Bin Laden's Dead! But, Saddam got away.

OK, that's a low blow. But, nowadays, it almost seems like instead of killing Saddam, we imported him.

Does anyone here remember the biggest reason that whipped Americans into a frenzy of outrage and got their juices flowing for sending troops into Kuwait in 1990 for the first Gulf War? I do. It was the Incubator Babies! Cold bloodied Iraqi soldiers were stalking through nurseries, grabbing newborn premature babies by their ankles and tossing them out of their incubators to die gasping on cold hospital tiles. Or at least, that was the story a sobbing Kuwaiti nurse told a Congressional committee.

Only, she wasn't a nurse. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador.

Today, we have Republicans in Congress proposing budget cuts to the CDC and the NIH that will shave over a billion dollars in research grants and programs to assist children with disabilities secondary to premature births and to perform research for life-saving biomedical research aimed at finding causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm births themselves. Is it just me, or does that kind of sound a little like throwing premies out of incubators?

"Saddam lived in luxury on the money he'd stolen from his people," Bush said to justify his invasion of Iraq after no WMD were found. Today, predatory lending banks toss people out of their homes; millionaire congressmen pass tax breaks for themselves at the expense of the middle class and the poor; they give corporations tax loopholes you could toss a small moon through.

"Saddam gassed his own people," Condaleeza Rice said. Well, we didn't get gassed, but several of our people got poisoned and our Republican congress had to be shamed by a comedian to pass legislation to get our heroic 9/11 firefighters and policemen health benefits for the contaminants that are killing them from their service on Ground Zero. That's on top of the way they're trying--and succeeding--in protecting a major polluter in getting off scot free after poisoning one of our greatest bodies of water. And set the stage for another possible disaster to happen in the future.

This isn't even Bizarro World anymore. At least, with Bizarro World you knew what to expect--the opposite of what's on earth. What one party in our country has done to it is a silent, stealth destruction from within. I dare not call it terrorism. The American people aren't terrorized. They're apathetic and shell-shocked at best and furious at the wrong targets at worse. Not that I'm giving the Dems a pass. They've been enablers and beneficiaries of corporate largess as well. But, a few have cared; and tried to stop the tide.

God, I need a drink.

How You and I Got Snookered, Jeanne Kirkpatrick


Memo To: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former U.N. Ambassador
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Why We Supported the Gulf War

Holy smokes, Jeanne, I saw you on LateEdition with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, talking about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was for invading Kuwait in 1990. But then you said he was about to invade Saudi Arabia too. I’m amazed that after all these years you still think Saddam was going to gobble up Saudi Arabia after he digested Kuwait. Do you remember how skeptical both of us were about why we should get excited about why Iraq went into Kuwait, when nobody in the neighborhood seemed to be bothered? You had written an op-ed, I recall, which is probably why you got invited to the Saudi Embassy for a briefing by Saudi’s Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, who is still there. I’d also written about why the United States should war with Baghdad when everyone knew the Kuwaiti Emir was stealing oil from Iraq and had driven the price of oil down to $11 a barrel by cheating the other oil producing countries on its promises to limit production. That’s how I got invited. I think we even shared a taxi from Empower America and went over together. I know for sure we sat next to each other in that little briefing room, where Prince Bandar told us why King Fahd had suddenly decided that Saddam was a threat to Saudi Arabia and to the peace of the region.

It was late August or early September, if I am not mistaken, because it did take a while for the Saudis and Egyptians to get their danders up after Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2. The “evidence” that Saddam was about to hurl his military machine against the Saudis were photographs which Prince Bandar said he was shown in a Pentagon briefing, photos taken by “Naval Intelligence” which showed Iraqi tanks lined up at the Kuwait/Saudi border, ready to pounce! Wow, I remember thinking, this guy Saddam Hussein, who we backed in the war against Iran, turns out to be a Hitler after all. So did you. And we got behind President Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his deputy secretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, and cheered our troops on. A few days later, on September 11, President Bush told a joint session of Congress that "following negotiations and promises by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not to use force, a powerful army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait. Within three days, 120,000 troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then I decided to act to check that aggression."

It was only later I discovered I had been snookered, Jeanne, and so had you. I was sure you had learned those photographs we saw showed tanks that were nowhere near the Saudi border – and Saddam never had the slightest intention of going anywhere near it. This has been confirmed in several different ways in the years since, but the first inkling that the photos were not what they were purported to be showed up in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) of January 6, 1991. Jean Heller, a Times reporter, wrote "Public Doesn't Get Picture with Gulf Satellite Photos." She was interviewed last month, September 6, by Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor after President Bush included the canard in his bill of indictment against Saddam in his United Nations speech. (We may hear it again tonight when he addresses the nation at 8 pm EDT). Ms. Heller told the Monitor “It was a pretty serious fib.” In 1991 she had written:


Much more here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg97016.html


2 Bush / Cheney wars against Iraq - both built on lies. They killed 100's of thousands, maybe millions...Yet these people are allowed to go free in our society.