On Sunday, November 26, 2006 the United States will have been at war in Iraq for the same length of time that we were involved in World War II. As an observer of human events for the last 80 years and as a veteran of World War II, I believe that it is incumbent upon me to offer some straight talk. This will not be the tortured syntax of George Bush’s speeches nor will it be the lectures of the hapless Condoleezza Rice. It is much too late for that sort of thing. This will be as straight-talk as can be imagined.
The so-called war on terror is at heart, a fraud and a myth.
Simply put, the so-called war on terror, which is primarily the invasion of Iraq, is flawed because it was based on the lies of George Bush and his administration. Dozens of books are now available which recount the lies told by the President of the United States which led us to war. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has stated that in the first cabinet meeting, it was apparent that Bush intended to take this country into war against Iraq. Richard Clarke, the adviser to the National Security Adviser has testified in the same vein. There is an abundance of evidence flowing from our main allies, the British, to the effect that the intelligence was manipulated to support a war in Iraq. The Downing Street Memo and other British government documents are the most damning of the Bush lies that led us into this war.
Rather than go through each of the points which are so amply documented in dozens of books, I believe it is fair to say that on this subject, George Bush is a bully, a coward and a consummate liar.
And now we turn to the myth making. According to the Bush administration, Iraq was awash in weapons of mass destruction. There were references to the smoke billowing from an atom bomb to which we were led to believe that Saddam was on the verge of achieving. There was the brilliant moment when George Bush stepped out of his airplane on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln to announce that as far as the war in Iraq, it was a “Mission Accomplished.”
After the WMD excuse did not fly, we were told that the idea was to democratize the Middle East. Events over the Thanksgiving holiday, 2006 make it clear that we aren’t going to democratize anything in the Mideast. What we are trying to do is figure a way out of Iraq without being slaughtered. This is not the “victory” that George Bush imagined.
The fact is that any dream of establishing a new democracy on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has been replaced by an active civil war which is killing thousands of people every month.
The recent American elections on November 7th of this year have told the Bush administration that the American people at long last, no longer believe him. Bush now is irrelevant. The fact that he is making foreign trips simply causes him to seem more silly. He finally arrived earlier this month in Vietnam, some 40 years late. Bush copped out on that war.
His meeting with the Prime Minister of Iraq in Amman was, in large measure, a disaster because Bush is asking the Prime Minister of Iraq to disarm the militia groups of his own sect. Simply put, Maliki is unable to do that and even if he were able to do it, it is highly improbable that he would even set out to accomplish that end.
In the meantime, while we are engaged in what Bush has told us is the central front on the war on terror, there is strife in Nigeria. In Zimbabwe, we have the president, Robert Mugabe, terrorizing his opposition. In the Darfur region of the Sudan, the Arabs are killing and raping the black inhabitants. In Lebanon and Gaza, there are excesses by the Israeli Army that border on atrocities. Last week an Israeli artillery shell landed in a crowded settlement killing 18 Palestinian women and children. The prime minister of Israel issued a muffled I’m sorry kind of excuse but no investigation followed. The point that is obvious here is that there are plenty of terrifying incidents around the rest of the globe, but our attention is tied to Iraq where we are bogged down and looking to Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia for some thought that would lead us to escape with the skin on our backs.
The end product of George Bush’s war in Iraq is a new set of civil strifes. According to an American source, as many as 600,000 Iraqis have been killed. General Tommy Franks, who was decorated by Bush with the Medal of Freedom, has announced that, “We don’t do Iraqi body counts.” Soon we will have lost our three thousandths soldier in Iraq not to mention the losses of the British, the Polish, the Spaniards, and the Italian contingents. Bush has told us that we must make the sacrifices so that the war is kept over there and not over here. Does anyone believe that?
Throughout the history of the invasion of Iraq, Bush has taken his vacations in Texas and has ridden his bicycle. He has never attended a funeral of one of the soldiers killed in Iraq. Perhaps one of the largest myths that George Bush seems to believe is that, to the extent that we train Iraqi soldiers, we can then leave the battlefield. Friends, the fact of the matter is that no Iraqi soldier is going to defend American interests after we leave. Obviously, they are going to pursue their own interests. They would say to hell with the interests of Americans.
This has been an unhappy experience for this old essayist to record. But it is a matter of straight talk which you haven’t heard from George Bush or Cheney or the hapless Madame Rice. America is much less safe today than it was before Bush initiated his invasion of Iraq. Much less! For that we have to thank the Iraqi invasion because it was based on fraudulent evidence and the hopes of myth makers. The man in charge was George Bush who is nothing less than a bully, a coward and a consummate liar. It would be my hope, which is forlorn, that Mr. Bush could hear this summary from my own lips. In the meantime, this essay will have to do.
E. E. CARR
November 25, 2006
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This essay was bundled with another 2006 essay called WAR ON TERROR which I published almost three years ago. In the bundle, he gave this forward:
To the Essay Reader:
Here are two essays on the so-called War on Terror. They were both written in November, 2006. While there are a few redundancies in the two essays, they reflect the fact that the War on Terror is nothing more than a complete fraud and a total myth. I hope you have the inclination to read both of them.
EEC
I think many of the essays were shipped out to readers in bundles with little introductory letters, but for some reason I don’t have access to most of those introductory letters outside of 2006. Some of them are quite short like this one, and some could be essays in their own right.
I had no idea that Bush such an avid biker. Makes me wonder what security must have looked like for those outings. I imagine a two-wheeled version of the motorcade parading through the underbrush.