23 December 2005 (# 18)
As I write this letter, more than two thousand families of American soldiers are suffering the loss of a son, a mother, a brother, an uncle, a daughter …
As I write this letter, more than 16,000 American soldiers are living the memory of being wounded -- of once being able to walk, to write, to speak, to hear, ... all now lost because they served valiantly, but their Commander-in-Chief not only lied to them but engaged them in an illegal imperialist war on Iraq.
More than $ 500 billion dollars have been spent by Bush and his fellow neoconsters on their conversion of Iraq into a spectacular gift for the Islamic extremists who control Iran and the militant Islamic extremists who now have been provided a platform and a mission – revenge American imperialism.
Mr. Bush has gifted to one of his axis-of-evil states more than they ever could have achieved on their own. In fact, with the Soviet Union as a partner, the Iranian fundamentalists were not able to defeat Iraq.
Oh the irony – Iranian mullahs should have just waited for the delusional crowd of wonky, world-domination militarists to gather at Kovner and Cheney’s
American Enterprise Institute and craft a strategy for converting Iraq into a Shiite hegemony. Heck, they didn’t even have to pay for it. Bush and the neoconsters were more than ready to spill US soldiers’ blood and expend billions of US tax dollars to deliver Iraq to them, even more ironically, at Christmas/Hanukkah time, 2005.
RJ Eskow provides a succinct summary of
AEI/PNAC fantasy and its consequences:
The mission of "exporting democracy" to Iraq had four key goals:- To create a US-friendly nation in the region
- To build a working model of democracy as the neocons conceived it for the Middle East
- To provide Israel with an ally in the Arab world (which Chalabi had promised to deliver)
- To isolate Iran from the Arab world
What have we gotten instead, for the massive loss of American and Iraqi life and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent so far?- A country where 82% of the population "strongly opposes" our presence and 45% support armed attacks against US troops
- A highly conservative, religiously-based electorate that's a far cry from the neocon vision of liberal democracy
- A country that appears to be drawing closer and closer to Israel's enemies
- A new ally and sister country to Iran, with similar religious and political beliefs
Link:
http://tinyurl.com/anv9k Juan Cole, on October 27, 2005, predicted outcomes that are remarkably accurate based on the current results
(http://tinyurl.com/8s76c). Today, he has the following relevant observation:
Note that I was often contradicted by observers on the ground in Iraq, who kept saying they perceived a groundswell for the secular party of Allawi, even in the Shiite-dominated provinces. This allegation never made any sense to me.
Michael Rubin of the AEI was predicting 5 percent for Chalabi (the neocon favorite) and 20 percent for Allawi,
a prediction that demonstrates that after 2 1/2 years the neocons still just can't understand anything about contemporary Iraq.
Link: http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/shiite-religious-parties-dominate-10.htmlAnd, what about those sweethearts of the neoconsters, Allawi and Chalabi? Robert Scheer provides a typically cogent assessment in
"Iran's victory revealed in Iraq election":Allawi and Chalabi are the Iraqi exiles and U.S. intelligence "assets" who played such a huge role in getting the United States into this war. Chalabi, in particular, will go down in history
as one of the great con artists of all time, managing to feed phony intelligence to the White House, the New York Times and countless other power players who found his lies convenient for one reason or another. Now, despite -- or, more likely, because of -- their long stints on the U.S. payroll, both of these wannabe George Washingtons have been overwhelmingly rejected by their countrymen. Chalabi, long the darling of the Pentagon, seems headed to obtaining less than 1 percent of the vote nationwide and will fail to win his own seat. Allawi's slate, favored more by the CIA, will end up in the low teens. As much as one should despise the role played by those two men in getting us into this mess, their abject failure is not a good thing for they carried the banner of a more modern and secular Iraq, which is essential to peace and human rights progress. But the Iraqi people will have to come to that truth on their own and not as a result of foreign intervention that only fuels the most irrational political and religious forces.
Unfortunately, it is hardly an advertisement for our democratic way of life that the American people were so easily deceived as to the reasons for this war. Or that our president resists the condemnation of torture, renders captured prisoners to be interrogated in the savage prisons of Uzbekistan and Syria, and claims an unrestrained right to spy on U.S. citizens.
Link: http://tinyurl.com/8sobm Gov. Dean, it’s awesome, isn’t it.
Bush, Cheney and their
AEI/PNAC buddies have achieved not just for Iran, but, more importantly, for fundamentalist Islam more than any Western leader in all of history.
They have sacrificed our brave troops, expanded vastly our national debt, instituted policies of torture that violate everything America used to represent, jeopardized our national security and our access to crucial resources, compromised our intelligence infrastructure, and throughout all of it lied constantly to our fellow citizens and our allies
– all to enable anti-secular, anti-USA, anti-Israel, fundamentalist Islamic Iran to flourish, and expand its influence into the fertile land of the
Euphrates-Tigris water basin, and one of the major sources of oil on the planet.
The message to our fellow citizens needs to be crystal clear – Bush, Cheney and their
AEI/PNAC syndicate are traitors. It would be hard to imagine how any "foreign enemy" could have done more damage to America in the past five years than these greedy, bumbling criminals who have operated under an "Oath of Office" to protect us -- talk about an inside job.
They must be impeached and prosecuted.
"We the People …" must do our duty and hold them accountable to the law – or, we are "them."
Thank you for your continued leadership,
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