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Iraq Policies Based on Lies

Comment by Larry Ross, February 5, 2007

Many well-known people in the US predicted disaster and warned the Bush regime against their plan to invade Iraq . It counted for nothing to Bush and his regime of extremist neocons. Critics said "no weapons of mass destruction would be found" and that was correct. They criticised the doctrine of pre-emptive war and that al-Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq and that democracy could scarcely take hold there. That was also correct. They predicted a long occupation and that Iraq would become a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda and the war would damage relations with the Muslim world. That was correct.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) the only member of congress voting against the carte blanche resolution allowing Bush to go to war against any nation he claims had links with terrorist attacks is very worried. She says "it gives the administration a blank cheque to use in perpetuity" "The administration's foreign and military policy is very dangerous" especially "the notion of pre-emptive war".

Really ominous is how critics were shunned and excluded because of their criticism, often by so-called 'objective Think Tanks' some of which have become little more than propaganda agencies for the Bush regime.

Foreign policy guru, Zbigniew Brzezinski opposed the Iraq war and the doctrine of pre-emption. He worries that "the president's team is hell-bent on digging itself in more deeply" and some "seem eager to enlarge the scope of the war to Iran".

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No I-Told-You-Sos

by Lynne Duke, The Washington Post, February 4, 2007

Opponents of the Iraq War Voice Pain, Not Vindication, at Predictions They Could Only Hope Would be Wrong

Sweet vindication. Who wouldn't want it? To be right. To be free of criticism and upheld by evidence, by actual proof, that one's predictions about a controversial war were correct.

It is the culture of this town -- trafficking in rightness. People clamor day in and day out, in that polished and politic way of the Washingtonian, to be proved right.

But on Iraq, the vindicated are pained. There is no gloating -- not with thousands of people dead, Americans and Iraqis; not with the Iraq war precipitating an ongoing foreign policy crisis that has left the United States' global image in tatters. For people who were pilloried, penalized or warned to be careful because of their opposition to a powerful president's war, vindication is nothing to celebrate. It is a victory most bitter. "Emotionally, it's a very traumatic and unhappy outcome." That is retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan. "How can you be happy about being right about the disaster that's been created?" It weighs on him.

"Vindication is not pleasing," he says. "Even some of my friends have noted: the more vindicated I've been, the more irritable I become."

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