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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/23/10

Was the Iraq War 'a Horrible Mistake'?

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Message Grant Lawrence
Two GOP congressmen say most Republicans on the Hill now believe the Iraq war was a mistake, and "more than half the Republican caucus" believes the way in which the US entered the Afghanistan war was also a mistake.

Reps. Tom McClintock (R-CA) and Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) made the comments at a discussion panel at the Cato Institute on Thursday, March 18. Rohrbacher said, "...In retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake."

So after seven years of war, GOP Congressmen are even admitting that the Iraq War was a horrible mistake. They are obviously right from a humanitarian perspective.

According to a Lancet Medical Journal Study in 2006, the Iraqi War had killed as many as 655,000 Iraqis. Some estimates have the figure well over a million now. Estimates of American deaths can't be trusted because there is the problem of not counting some deaths as war casualties and there is the lack of reliable information on how many private American contractors were killed. Tens of thousands of Americans have been wounded. But nobody knows for sure because the Pentagon hides the true numbers. According to a Duke University Study in 2006, millions of Americans knew someone killed or injured in Iraq.

All of this doesn't include the nearly trillion dollars or so for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But here again we have to rely on likely lies since the true cost is not known. The Pentagon is not subject to a real independent audit and will likely not be subject to one in many years, if ever.

So there were no WMDs in Iraq, and all of this was a great big fat mistake. Or so most now agree.

But was it really a mistake?

Sure the war has been horrible, but a look at the facts show it wasn't a mistake. It is well known with the leak of the Downing Street Memo and other subsequent information that the war was actually initiated before March of 2003 and was planned well in advance. WMDs or no WMDs, the illegal war on Iraq was going to happen no matter what. The WMDs were really Weapons of Mass Deception to get the American and the World to go along with an invasion.

But you likely know all of that.

There was never any mistake. The American and the British had plans to confiscate the Iraqi oil for the Oil Monopolies, to corporatize or privatize Iraq for economic globalization, and to place permanent bases in Iraq for the expansion of Empire.

So were these goals met?

According to Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq on Democracy Now, it looks like the goals of the Military Industrial Complex were achieved rather well.
".....The other side of the issue, which not many people are talking about, is the economic agenda in Iraq, the privatization, the heavy privatization, that's happened in Iraq in the last two years, where tens of thousands of workers have been laid off, with no work to go to, with no social insurance to support them, while in the same time there is an economic agenda of supporting foreign investment in a way where there is protection for foreign investment, but there is no labor law, no unemployment insurance for people. And in the same time, we are being surprised by the Ministry of Finance telling the Iraqis that we need to have a loan from the World Bank, which will put the Iraq policies under such pressure, and it is a surprise to everybody because the revenues of oil are so high that we do not really need a loan from the World Bank. So, economically, it's a rollercoaster here in Iraq--privatization, no security for the working class, much investment for multinational countries, and, in the same time, a democracy which has brought forward groups which are transformations of the first political forces that started off with militias, but now they are politicians and they are sitting in the Green Zone.

"So it's a very strange scene that we are in Iraq now. High poverty among women, very high poverty, especially among the millions of population, the millions of widows of war and orphans of war, who do not have sufficient social insurance to support them. And there are no social programs to tell us what to do with these millions who do not have a place to go or a economy to support them. And in the same time, the oil law has been signed already, big investment for foreign companies. We do not have any promises of a good labor law..."
How about those permanent bases in Iraq?

That is the plan too.

The Iraqi war is now being made to appear as a bumbling bloody mistake when in fact there was no bumbling involved. It was no mistake from the perspective of the financial and corporate elite and their 'war criminal' political puppets.

The killers are now making a killing and enjoying the fruits of their evil. The Iraqis, after years of brutal war, can now enjoy the freedom we have here in America and can become credit serfs too.

The Iraqi War was a fantastic success for the merchants of death and dehumanization. The only mistake is that people believe it was a mistake to those that rule.
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