The Iraq war began twenty years ago. Jon Schwarz says that those who lied us into that disastrous war that led to the destruction of Iraq and neighboring countries have not faced any consequences. His review includes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John Bolton, Condoleeza Rice, David Frum, David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg, Judith Miller, and Joe Biden.
THE U.S. AND its allies invaded Iraq 20 years ago in Operation Iraqi Freedom. President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer twice accidentally referred to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation, which was definitely not its official name and would have generated an unfortunate acronym.
The men and women who launched this catastrophic, criminal war have paid no price over the past two decades. On the contrary, they’ve been showered with promotions and cash. There are two ways to look at this.
One is that their job was to make the right decisions for America (politicians) and to tell the truth (journalists). This would mean that since then, the system has malfunctioned over and over again, accidentally promoting people who are blatantly incompetent failures.
Another way to look at it is that their job was to start a war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable for the U.S. defense establishment and oil industry, with no regard for what’s best for America or telling the truth. This would mean that they were extremely competent, and the system has not been making hundreds of terrible mistakes, but rather has done exactly the right thing by promoting them.
You can read this and then decide for yourself which perspective makes the most sense.
It was always clear (to me at least) that the second way of looking at it, that it was to start a widespread war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable, made more sense.
He goes on:
The following list doesn’t include anything about the Iraqis who’ve died since 2003. Partly, this is because it’s traditional for the U.S. media to pay no attention to the lives of foreigners. Partly, this is because we have no idea how many Iraqis deaths there have been. Various estimates range from 151,000 to over a million. While the U.S. ultimately spent at least $3 trillion on the war and the CIA put down $1 billion just to figure out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, we’ve allocated exactly zero dollars to learn how many Iraqis have died thanks to us. Come on, we’re not made of money!
Schwarz also does not discuss the ideology of the neoconservatives that held such great influence in that administration and who made no secret of their desire to overthrow the governments of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and eventually Saudi Arabia, under the grandiose label of The Project for the New American Century. He has also omitted any mention of people like Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami, and other leading neoconservatives. The events of 9/11 gave them the perfect excuse to launch their project.
I’ve long said that UK Prime Ministers are mostly condemned, regardless of what they might have achieved, to be remembered for one thing, usually to be summed up in three words or less. The following are my picks of the PMs of my political (i.e. 18 and over) lifetime:
Thatcher: poll tax.
Major: Bastards.
Brown: “bigoted woman”.
Cameron: Brexit.
May: “Brexit means Brexit”.
Johnson: “Get Brexit Done”.
Truss: Lettuce.
You’ll notice I’ve missed one out -- a PM responsible for, among other things, peace in Northern Ireland, the minimum wage, civil partnerships for gay couples, Surestart centres, Bank of England independence, successful UK internal devolution, and securing the Olympics for London. And what will his footnote in history be?
Blair: Iraq. Or if you insist on two words: “Dodgy dossier”.
Sorry Tony. Best PM of my life, but you’re a war criminal.
His review includes …
He left out “news” broadcaster Nicolle Wallace, among others.
sonofrojblake @1
You left out the significant spending on the NHS from your (admittedly) partial list of good things Blair or his Cabinet were responsible for, significant enough to bring waiting lists down and improve patient experience all over the UK. However your overall point is correct.
More likely would have generated and overly truthful acronym.
Even after this low point, the New York Times has managed to sink even lower throughout the DT era.
Another way to look at it is that their job was to start a war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable for the U.S. defense establishment and oil industry, with no regard for what’s best for America…
This take really makes no sense at all, and so-called leftists made themselves sound incredibly childish and stupid saying it from 9/12 to about 2008. “Extend the empire?” No one had any intent, or ability really, to conquer Iraq permanently. “Profitable for the oil industry?” Oil consumers outvote oil producers in the USA, so lower oil prices would have been the priority; and the best way to bring prices down would have been to leave Iraq alone and let them rebuild and resume their place as one of the top oil producers in the world. Yes, a disruptive war would have helped to keep oil prices high for US producers — but most US voters would have punished the warmongers for that, not rewarded them. That’s why Reagan persuaded the Saudis to LOWER their oil prices, thereby gutting the Texas oil business but making energy cheaper for everyone.
No, it wasn’t about “oil” or “empire” at all. It wasn’t about ANYTHING more than a gaggle of incompetent right-wing bigots launching a feel-good war to make themselves look and feel strong, and to distract Americans’ attention away from their utter lack of any decent or substantive policy ideas. (And also they had VERY short attention spans and didn’t give a shit about any long-term policy of helping Afghans rebuild their nation or civil society either.)
It was always about oil.
https://youtu.be/sehmmzbi3UI
@6:
And the smart thing is to realise you don’t need to. Soft empire is just as effective and a damn sight cheaper.
(Though, y’know, if you’ve got cannon fodder to spare for a bunch of years, that can be profitable too.)
Oh my poor naive child! Oil consumers *outnumber* oil producers, but oil producers still outvote them.
(PS you forgot to mention “daddy had one, I want a bigger one!”)
There are a lot of options between those two extreme positions. As far as I can tell the right wing cabal that started the war had their own goals. Dick Cheney was looking for profits for Halliburton plus the possibility of seizing Iraqi oil for the US. John Bolton never saw a war he didn’t like as long as he wouldn’t have to take responsibility if it failed. Donald Rumsfeld wanted to demonstrate the power of the US and establish Iraq as a forward base for US power in the middle east. Bush Jr was in over his head being president and easily swayed by advisors. This wasn’t a single well organized conspiracy, it was a cluster of political manipulators that happened to all think invading Iraq was a good idea.
It worked surprisingly well because certain people in the press wanted to break a big story more then find the truth. People saw a chance for a career defining story and didn’t dig deep enough to see if they were being used.
Evil doesn’t require some grand conspiracy, evil people will work with anybody as long as it serves their short term goal. The different parts of this conspiracy turned on each other when it became clear that no WMDs would be found in Iraq. At that point though the whole situation was too embarrassing. Too many Democrats had supported the war for the party to push hard on the topic. Too many Americans didn’t want to hear that the entire reason for the war was bogus.
@Raging Bee, 6:
https://youtu.be/sehmmzbi3UI?t=1287
In 2000 Iraq started selling oil in Euros, not dollars. Watch the video at the link for a longer explanation of why this would be BAD. It does go on a bit, but it’s funny. Hell, watch the whole thing, it’s only 45 minutes. It’ll stop you thinking we went into Iraq for anything as naive or simple as “my daddy didn’t win, I want to”.
First, why would Iraq demand the US pay for our oil in euros, when our dollars were perfectly usable as currency? If they want our money, they’d want to make it EASY for us to give it to them, not hard. And if they really wanted euros, they could have traded our dollars for euros after we’d paid them.
And second, why would that demand alone require us to respond with nothing less than a full-on invasion?
You’re gonna need more than a comedy show to back all that up — AND explain all the other silly rationalizations cooked up by “leftists” at that time. If your explanation is true, why were we hearing so many other equally-implausible-sounding explanations at the same time?
@11:
Hit by Mano’s spam filter again. Apparently I can’t just post the one word answer, I have to provide a certain amount of filler first. Anyway, the answer is:
Seigniorage.
Dick Cheney was looking for profits for Halliburton plus the possibility of seizing Iraqi oil for the US.
If they really wanted to seize oil, why didn’t they go for Saudi Arabia? That would have given us control of the entire global oil business.
This wasn’t a single well organized conspiracy, it was a cluster of political manipulators that happened to all think invading Iraq was a good idea.
Exactly — and “oil” was way down at the bottom of the list of motives. At the top were:
-- neocon chickenhawks trying to be Foreign Policy Sages like Kissinger, and whose Big Idea was that with the USSR gone, America was now a SuperDuperHyperMegaPower and we could do anything we wanted with no pushback;
-- a President whose attention span couldn’t deal with long-term stuff like rebuilding a country after you’ve invaded it, and who desperately needed something else noisy to make himself feel like a boss;
-- aforementioned chickenhawks manipulating aforementioned President by saying “Everyone knows your daddy was a wimp and didn’t finish the job; but you’re not a wimp like your daddy, are you? ‘Course not, you’re a big strong man, and you know what big strong men do, right?”
-- General fear and hysteria from 9/11, which the ruling party had ginned up with no actual plan or policy to rally behind, which enabled the ruling party to push any shortsighted feel-good war they wanted to push, with much less effective opposition than they would have otherwise got; AND
-- All of that happening within a Republican Party that had already lost what little brain-trust and institutional knowledge it had, and absolutely no clue what was going on or what to do about it.
@Raging Bee:
You’ve either not watched, or not understood, that show, have you?
You don’t understand how oil is traded, do you? Because if you did, you wouldn’t ask that question.
And if you don’t understand how oil is traded, you’re not equipped to understand why trading oil in euros instead of dollars would be bad for the US and why it absolutely would be grounds for invasion to ensure that other oil producing nations didn’t get the same idea and bring down the dollar.
Again -- you’re betraying ignorance. The US already has control of the entire global oil business because oil is traded exclusively in US dollars. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything. And from what you’ve already stated, you’re firm in your decision to not WANT to understand. Which is fine. /shrug/.
Why the fuck would any country that sells stuff to the US want to “bring down the dollar?” If people in the US want to buy stuff, we’ll pay for it in dollars; so why would the people who want to profit from us do anything to destroy both the US economy and the value of all that money they’re getting from us? Where are you getting that from, that old Jane Fonda movie “Rollover?”
The US already has control of the entire global oil business because oil is traded exclusively in US dollars.
That’s utter bullshit. That fact alone doesn’t give us any actual control over how it’s traded, how it’s priced, who else gets to buy it, etc. etc. Our demand — along with other countries’ demand, regardless of what currency they use — certainly influences how it’s traded, but that’s nowhere near the same as “control of the entire global oil business.”
Seriously, OPEC’s embargo began one of the biggest international wealth transfers in the history of wealth — AWAY from the US. Does that really look like “US control of the entire global oil business” to you?
You’ve either not watched, or not understood, that show, have you?
It looked like an old-timey travelling roadshow. Is that’s your go-to source, then you got nothing. I have, at the very least, taken enough college courses and read enough news and history since the 1970s to understand that the oilbiz is far more complex than your silly allegations admit — let alone the rest of the whole global political-economic picture.
@13: Why Iraq? Because the US isn’t so centrally controlled that the President can just start a war and occupy another country at whim. There had to be a reason for the war that could be sold to the public and congress. Saddam was already a hated enemy and made threats against the US from time to time. He had used WMDs in the past and talked of getting more.
At the same time Saddam was a paper tiger. His army had been wrecked by the first Gulf war and never recovered. He was hated by the population and retained power only through force.
JM: Very similar excuses, if not exactly the same ones, could have been used to justify invading Saudi Arabia (evil tyrants, funding terrorists), Syria (even more evil tyrant, used WMDs against his own people), or Somalia (failed state, harboring dangerous terrorists). Also, Saddam’s “threats against the US” were BS. So why Iraq? It was both the grudge-match (“gotta finish the job and prove I’m tough!”) and the feel-good war. That’s it. There was no other “need” to start a whole new war when the first one was so clearly far from finished.
Oh, and by the way…
In 2000 Iraq started selling oil in Euros, not dollars.
Leaving aside the clumsy wording here, you’re missing the fact that the euro was officially CREATED, and officially replaced all participating countries’ national currencies, on 1/1/1999. So once all those countries had euros as their common currency, OF COURSE they’d start using euros to buy oil from Iraq and wherever else. Duh. That change would have had absolutely ZERO effect on America’s control of the global oilbiz, because we never has such control to begin with. We sure as hell had no control over European demand for Arab oil, or how they paid for it.
And I got that simply from Wikipedia. A slightly less shallow dive got me this article in Foreign Policy Quarterly:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/07/debunking-the-dumping-the-dollar-conspiracy/
Suppose that prices in the oil market were quoted in yen or bushels of wheat. Currently, oil is priced at about $70 a barrel. A dollar today is worth about 90 yen. A bushel of wheat sells for about $3.50. If oil were priced in yen, then the current price of a barrel of oil in yen would 6,300 yen. If oil were priced in wheat, then the price of a barrel of oil would be 20 bushels. If oil were priced in either yen or wheat it would have no direct consequence for the dollar. If the dollar were still the preferred asset among oil sellers, then they would ask for the dollar equivalents of the yen or wheat price of oil. The calculation would take a billionth of a second on modern computers, and business would proceed exactly as it does today.
This is one of the dumbest conspiracy theories ever to come form “the left.” Unless, of course, it came from right-wing COINTELPRO plants…
Fisk’s theory would make a good plot for a Hollywood movie…
Like Rollover?
You’re suggesting the use of chemical weapons against the population in the Syrian civil war, which started in 2012, as a theoretically plausible casus belli for a war that started in 2000? Fascinating theory!
I’m honestly surprised that Holms hasn’t died of smugness poisoning yet. The flowers that I got for his funeral a while ago are drier than the Sahara.
Holms: Syria was believed to have used chemical weapons against their own people back in the 1980s too.
@18 Raging Bee: Saudi Arabia was never a possibility. The US and Haliburton was too tied to oil production in the country. An invasion would mean blowing up a lot of facilities actually owned by US companies. Saudi Arabia was nominally a US ally and their involvement in terrorism was swept under the rug by the US government.
Really though, we don’t disagree much about this. I just push oil up the list of reasons further then you do. It clearly wasn’t the only reason. For a number of people involved it’s likely that finishing what was started in the first Gulf war was their primary motivation.