The Never-ending War Story - The Hornet's Nest

Senator McBamanton: General P, we have had our foot stuck in a hornet’s nest for 5 years. Last year, you advised us to punch our hand into the nest to quell the insurgent hornets. When can we start to pull our hand and foot out of the nest?

General P: We have seen that the ‘surge’ - our punching our fist into the nest - has been successful. We are suffering fewer nasty stings and there are fewer insurgent hornets flying around causing trouble. We can expect to start pulling out our hand as long as the insurgent hornets do not start being hostile again. After a ‘cooling off’ period, if the hornets behave themselves, we’ll consider pulling out our foot a little at a time.

Senator McBamanton: General, you have done a wonderful job of punching our fist into the nest and we appreciate your courage and dedication. However, we’ve heard that one reason the ‘surge’ has been so successful is that due to our stomping around for 5 years in the nest and then punching our fist into it, we’ve managed to kill a substantial number of hornets, so there are fewer hornets left to sting us. What’s your comment on this?

General P: While there are always an unfortunate number of pacified hornets which are killed in actions such as this, there are also many insurgent hornets coming from other nests to sting us and to attack the pacified hornets we’ve taken as pets. We feel that the amount of hornet-on-hornet violence is also down dramatically due to our fist punching away at the nest and our foot stomping with conviction on the nest.

Senator McBamanton: So, General, seeing as you think this ‘surge’ has been a success, when can we expect to start to pull our hand and foot out of this nest?

General P: As stated before, we can expect to start pulling our foot out of the nest after we have withdrawn our fist. If the hornets do not respond by stinging us in reaction to the withdrawal of our hand, we will be able to remove our hand or most of it in a few months. Then, after a period of consolidation, if the hornets from this nest and other nests do not attack us or our pacified, pet hornets, we can consider the withdrawal of our foot.

Senator McBamanton: General, isn’t it true that any action on our part, whether it is to remove our hand or our foot will most likely result in the resumption of insurgent hornets stinging us and buzzing all around us?

Gen P: While I do not profess to be able to see all contingencies and outcomes, it is our belief that the hornets will, under the influence of our foot and our pacified hornets, understand that smashing their nest was in their best interest. If insurgent hornets from this nest or from other nests continue to cause disturbance, then we will not be in a position to remove our foot from the nest. Renewed insurgency will necessitate our foot and possibly our hand remaining in the nest until such time as conditions are met by which we can extricate our foot and fist.

Senator McBamanton: To be clear, General, what conditions would meet the criteria for removing our hand and then consequently removing our foot?

General P: The conditions that we are considering, the ones that will allow us to remove our appendages from the nest are those that would allow us to remove our appendages from the nest.

Senator McBamanton: Ambassador C, what is your considered opinion on the prognosis given by the General regarding the possible removal of our foot and fist from the nest of hornets?

Ambassador C: I concur wholeheartedly that should conditions for the responsible removal of our appendages from the nest be met by the hornets, then we can consider removing our appendages in a responsible manner. Should the insurgent hornets prove intransigent then conditions will not have been met by which we might consider removing our foot and hand from the nest. Should, on the other hand, the hornets change into butterflies, then we will re-evaluate the situation and it might reasonably be expected that we could consider the removal of our appendages from the nest in a responsible manner and according to a realistic time-table.

Senator McBamanton: So, General, you and the ambassador are saying that if everything goes well, and the hornets turn into butterflies, we may be able to start removing our foot soon after we remove our fist from the nest?

General P: I’m saying what I have been saying all along: sticking our foot into the nest and then punching our fist into the nest was and is necessary to our security and the stability of all of the other nests. Should insurgent hornets from this nest or other nests continue to sting us and fight us, then we will have no other choice but to continue to kick and punch the nest until they stop stinging and fighting us.

Senator McBamanton: Thank you very much, General and Ambassador, for your insight. It is obvious to all of us that we have brought the gift of democracy and freedom to the nest and it is up to the hornets, now, to get to work and rebuild their destroyed nest and stop their insurgency against our foot and fist. It is time the hornets for their own good, became butterflies.

Nota bene:
Jon Stewart's interpretation of General Petraeus’ testimony: “We can't leave if things are not going well and we can't leave if things are going well or else we will lose ground."Stewart called it “A Catch-22 (billion dollars a month) statement."

The Never-ending War Story - the Prequel

6 months before the US invaded Iraq, Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion.

The PBS documentary ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact in June, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/
(Chapter three, ‘Embedded with KBR’; at 5:10)

To repeat:

The decision to invade Iraq had been made and Halliburton had been hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault of Iraq long before the fabricated evidence re: WMDs and Saddam/Al-Qaida connections were presented by the White House to the US people and their greedy, jello-spined representatives.

It might seem beyond credibility, given what we know now, that neither the director, Tim Mangini, nor producers, Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith thought to pursue a line of questioning pertaining to this fact in this ‘hard look at private contractors’. Too off-topic perhaps. (IMHO, the documentary quickly descends into a ‘human interest piece’. Perhaps the tragic story of ex-Navy Seal, Scotty ‘the Bod’ Helvenston and others was too alluring. Helvenston was one of the Blackwater mercenaries killed, burned and strung up from the bridge in Falluja.)

Call me naïve, but I would have thought that drilling to the core of the investigation to fathom the grand reason why we were truly at war in Iraq and in need of all these private contractors would have been the preferred tact to take. (Call it 20/20 hindsight, if you wish.)

If the reporter was correct, sometime in September, 2002, 6 months before the Bush Administration bullied the US into violating international law by invading the sovereign nation of Iraq on March 20, 2003, contracts had been signed and contractors were on the ground building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. This presumably included the ‘permanent bases’, and quite likely improvements on what is to be the largest embassy compound in the World. A ‘Vatican City’ to serve as the base of future operations in the Middle-east. Most certainly, they were busy building some of the more than 60 sites that KBR operated in Iraq at the time of this documentary.

In his January 28, 2003, state of the Union address, Bush denounced Saddam as “the dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons” and listed vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons. What Dubya didn’t tell us is that his cabal of war-criminals had already bargained away any peaceful, diplomatic solutions in a no-bid contract to Halliburton/KBR, three months earlier.

Lest we forget, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, a 26-year veteran of the agency, revealed to CBS’ Ed Bradley on ‘60-minutes’ which aired on April 23, 2006, that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director, George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States and was reportedly paid more than $100,000 by the CIA — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/60minutes/main1527749.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-09.htm

Mr Drumheller went on to say that the administration didn’t care about this revelation, no matter the source. Of course not, by that time, in September, 2002, the real decisions had been made by the people who truly matter, the high mucky-mucks of corporate America, and the ink was drying on the dotted line. The gravy-train was leaving the station with a full head of steam and no red flag was going to stop it.

You can almost hear an echo from the addled, collective brain-pan of Bush’s Inner Circle, ‘We can’t renege on the deals we’ve made with our friends at Halliburton. That wouldn’t be kosher. A deal is a deal.’ One must suppose that the ‘finder’s fee’ on the estimated umpteen billion dollars in no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton/KBR would be a handsome one. And if one had similar connections with other corporations that supplied materiel and services to Halliburton and KBR at inflated cost, one could wolf down the slop at both ends of the trough. Hog heaven, as they say.

That’s a mighty temptation. Mountains of cash up front and on the back end, lots of powerful friends who’d be happy to give you a corner office, a princely salary and a diamond parachute when you conclude your ‘service’ in the US government.

Beyond the dreams of avarice.

And all you have to do is undermine the Constitution, betray your solemn oath to uphold and defend the precepts of that document, lie to the US citizens you swore to serve, deceive the world with bald-faced falsehoods and steel yourself to live with the fact that the blood of thousands or even tens of thousands of human beings are on your greedy hands.

Such a deal.

So, General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, when can we expect to bring home our troops and our contractors? When will this war end?

The answer is simple.

The war will end when Dubya, Dicky-boy, Donnie the Rum, Condi, Wolfie, and all those of their sickening ilk can force themselves from the slop of the trough.

Then again, I’m an optimist.

Post Script:
I am very sympathetic to Mr Helveston's friends and family members. I also can understand the reasoning revealed by Mrs Katy Helveston, Scotty’s mom when she told PBS,”When you’ve been in Special Forces for 13, 14 years, you’re trained to do one thing. And there’s not a whole lot of jobs out there for people trained to kill.” Being a private contractor seemed to be a solution to the deteriorating US economy for many of the 10,000 who were in Iraq in 2005.