http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/22/1307897/-Stop-pretending-the-invasion-of-Iraq-was-a-mistake-It-lets-the-liars-who-launched-it-off-the-hook?detail=email#
Three months before Barack Obama was born, President John F. Kennedy sent 400 Green Berets and 100 other advisers to Vietnam. By mid-1963, there were 15,000 military advisers there, and 187 of them had been killed.
Whether one agrees or disagrees, as I do, with President Obama's decision to send 300 Special Forces advisers and another 275 military personnel to Iraq—effectively doubling the number of U.S. troops in the country—his decision, despite being couched in talk about how "mission creep" will not become a factor, should be troubling to anyone even vaguely familiar with the damage caused at home and abroad by American intervention in the region. This is the first increase in U.S. military personnel in Iraq in the two-and-a-half years since welcome removal by Obama of the last combat troops from that country. It ought to give shivers to Americans with the slightest appreciation of our interventionist history.
Calling the invasion and slaughter that followed a mistake papers over the lies that took us to Iraq. This assessment of the war as mistake is coming mostly from well-intentioned people, some of whom spoke out against the war before it began and every year it dragged on. It may seem like a proper retort to critics of Obama (who inherited that war rather than started it). But it feeds a dangerous myth.
A mistake is not putting enough garlic in the minestrone, taking the wrong exit, typing the wrong key, falling prey to an accident.
Invading Iraq was not a friggin' mistake. Not an accident. Not some foreign policy mishap.
The guys in charge carried out a coldly though ineptly calculated act. An act made with the intention of privatizing Iraq and using that country as a springboard to other Middle Eastern targets, most especially Iran.
They led a murderous, perfidious end run around international law founded on a dubious "preventive" military doctrine piggybacked on the nation's rage over the 9/11 attacks. An imperial, morally corrupt war. They ramrodded it past the objections of those in and out of Congress who challenged the fabricated claims of administration advisers who had been looking for an excuse to take out Saddam Hussein years before the U.S. Supreme Court plunked George W. Bush into the Oval Office.
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. ...
In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.
Those 935 lies, by the way, did not include "indirect false statements" such as that Iraq had possession of "dangerous weapons."
No. The invasion of Iraq was not a mistake.
I put so much of this article up because IMO it is excellently written and cuts to the fact that the title is on the one, it was not an accident it was a plan by the right wing community. there is much more content and you might want to fix a picnic lunch and bring a flashlight to get through it all but I think you'll be much more richly informed for the effort. ain't understanding mello? title of a Jerry Butler song but steeped in truth.
