Why Are We in Iraq? Listen to the Moustache...

[BurtWorm]

http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/09/11/listen-to-the-mustache/

Listen to the mustache
Posted by The Editors under Uncategorized


Atrios is confused:

I still have no idea why we invaded Iraq. I really don’t.

A lot of people are confused about this, because so many explanations have been put forward - from Saddam’s WMDs and al-Qaeda links, to spreading democracy, to creating terrorist “flypaper”, to following the orders of the secret Israeli shadow government, to controlling of the region’s oil, to being duped by Iran, to being a first step towards conquoring Egypt. But none of these explanations quite make sense. And it is confusing. And when I get confused, I listen to the mustache:

Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.

The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn’t enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things “martyrs” was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such “martyrs” was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.

The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don’t believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

Or, as Ann Coulter explained to the Conservative Political Action Conference, to boisterous applause:

I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’

Or, rephrased again:

“You have to understand the Arab mind,” one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book “Cobra II,” Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: “The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.”

And that’s really all there is to it, kids. Setting up a client state, building military bases, controlling energy resources, spreading democracy, kick-backs to Halliburton, etc. - these are all nice-to-haves, and, once the decision was made to go in, they were in play; but, if you want to know why the decision was made, these are distractions. Now whether there were four reasons put forth, as Friedman claims, or 27, as one research project suggests, is entirely beside the point. The war fulfilled a psychological need in the country - one which only the terminally sensible and the terminally insane were able or willing to acknowledge, but a need nevertheless - and politicians are all about stroking the national id. Other reasons served their purposes - plausible deniability, conning the rubes, etc. - but even the most abject failure of one of these reasons never undermined the faith of the true believers. If you blow a tire, you replace it and race on. The race is the thing.

[liberal N proud]

1. And what has going into the Arab world done for us?

Create more terrorist contrary to any thing you will hear from the bu$h regime.

[leftchick]

2. Has the NYTs ever had a worse column than his?

now I know why I have never read his dreck. Look at this shit....

<snip>

The "right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime. Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were never Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states — young people who hate America more than they love life. Helping to build a decent Iraq as a model for others — and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are the necessary steps for defusing the ideas of mass destruction, which are what really threaten us.

The "moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped.

But because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it opted for the stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to America. I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the nation to war "on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush should fight this war for the right reasons and the moral reasons. But he stuck with this W.M.D. argument for P.R. reasons.

Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that way. But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war. And if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter.


....I hope he is planning on sending his daughters to "His War". What a fuckhead.

[malaise]

6. The fugging illegal war was

a violation of international law. QED.

[lyonn]

10. The Mass Graves that keep being repeated as the "reason"

for some is ridiculous with the info that came out about the reason for Saddam killing thousands of Shiites and that was after Bush I's invasion. He (bush) told the Shiites that he would back them if they wanted to rebel against Saddam in his weakened condition after he had been attacked by U.N. forces. Then, Bush I backed down when they rebelled against Saddam and were massacred.

Saddam was shown on tv in Court this a.m. and it occured to me that he is probably chuckling due to the fact that the powerful U.S. is in a quagmire in his old country. We used him and then abused him. Of course Saddam was wicked, we knew he gassed the Kurds, saw it on tv at the time. Somehow our media dismissed this fact as not important. Assumption is that Saddam was fighting Iran and we needed to back him. That is the reality as it was shown way back when----

[EST]

3. I think you are being far too generous and granting these

bastards too much credit for forethought and planning. My own analysis has it that everything that has been done, including even the re-establishment of an Israeli state, is all predicated on the notion of the US owning the middle east.
This ownership of the middle east, dog in the manger style, is the only real way to dictate to the entire rest of the world. The reason for the urgency of an Iraq invasion, other than the long standing goal, came from the acknowledged probability that Saddam Hussein had every intention of restructuring his oil marketing on the euro, cutting off the US forever from grabbing and holding on to that essential world control mechanism.

The primary reason, world wide, but especially here in the US, for not following through on alternative energy and other non-petroleum plans thirty years ago was the ability to boss the rest of the world around.

Maybe my thinking is too foggy or logic too cynical, but it looks that way to me. Thanks for the chance to argue with you.

[BurtWorm]

5. Iraq was a done deal long before 9/11, but 9/11 gave them the opportunity

to exploit desire for revenge on "Arabs." The Bushists exploited their perception that for most Americans after 9/11, any Arabs would do, even ones who had nothing to do with 9/11. Control of oil probably is the root cause of all US policy in the Middle East. But that isn't why we're in the quagmire we're in now. That's not how the war was sold and is continuing to be sold.

[Mist]

7. Yes, it was about Saddam wanting a bigger piece of the OPEC pie--that

was the one thing that couldn't be tolerated. The US never had a problems with his dictatorship before that. Ironically, if building a more progressive gov't in the Middle East was actually an aim, it would have been easier to do in Saddam's Iraq, as he had a secular gov't.

Only the 'Stache would think it makes sense to chase after a bubble. And what makes Iraq the "heart of the Arab world"? Fridman's cartoon vision of the world is grotesque.

[Parisle]

4. Not All Oil Is Equal

---- For as often as the debate comes up about the war being "about oil," there is a hugely significant detail in this argument which is seldom mentioned. The oil in Iraq lies very shallow in the ground. Its "cost to extract" is only about a third of the extraction costs of oil in,... say, Saudi Arabia. If Arabs are pumping that oil and observing OPEC pricing schedules, then in the minds of US oil firms, its extraordinary profit potential is being "wasted."

[FloridaPat]

8. Greg Palast: we invaded Iraq to keep Iraq's oil off the market.

That the US has tried for 50 years to keep as much Iraqi oil off the market as possible because it would lower profits for everyone. Sadam had started to make the moves to get the sanctions off and to export his oil and get financing in to make the oil wells modern. Oil was around $25 when Clinton left office. We have screwed up that country so badly it will be decades before they can become an oil exporter again.

[Kolesar]

9. Geraldo said all that? ... eom

[lyonn]

11. You Jest! Geraldo has never competed a thought has he?

Just kiddin'