To BushCo, people are 'nothing.'

Here's some conspiracy FACT: The Bushes and their cronies are in bed with NAZIs and their ilk. They both believe themselves to be the Master Race. Here's some history on how these super-duper-supermen got in bed together. FWIW: The author below is an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter.

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

by Edwin Black
Sunday, November 9, 2003

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race.

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

CONTINUED...

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/www.sfgate.com/index.html

Thanks for giving a damn, Karenina. I owe more than my sanity to you and our Friends here and around this wonderful blue sphere.

EUGENICS GONE BAD