Friday, August 6

Why

One of my friendly readers posted a question on yesterday's post; I think it's important enough that I'm reproducing my answer here.

He asked why the Bushies have been lying to us about Iraq, and what they're really after.

My response:

There are a number of possible explanations; the most generous is that they sincerely believed we would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people, and we would be able to safely and easily create a stable democracy in the Muslim Middle East.

I hope that's the truth, because it means they're just stupid, as opposed to actively rotten.

There are other likely explanations; one is a personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein by Mr. Bush, seeing as how Hussein did try to have his father, George H. W. Bush, assassinated.

It's also possible that Michael Moore was right. What d'you think the odds might be that the real reason Dick Cheney has been fighting the release of records of the energy task force meetings is that they contain (hypothetical, one hopes) discussions on how to divvy up the oil fields in Iraq?

For an overview of what the American Left Wing seems to suspect, check this out:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/these_are_their_ends.php


I do not fully endorse the arguments in this essay -- but I do think they raise the important questions, and I do think the Bush Administration owes the American people, and the world, some straight talk. We just don't seem to be getting it.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

don't forget that these people have already proven they aren't as concerned with terrorism as they claim to be.

if they were, they wouldn't have outed Valerie Plame, a longtime CIA covert in the field of nuclear weapons, just to retaliate against her husband, Joe Wilson, for not playing along with the administration's stance on the yellowcake from Niger.

they also wouldn't have confirmed that a Pakistani in custody had been a covert who'd infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell, thus causing British officials to rush to make those arrests faster than they'd wanted to, else risk those guys putting 2 and 2 together and getting into the wind.

and the confirmation came about because of raising the terror alert to distract from the DNC convention buzz (hey Howard Dean wasn't the only one who thought that was a political move rather than a security one), so they confirmed that guy's name as some sort of attempt to prove that they weren't playing politics.

now, how many countries are going to trust these guys with any sensitive information anymore? how does that help with the fight against terrorists?

oh, and for some links that'll lead you to some independent sources for why they wanted to invade Iraq and take control of the oil fields, here are a few lots of angry bloggers already knew about:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=reasons
(read the entries for 1997, 2000, and April 2001, and the links that are there)

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2004/1.html
this link contains a tidbit i hadn't known before, that Bush I talked about national security threats the day before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

what i had already known was that Saddam had practically asked the US ambassador to Iraq for permission to invade Kuwait in 1990, and was was given that permission. invasion happened a week later. see this link:
http://www.thetip.org/art_April_Glaspie___US_Ambassador_to_Iraq______292_icle.html

DesertJo