Oct 14 2010

“A series of lies” led to Iraq war – former Joint Chiefs of Staff

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I know the current administration prefers to “look forward”, but the memoir of former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton III has been published and he has a few words to say about how the U.S. went to war with Iraq. To coin a phrase: Bush lied. According to Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy, this is what Shelton wrote:

Shelton also writes that there was no reason to go war against Iraq. “The fact is that we had Iraq contained and they were not a threat.” (419) Also, “There was absolutely no link between him [Saddam] and 9/11.” (474)  …

His bottom line: “President Bush and his team got us enmeshed in Iraq based on extraordinarily poor intelligence and a series of lies purporting that we had to protect American from Saddam’s evil empire because it posed such a threat to our national security.” (474-475)

Just in case you weren’t paying attention, he elaborates on that charge later in the book. “Spinning the possible possession of WMDs as a threat to the United States in the way they did is, in my opinion, tantamount to intentionally deceiving the American people.” (488)

I just thought I’d share this, in case someone in our “forward looking” Department of Justice is still was ever examining the evidence. Oh and Gen. Shelton, it would have been really nice if you would have written this in 2003 or 2004. Ya know, spoken out before the bastards were in the clear.

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  1. And I hope Nancy Pelosi will remember her arguments against impeaching Bush when the Republicans impeach Obama next year.

    • Xanthe on October 15, 2010 at 01:30
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    now it is a matter of saying it often and loud by insiders.  The war lovers are consistently revising the

    Iraq War.  The battle now is for future generations.

    But yeah, real courage years later.  he doesn’t linger much, does he – a few pages.  Looking forward….  

  3. nothin I didn’t already know though 🙂

    • Edger on October 15, 2010 at 02:41
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    was former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton III in early 2003? On his knees under George’s desk?

    • Edger on October 15, 2010 at 03:43
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    a series of war crimes.

    • RUKind on October 15, 2010 at 03:56
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    I was born exactly one month before Dewey defeated Truman. Now I don’t know the genesis of the Korean “Police Action” (it never was a Real War). Most Americans don’t know that. Most Americans don’t know that it’s still ongoing. There’s never been a peace treaty.

    Mu guess is that the Korean situation? provided the DoD to set up forward power bases in Korea and Okinawa to keep the PRC on its toes. Plus we had those huge air and naval bases in the Philippines until they kicked us out. If you have a globe or a global map you can see how China was well encircled. So there’s Cold War East.

    Then there’s Cold War West- Iron Curtain and all that shit with massive Russian rusting dysfunctional military hardware and conscripts. That fell apart when Russia got a sane leader to  match our pre-Alzheimer leader. The Wall came tumbling down. the Soviet prosperity illusion was shattered by Reagan bankrupting two huge nations with his Star Wars BS. Those two nations were Russia and US – as in us.

    Somewhere in the middle was Viet Nam, Cambodia, The Domino Theory and a multitude of proxy wars around the planet. Just flat out dead wrong lies all the way. Reagan’s Grenada after the Marine Baracks bombing and instant retreat in Lebanon. Hey, got to show we can still kick some ass here and there.

    Throw in Gulf War I and that little incursion in Panama. All of this followed by continues US-British air control of northern and southern Iraq and some small wars in the former Yugoslavia.

    Now we have the lies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan if truth be told. Out of this we get massive, permanent forward power bases right in Iraq. Tese complement our Suadi bases which we conveniently don’t mention out loud. Now we have Iran surrounded plus Iraq’s oil.

    So, to get to the point, I’m 62 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full year of what could be called peace in my lifetime. And I don’t think this shit is ever going to stop.

    Lies take lives. Lies take freedoms. Bit by bit. Ballots are bullshit. Foreign money buys them now. In retrospect, Harry the Haberdasher may have been the last great president we ever had.

    It makes me wonder if America ever really existed or if it was just a consensual hallucination populated by our own fantasies of how things should be.

    Shanti.

    • on October 15, 2010 at 06:55
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    Yes indeed shocking (sarcasm).

    If one chose to seek the truth back then — it wasn’t difficult. I was quite young and fully capable of obtaining what was really going on. Bush and Cheney should absolutely be in jail. And I do believe that Colin Powell will be forever haunted about his part in this tragedy. Yes that is what it was. So many lives. Not just ours but all those innocent civilians. If God is just …. he will judge us all. We allowed this. We are responsible for the deaths of human beings whose only crime was being Muslim. It sickens me. Aren’t we supposed to be better? Do better? If so, we have failed miserably.  

  8. It was relatively easy to fool the American sheep, just relate whatever policies and actions our elite wanted to take to “terrorism”. It worked rather well.

    How much support for going to war would they have gotten from people if we had told them the truth, that we wanted invade Iraq to overthrow Saddam so that the Anglo-American oil companies could once again have access to Iraq’s abundant energy resources, the world’s second, or possibly third, largest reserves?

    Lies so blatant any fool should have been able to see through them. But it’s fool me once, fool me every time and so the facts were fixed around the previously made policy, and it would be so easy to slough it off and blame it on “bad intel” once the truth came out.

    The man once regarded as the world’s most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was ‘largely’ about oil.

    Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.

    In his long-awaited memoir – out tomorrow in the US – Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’

    The Guardian 16 Sep 2007

    We didn’t get everything we wanted, no production sharing agreements – remember the oil revenue sharing “benchmark” that the Bush Administration and Congress so badly wanted – at least not yet, but on the other hand we are no longer locked out as we were when Saddam was in power and we have military bases in Iraq from which to further project power in the Persian Gulf Region. We have also opened a potentially large new market for military hardware from the well-connected MIC.

    It should be noted that two previous little publicized regime changes in Iraq, in 1963 and again in 1968, were for the very same reason, access to Iraq’s oil.

    And of course few are ignorant of the Iranian regime change in 1953. Once again, the reasons were the same.

    Illegal wars, war crimes, but it does not matter for our political masters are immune from from the consequences of their policies. Meanwhile in Louisiana a homeless man was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing $100.

  9. This from Sybil Edmonds at Boiling Frogs

    The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help.

    Meanwhile Scowcroft, who was also the chairman of the American Turkish Council, Baker, Richard Armitage, and Grossman began negotiating separately for a possible Turkish protectorate. Nothing was decided, and then 9/11 took place.

    Scowcroft was all for invading Iraq in 2001 and even wrote a paper for the Pentagon explaining why the Turkish northern front would be essential. I know Scowcroft came off as a hero to some for saying he was against the war, but he was very much for it until his client’s conditions were not met by the Bush administration.

    But we can’t look back, we must look forward. Illegal wars? No problem.

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