The Iraq Occupation and the Coming War Against Iran: Political Wickedness and Moral Bankruptcy
Tuesday, 09 October 2007
by Rodrigue Tremblay
"Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang."
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
(Iran will react to a bombing attack by the Bush-Cheney administration) “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Jimmy Carter
"Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, (Ariel) Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel's security problems."
- Robert (Bob) Novak, veteran American reporter
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
- Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chairman 1987-2006
"There are people in Washington … who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they’re looking for ten, 20, 50 years into the future … the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that ten years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq."
- Jimmy Carter, former American President (February 3, 2006)
How do you get out of a hole?
First of all, you stop digging. — This is the simple lesson that the Bush-Cheney White House has so much trouble understanding. For Bush and his neocon crowd, they are militarily occupying Iraq and they intend to remain there, no matter what. It doesn't matter that this immoral and illegal occupation has caused the death of more than one million Iraqis and killed more than 3000 American soldiers. And now, they want to escalate the Iraq war into a wider Middle East conflict involving Iran, thus making sure the United States will be involved militarily in that region of the globe for the next twenty years.
In 2002, immoral neocon officials in the Defense Department considered Iraq to be a "low-hanging fruit", ripe for picking for its huge oil reserves, for the opportunity to displace French and Chinese oil companies, for increasing Israel's security, for moving American military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq and for pleasing politically the end-times religious right in the U.S. — thus killing five birds with one stone. According to former CIA Director George Tenet — and this has been confirmed by former Secretary Paul O'Neill and many other insiders — the very idea of taking control militarily of Iraq was improvised and was unjustified because "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."
Nevertheless, the Bush-Cheney-Libby-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle team, and their allies at the American Enterprise Institute and at the neocon Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), thought it was a win-win situation. They had decided they wanted a war under the clouds of 9/11, and nothing — truth, morality, reason or facts — could deter them from it. They were ready to lie a thousand times to achieve their goal. And they got it. But now the apprentice sorcerers do not know how to stop the infernal machine of destruction they have set in motion. They only know how to push forward and make a larger mess of it.
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http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2581/81/