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....The last several days in Iraq have seen a spiraling of violence and horror that has taken many Americans by surprise, mostly because those Americans have been relying on the Bush administration for the straight dope. The images of butchered Americans were bad enough, but the sudden explosion of violence from the Shi'ite community in Iraq has unnerved the America people in a way we have not seen since the Tet Offensive. Fighting raged in Baghdad, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Amarah as supporters of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr simultaneously threw themselves at American forces. Many American soldiers have been killed, and scores of Iraqis have also died.
How is this possible? Didn't Don Rumsfeld and the Bush administration people say the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms as liberators? How did our involvement in Iraq come to look suspiciously like the eternal spiral of bloodletting that takes place between Israel and the Palestinians? Again, the surprise comes because the American people have been relying on the Bush administration for the truth, an act of faith that has been proven time and again to be a very bad idea.
The population of Iraq is divided into three groups: The Shi'ites (60% of the population), the Sunnis (23% of the population), and the Kurds (17% of the population). Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and his Ba'ath Party was dominated by Sunnis. During his rule, this minority group dominated the country and oppressed the Shi'ites. The Kurds in the north waged their own separate battle for an independent nation, clashing with Turkey as often as they did with Hussein.
When Bush came in promising democracy to Iraq, the Shi'ites rejoiced because they are the majority, and the basic one-person-one-vote principle of democracy pretty much guaranteed that they would get to run the country. Unfortunately for them, the Bush people never actually intended for democracy to take root in Iraq, because they knew the Shi'ites would use democracy to elect a fundamentalist regime with ideological ties to Iran and then throw democracy out the back door. For a time, the Shi'ites were willing to cooperate with the American occupiers because they thought democracy was coming. Shi'ite Ayatollah Sistani counseled patience to his people, but that patience has ended. The Shi'ite people are now listening to Muqtada al-Sadr and killing as many Americans as they can find.
The words 'total failure' do not capture the enormity of this American action in Iraq during the last year. Why do we stay? Why would we stay?
This, in the end, is the ultimate failure of George W. Bush and his people. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the invasion, but they are there now. There was no open warfare between the religious factions in Iraq before the invasion, but now blood runs in the streets.....
Source: http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc4247.html
......Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador and career diplomat who received lavish praise from the first President Bush for his work in Iraq before the first Gulf War. Wilson was the man dispatched in February 2002 to Niger to see if charges that Iraq was seeking uranium from that nation to make nuclear bombs had any merit. He investigated, returned, and informed the CIA, the State Department, the office of the National Security Advisor and the office of Vice President Cheney that the charges were without merit. Eleven months later, George W. Bush used the Niger uranium claim in his State of the Union address to scare the cheese out of everyone, despite the fact that the claim had been irrefutably debunked. Wilson went public, exposing this central bit of evidence to support the Iraq invasion as the lie it was. A few days later, Wilson's wife came under attack from the White House, whose agents used press proxies to destroy her career in the CIA as a warning to Wilson and anyone else who might come forward. For the record, Wilson's wife was a deep-cover agent running a network which worked to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. The irony is palpable.....
....."There are a hundred or more people wandering around Washington today," wrote Thompson, "who have heard the 'real stuff,' as they put it - and despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who felt shocked, depressed or angry after reading the edited White House transcripts should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy sedation or locked in the trunk of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence"....
Source: http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_...m/doc4205.html
How is this possible? Didn't Don Rumsfeld and the Bush administration people say the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms as liberators? How did our involvement in Iraq come to look suspiciously like the eternal spiral of bloodletting that takes place between Israel and the Palestinians? Again, the surprise comes because the American people have been relying on the Bush administration for the truth, an act of faith that has been proven time and again to be a very bad idea.
The population of Iraq is divided into three groups: The Shi'ites (60% of the population), the Sunnis (23% of the population), and the Kurds (17% of the population). Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and his Ba'ath Party was dominated by Sunnis. During his rule, this minority group dominated the country and oppressed the Shi'ites. The Kurds in the north waged their own separate battle for an independent nation, clashing with Turkey as often as they did with Hussein.
When Bush came in promising democracy to Iraq, the Shi'ites rejoiced because they are the majority, and the basic one-person-one-vote principle of democracy pretty much guaranteed that they would get to run the country. Unfortunately for them, the Bush people never actually intended for democracy to take root in Iraq, because they knew the Shi'ites would use democracy to elect a fundamentalist regime with ideological ties to Iran and then throw democracy out the back door. For a time, the Shi'ites were willing to cooperate with the American occupiers because they thought democracy was coming. Shi'ite Ayatollah Sistani counseled patience to his people, but that patience has ended. The Shi'ite people are now listening to Muqtada al-Sadr and killing as many Americans as they can find.
The words 'total failure' do not capture the enormity of this American action in Iraq during the last year. Why do we stay? Why would we stay?
This, in the end, is the ultimate failure of George W. Bush and his people. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the invasion, but they are there now. There was no open warfare between the religious factions in Iraq before the invasion, but now blood runs in the streets.....
Source: http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc4247.html
......Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador and career diplomat who received lavish praise from the first President Bush for his work in Iraq before the first Gulf War. Wilson was the man dispatched in February 2002 to Niger to see if charges that Iraq was seeking uranium from that nation to make nuclear bombs had any merit. He investigated, returned, and informed the CIA, the State Department, the office of the National Security Advisor and the office of Vice President Cheney that the charges were without merit. Eleven months later, George W. Bush used the Niger uranium claim in his State of the Union address to scare the cheese out of everyone, despite the fact that the claim had been irrefutably debunked. Wilson went public, exposing this central bit of evidence to support the Iraq invasion as the lie it was. A few days later, Wilson's wife came under attack from the White House, whose agents used press proxies to destroy her career in the CIA as a warning to Wilson and anyone else who might come forward. For the record, Wilson's wife was a deep-cover agent running a network which worked to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. The irony is palpable.....
....."There are a hundred or more people wandering around Washington today," wrote Thompson, "who have heard the 'real stuff,' as they put it - and despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who felt shocked, depressed or angry after reading the edited White House transcripts should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy sedation or locked in the trunk of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence"....
Source: http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_...m/doc4205.html
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