Winning the War in Iraq

There’s no ‘winning in Iraq’.

This illegal conflict cannot be considered in terms of hopeful ‘win-win’ euphemisms and silver-lining slogans.

There is no ‘up-side’ to the war in Iraq.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, McCain and any other politico gas-bags sounding off with such absurd rhetoric should take a look around.

The war in Iraq is a debacle. Any attempts to paint rosy pictures of the war and any promises of happy endings involving honorable victory are pathetic delusions or the callous manipulation of public fear by those at fault for this catastrophe.

The invasion of Iraq was a psychotic nightmare scenario whipped up by power-mad socio-paths who think in terms of the ‘Grand Strategy’, the ‘Great Chess Match’ and other fantastic delusions that are brought on by monumental egos and class-based megalomaniacal self-confidence that they are the sole arbiters of truth and the rightful Masters of Mankind.

There’s no ‘winning in Iraq’.

‘The Surge was successful!’ cry the Dogs of War who have unlawfully taken control of our government and thrust us by devilish deception into this lethal calamity.

‘The Surge was successful!’ they bay in dissonant unison. Successful for the bottom-lines of Exxon-Mobile, BP, Total, Shell, Halliburton, KBR, Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell and all of the Senators, members of Congress and those colluding with the Bush/Cheney cabal? – Yes! Resoundingly so.

We, the people, do not live our lives by the de-humanized rubrics of the corporate board-room. Yet, we have been thrust into this lethally untenable, calamitous conundrum by those who have vowed and taken oath after oath to protect our Republic, uphold the Constitution and act in accordance with the will of the people.

They have failed us and criminally dishonored their oaths of office.

Should the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have been slaughtered during this ‘Campaign for Democracy’ for the sake of ‘National Security’ consider the ‘Surge’ successful? Or the 4,000+ American troops?

The ‘Surge’ was a short-term rudimentary change in tactics and nothing more. ‘Send in the Reserves!’ Now the reserves are spent and there are no more to be called on for more senseless sacrifice either in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

Our ‘Troops’ are coming back from staring down Death and dealing out Death for so long - tour after tour, rotation after rotation in a ‘hot’ zone - that they are returning to the ‘Land of the Free’ and committing suicide at an unprecedented rate for combat veterans. These deaths, like the number of Americans injured or incapacitated are not generally known to the public. Neither is the number of Iraqi civilian dead, wounded, missing and displaced. That is official policy; the perpetrators of this nightmare want to keep us in the dark and under wraps lest we know the extent of their debacle and rise up in arms, bearing torches and demanding a righteous pound of flesh.

There’s no ‘winning in Iraq’.

There is no such thing as a successful exit strategy from Iraq or Afghanistan. There never was. There never will be. No matter how or when the US (or NATO or the ‘Coalition’) removes its troops and its mercenaries from these nations, people will lose their lives for a venal, dishonorable, ignoble enterprise engendered by despicable people to serve their insatiable greed for power, glory, fame and riches beyond the dreams of avarice.

There is no happy ending. Not for the Iraqi people. Not for the American people. Not in the short term. Not for another generation, at least.

There’s no ‘winning in Iraq’.

Rummy and the Pentacrats

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With a brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.

Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone; our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary is closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

“An average American family works an entire year to generate$6,000 in income taxes. Here we spill many times that amount every hour by duplication and by inattention.”

“Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”

“We must change for a simple reason – the world has – and we have not yet changed sufficiently. The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable, to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.”

Spoken by Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, in an address that announced an end to the S.O.P. of waste and fiscal mismanagement at the Pentagon, delivered on September 10, 2001; the day before the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

What would have been an excellent, long-called-for policy shift (from a most unexpected quarter), tossed out with the ‘Ba’ath’ water, so to say.

In the days immediately following, George W. Bush called for $20 Billion to fund the ‘War on Terror’. Since then, he has demanded and gotten a blank check for debacle after debacle, all sanctified by ‘them-or-us’, anti-terrorist bluster and approved by a spineless, bi-partisan, rubber-stamp Congress.

(The cowards in Congress just approved another $257,000,000,000 (two-hundred-fifty-seven billion dollar) emergency supplement to fund the wars through the end of Bush’s term. )

(Any wonder there is no money for universal health care, education or infrastructure projects such as reinforced levees on the Mississippi River? That astronomical figure – more than a quarter of a trillion dollars - is only to help pay for the next 7 months of these hateful wars which so rapaciously destroy lives. Someone should check the Congress for drugs or implants. )

From being on the verge of tightening federal purse-strings to the current open-vault-door policy of hysteria-driven defense spending - financing the building of new nuclear submarines to counter the non-existent Al-Qaeda navy and new super-sonic jet fighters to combat the air force that Al-Qaeda doesn’t have – was a most fortuitous swing of events for the Pentagon and its contractors. This catastrophic bit of malevolent serendipity is what author and journalist, Robert Scheer refers to as the ‘gift of 911’ to the military-industrial complex.

The military-industrial complex; since Eisenhower used that cumbersome phrase in his farewell speech, it has seen plenty of use. Though its initial axiomatic power still resonates, it’s a stock phrase, shop-worn. Moreover, from its inception it has been inadequate. Its failing, despite its power as an axiom of unalloyed truth, is that it hides the people who operate this complex and extremely profitable relationship between government bureaucracy and big business.

It is time to put a face on these people in the Pentagon, in the Congress and in the Defense Department. It is long past time to strip the mask of anonymity from leaders of the arms industry, their lobbyists and their agents. What is needed is a more pertinent, personalizing epithet which exposes the active players of the military-industrial complex.

Pentacrats (noun)

1. The autocrats and oligarchs of the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense and arms industry who in concert advocate robbing the taxpayer to fund boondoggles, pork-barrel spending and bloated defense budgets for personal profit and political gain.

2. Their agents and functionaries.

Pentacrats have usurped the power of the citizenry to influence policy and thus the course taken by the ship of state, in order to enrich themselves at the direct expense of the citizens of the United States; deeply effecting, most deleteriously, nearly every aspect of the daily lives of the American people. Furthermore, the effect of Pentacratic policies on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and every other country around the world where armament and weaponry contracted and manufactured by Pentacrats, furnished and financed by the Pentacrats in Washington are used to violently suppress democratic movements, insurgencies and up-risings, is even more dire. A maleficent mélange of death, terror and suffering is what those people get on a daily basis.

Pentacrats.

What the precepts of Pentacracy boil down to is the super-rich getting richer by many other, much poorer men, women and children dying bloody, horrible deaths. To paraphrase the old song, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get murdered.’

The American citizenry must demand that this complex be dismantled, boondoggle by boondoggle, pork barrel by pork barrel, until the Department of Defense and Congress answer once again to the voice of the true, absolute, constitutionally recognized and affirmed rulers of our republic: the people of the United States of America. This demand must be constant and unrelenting, not solely reliant on participation in general elections, but rather with consistent, perennial involvement from the grass-roots to the Belt-way and the National Mall.

Defeating the agenda of the Pentacrats - and in so doing, returning control of the nation to its rightful rulers - is the gift we can bequeath, not only to the children of America but to the children of the world.

It is the right thing to do.

http://www.opensecrets.org/

http://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/contracts-leaderboard.asp

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