Shell, the other U.K. “super-major” oil company, also re-entered Iraq in 2009 after an invasion in 2003 that was widely denounced at the time as a war-for-oil on the part of the U.S. and U.K., Matt Kennard reports.
Source: BP Extracted £15 Billion of Iraqi Oil After British Invasion
What happened on March 20, 2003 wasn’t a “mistake.” It wasn’t well-intentioned but “unwise.” It was a calculated, premeditated crime perpetrated on a massive scale. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in a war premised on transparently nonsensical lies.
Source: The Invasion of Iraq Wasn’t a “Mistake.” It Was a Crime.
Among the lying liars who lied the U.S. into invading Iraq, Joe Biden stands out as a big reason why the lies swallowed the culture, becoming a damning indictment of a society that would elect him president.
Source: IRAQ 20 YEARS: Sam Husseini — The Lies, and Lies About the Lies, About the Invasion
Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.
Source: Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The making of ISIS
The looming US war on Iraq may or may not go well militarily, but the US does have the advantage of overwhelming military superiority. The real question is whether it can successfully wage a war of public opinion during and after the military conflict. Iraq is a minefield of religious sensitivities because of the Shiite shrines. Unless the Bush administration is very careful, the 1920 great rebellion could be repeated, this time against an American Mandate. Worse, we could return to the bad old times of the 1980s when it was Shiite radicals who attacked Marines, blew up our embassy in Beirut, and took US hostages. We should be careful not to create allies for al-Qaeda from among its natural enemies.
Who is missing? Australia’s John Howard of course! However, he’s not really missing, just regarded as totally irrelevant from the looks of this photo despite that he was a dutiful camp follower at the time calling out loyally about the fake WMDs.
He pushed us with Bush to Iraq and helped create ISIS. Howard didn’t give any thought to the LNP’s chant “All the way with LBJ” the chant that took us to Vietnam in 1965. All these fools simply went on to repeat history with their fabrication of the ” Weapons of Mass Destruction”. Now in 2023, the ALP has seemed to have joined them in accusing China to be a WMD when the facts and history tell us it’s not.
They’re all doing great, thanks for asking.
Voltaire said that humanity invented hell to dissuade people from doing wrong when they noticed there didn’t seem to be any consequences for it here on Earth. On this bleak anniversary, you can certainly understand where he was coming from.
Freudian Slip?
Michael Williams at the Dallas Morning News reports on George W. Bush’s speech at his presidential center at Southern Methodist University, during which the former president made what MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan called “one of the biggest Freudian slips of all time.”
Remember Bush Blair and Howard and the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Putin figures he’s justified do the same in the Ukraine and not be charged with war crimes. He’s not invading Finland a Democracy that’s promised not to be a part of NATO. He can turn to history and America’s Monroe Doctrine Cuba and a number of countries whose governments they have tried to change or made fall over the years simply because they were seen as a danger to American interests. Cuba stands out with the Russian missile crisis only 90 kms off their coast. They have been punishing Cuba ever since. Nothin is ever simple. Zelensky is prepared to negotiate.
Bush’s willful act of aggression, his invasion and eight-and-a-half-year military occupation of Iraq, has deeply hindered effective policy-making by the U.S. regarding Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Here are some of the ways it matters:
Source: How Bush’s Iraq Fiasco ruined US Credibility and Enabled Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine
I am struck by the irony that if only the US had invested massively in renewable energy and electric vehicles right from the 1970s when the climate crisis had become clear to scientists, Washington may not have felt the need to invade Iraq to unleash its hydrocarbon resources. When Ronald Reagan took back down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House, he was symbolically committing this country to generations of energy wars.
Trump assassinated Shiite leader Solemeini and started a war and now that war continues in Iraq (ODT)
via As Trump stumbles in war on Coronavirus at Home, He Bombs Shiites in Shiite-Ruled Iraq
In an exclusive, Reuters reports today that the Trump administration is going into the Iraq reconstruction conference in Kuwait next week with no plans to contribute a dime to the effort. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will attend.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi estimates that Iraq needs $100 billion to rebuild. The country is still devastated from the 2003 US war of aggression and 8.5 year military occupation, which spurred Sunni insurgencies and led to the collapse of the US- and NATO-trained military in 2014. The past 3.5 years have been spent attempting to recover the Sunni Arab areas of the country from ISIL, which involved destroying most Sunni Arab cities in the country.
Donald Trump ran on a platform of “no more nation building.” (He needn’t have bothered to articulate it. What nation has the US built recently?)
In Australia we don’t hear Senator Jim Molan fighting for the restoration of towns he helped destroy either in fact he’s been heard arguing for even a more aggressive approach to destruction called defense. (Old Dog)
via US, having Destroyed Iraq, won’t give a Dime to Reconstruction
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