COLIN POWELL
VINDICATED
WE WERE NOT LIBERATORS: WE WERE INSTIGATORS
THE MIDDLE EAST TODAY AS IRAQ BRACES FOR
FULL BLOWN
CIVIL WAR.
REPORTS OF MASS BEHEADINGS, RAPES, AND
MURDER AS INSURGENTS HEAD TO BAGHDAD
TAGS:
IRAQ IN CRISIS, MILITANT EXTREMISTS
BATTLE
FOR CONTROL, SOME MAJOR CITIES ALREADY IN ISIS
HANDS,
OIL FIELDS CAPTURED NEAR TIKRIT,
TENSIONS
IN SYRIA, TURKEY AND IRAN MOUNT,
(With Updated Links)
(Thursday June 12th, Tikrit, Iraq) The
former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell had a clearly
defined military doctrine that he developed from his time in the bush in
Vietnam, through extensive military education as he rose through the ranks to
achieving the loftiest of all military positions. Having intimate knowledge with combat and
warfare he was a staunch believer in asking a specific set of questions that,
if all could not be answered in the affirmative, then our military intervention
was not needed. His questions were: 1.)
Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2.) Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3.) Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4.) Have all other nonviolent policy means
been fully exhausted? 5.) Is there a
plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? 6.) Have the consequences of our action been
fully considered? 7.) Is the action
supported by the American people? 8.) Do
we have genuine broad international support?
Sadly during his tenure as
Secretary of State during the disastrous first George W. Bush Administration he
was forced to abandon his doctrine and, as a “good, loyal soldier” support the
President of the United States no matter how ill-conceived W’s plans were. Powell forfeited his respect, dignity and
reputation around the world when he went to the United Nations in March of 2003
presenting what he knew to be ambiguous evidence at best, and some totally
fabricated at worst arguments for a “coalition of the willing” lead by the
Texas Buckaroo W. and the American military to overthrow the dictatorship of
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Despite repeated
attempts by the United Nations monitoring group who had spent years searching
Iraq for “weapons of mass destruction” to this very day not one or any evidence
of one has been found. But all this
history is moot – to a point. The Iraq
of today is in grave danger of imploding from within with bloody sectarian and
ethnic fighting already rendering some large cities in control by the ISIS an acronym
for Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham but has also been referenced as Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria. This group,
these ISIS jihadis fighters are an
off shoot of al Qaeda but the head of al Qaeda has disassociated himself and
his troops from the ISI because he deems them “too violent”. That is quite a statement considering the
source.
It appears with each passing
hour that the people of Iraq, after an almost 20 year history of uninterrupted
wars; war with Iran, The United States, et al, and raging religious clashes
between the Sunni and Shi’ite populations, are veering towards living in a
completely fractured, broken and failed nation.. Aside from the human rights and humanitarian
depravations endured by the average Iraqi, the instability in the region as a
whole; Syria as a neighbor specifically, floods of refugees are seeking to exit
Iraq at any point possible; their lives have become untenable.
CHENEY/BUSH HANDS INDELIBLY SOAKED BY BLOOD
Our military foray beginning
in March 2003 was doomed from the start.
It has been widely scrutinized, analyzed and reported over the last
decade and the overwhelming consensus conclusion is that it was a bogus war of
choice sold to the American people via blatant lies, was so poorly planned and
executed that we should never have been there.
But it is there we went goading into supporting an invasion predicated
on the neo-con cabal that the hapless president George W. Bush had surrounded
himself with. How many of our young
enlisted men and women lost their lives there, how many limbs did we leave
behind, how many psyches were damaged after multiple deployments to fight a
ferocious insurgency that the Cheney/Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld’s
Pentagon had so crudely dismissed as “dead enders”. It seems clear today as we witness Iraq
descend into the looming anarchy of sectarian violence that those “dead enders”
are anything but. They are well armed
militias some of whom served in the old guard of Saddam Hussein a Sunni Muslim
and his Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party rule that held
the majority Shi’ite population in ironfisted, tyrannical oppression.
The time line and history of
our invasion and subsequent occupation has been vociferously studied and
written about. The information is
available for all to read so there is need to reiterate that information
here. We all realize we were lied to for
years by some of the most prominent elected officials from Vice President Dick
Cheney and his imbecilic, messianic sidekick President George W. Bush. We know today that there was no “exit strategy”,
no plans ready to be enacted once the despotic regime was toppled. The Cheney/Bush Administration had so wildly
erred in the planning, execution and aftermath of the invasion that many of the
first wave of American fighting forces to reach Baghdad were not even properly
equipped to do battle against difficult to define local insurgencies.
“IF YOU BREAK, YOU OWN IT”
Secretary Powell was under no
illusions and waged a tenacious behind the scenes war within the Cheney/Bush
Cabinet as they so callously shifted their focus from the rightful battles in
Afghanistan to constructing a “cut, copy and paste” prelude for war in
Iraq. He was at the helm of the Joint
Chiefs during what is commonly called “Gulf War I” during the George H. W. Bush
Administration. In 1990 Saddam Hussein
suddenly invaded the small, oil rich country of Kuwait and American forces lead
the charge to expel the invading Iraqi troops.
Powell and the elder Bush were level headed and wise enough to recognize
that if they decided to push all the way into Baghdad they would find
themselves quickly in an ugly quagmire.
They had a specific mission, well defined exit plan and knew precisely
what their goals were. Once those goals
had been met, they withdrew all troops except for some support staff on
American constructed airbases in Saudi Arabia (much to the chagrin of a wealthy
Saudi zealot named Osama bin Laden).
It was during those years that
Powell adopted a phrase (which has mistakenly been credited to the Pottery Barn
retailer) that says, “If you break it, you own it”. He was acutely aware of the dangers of “mission
creep” and realized any military actions that exceeded the mission objective
would invite disaster. His thoughts
would prove deadly prescient in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in
2003.
Powell brought a career of
military experience, an unrivalled tactical and strategic skill set to the
Cheney/Bush Administration only to be shoved aside by the neo-cons; a bunch of
right wing extremists all of whom had multiple military deferments to keep them
out of the war in Vietnam. These inside
the beltway warriors found the vapid President W. Bush an open vessel into
which they could pour their particular cocktail of a war of choice, occupation
and, hopefully an uninterrupted amount of Iraqi oil. With his master Dick Cheney firmly in control
of the White House and Pentagon with fellow traveler Donald Rumsfeld at the
reigns, it was just a matter of time before our troops in Afghanistan would be
essentially abandoned with all the much needed, precious military troops, gear,
and support being siphoned into the already running machinery that would have
the United States invading Iraq just 15 months after the attacks on our soil on
September 11, 2001. Our fight was with
al Qaeda and their hosts the Taliban, not in Iraq but that point was irrelevant
to the Cheney/Bush warmongers determined to invade Iraq no matter the lies they
had to tell or the costs in our military’s lives and nation of national treasure. They acted contrary to the long standing
military doctrine that we have abided by since our Independence: they pulled us
into a war of aggression. Powell knew
that we would be bogged down – in a position of “owning” – a broken Iraq
because the game plan was so lacking.
WELCOME TO THE DANCE
What the Cheney/Bush
Administration and Rumsfeld’s Pentagon did not know about Iraq could have
filled volumes of dense books. They had
no concept of the country’s history, society, culture, religious factions, sectarian
alliances and deep divisions. Into the gaping maw of the unknown they dispatched a slimmed down military force
without a thought given to what would come next. It was one thing to make a successful thrust
into Baghdad; it was an entirely different scenario to contend with once we got
there. General Tommy Franks admitted
openly that his lone objective was to get into Baghdad. Whatever was to happen next was beyond the
purview of his mission. In retrospect
the abject failures that lay in wait for our troops on the ground were preordained. Colin Powell was right; we broke Iraq and had
no plans as to how to fix it. If
anything we compounded mistake after mistake until we found ourselves facing a hydra
headed insurgency that was more than willing to bring the fight to us. And that they did.
Days after storming into
Baghdad it quickly became apparent just how poorly – to put it mildly – the Cheney/Bush
cabal had planned for what would come next.
What they did was set the future of Iraq as a nation in severe
jeopardy. The litany of all their
egregious errors in judgment, gross miscalculations of commission and omission,
and the abject failure to appreciate the ramifications of a protracted
occupation as the nation fell into pockets of hard core armed resistance
against the United States forces as well as widespread religious and ethnic
battle on a scale not seen in the region, arguably, in centuries. The iron fist of the Saddam Hussein regime
kept a lid on the strife between the Sunni and Shi’ite and exhibited no
tolerance for civil discord. His absence
created a huge power vacuum that placed our forces in grave danger. The prelude for the next chapter of our
bloody campaign there was set while George W. Bush was declaring to the world “Mission
Accomplished”.
What ensued is well documented
and, in retrospect even more appalling than it was as it was playing out. From bring in a group of Iraqi expatriates
who were close to the neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl and other
Cheney acolytes, to disbanding the Iraqi military and civil infrastructure in a
process callously called “de-Ba’athification”, the nation quickly fell into anarchy
and chaos. The entire civil bureaucracy,
the thousands of people who kept the machinery of a modern country functional,
were cast aside in this process to cleanse the institutions of government,
education, utilities and all the rest of what makes a country run. From doctors and teachers, to oil field workers,
police, and basic utility providers were purged leaving no one to assume those
roles. Because of these failures in
planning and preparation we would remain engaged in often brutal combat against
a series of ill-defined foes until the last of our troops exited the country on
December 18, 2011. We left behind an
American propped puppet government, a severely broken and scarred nation, and a
legacy of failure that will follow us for decades as we see happening right
now.
DESTABILIZATION AND RECRUITMENT
Since the creation of the
state of Israel in 1949 the Middle East has been a hotbed of instability. The history of the region just in the time
since 1949 has varied from open and guerilla warfare along the many schisms of
religion and ethnicity as well as colonial-type interference from the outside
and despotic rule from the inside. If
one is to understand the region and had only one point of reference to begin
the effort towards understanding it is the creation of Israel, the Zionist
movement that was born in the aftermath of the atrocities inflicted on the
Jewish people in Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe as a whole. Israel is a country born as much by the
workings of the League of Nations as it is of terrorism against colonial powers
and violence perpetrated against the native Palestinian population. With the United States in the sometimes
hazardous role as Israel’s most fervent ally we have been deeply engaged in the
region for over 60 years often putting ourselves in peril.
With the open hostility
towards Israel from her immediate and regional neighbors, it has served as a
focal point for groups in the pro-Palestine movement to the entire array of
Islamic and Muslim extremists including many groups the United States has
designated as “terrorist” groups. In its
history Israel has made “peace”, or at least agreed to some version of detente’
with only two of her neighbors: Egypt and Jordan. Although tensions have eased somewhat in the
seemingly intractable points of contention between Israel and other nations in
the region, it has long been a great source of propaganda and recruitment for
terrorist groups from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic organizations. With the United States always casting
pro-Israel votes in the United Nations Security Council we have, by default,
often been targeted by the same groups that are so militantly opposed to the existence
of the state of Israel. That Israel
receives billions of US tax dollars annually for military hardware from fighter
jets to artillery, those terrorist groups see Muslim blood on American
hands. We have in recent years learned
the global reach some of these radical groups have. Some will be troubled having Israel included
in this discussion at all and that is their prerogative. However, there cannot be any honest
deniability that the US – Israel relationship has often proven costly for the
United States. We have lost the
designation as a “moderate voice” and “honest broker” in the Islamic, Muslim
and Arab world. One might ask why Israel
is even being discussed in this geopolitical equation. The obvious answers have already been
provided above yet it is worth reiterating the fact that Israel is the focal
point around which the militants in the Muslim world rally around and we are
seen as her supreme enabler and protector.
On September 11, 2001 we
learned in horrific fashion the depth of the hatred of the United States by al
Qaeda and their Afghan hosts the Taliban.
Much of the extremist Muslim and Islamic world celebrated the vicious
attack on our home soil; they were finally able to bring the fight to us. They knew they would provoke us into military
action with the hope of Afghanistan becoming another Vietnam for us. They had no idea that by the end of December 2001
they would be reduced to a rag tag group forced by the encroaching United
States forces to seek refuge in the rugged but porous terrain of the
Afghanistan – Pakistan borderland. The
United States had already begun the preparations to unilaterally if necessary,
invade Iraq; a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11/01 attacks, the
Taliban or al Qaeda. As Cheney/Bush
argued with increasing urgency throughout 2002 that Iraq was involved with al
Qaeda, had weapons of mass destruction and even, perhaps, a crude nuclear
capability, al Qaeda licked their wounds and lived to fight another day. We still have 30,000 troops in that
perpetually ungovernable country.
Our foray into Iraq motivated jihadis and mujahedeen from across the Muslim/Islamic extremist world to join
the fight. They were more than capable
of conducting a cunningly lethal form of asymmetrical warfare, a development
like so many of the others that the Cheney/Bush “brain trust” neither
anticipated nor even remotely considered.
As a recruitment vehicle for extremists and fundamentalists already
inclined to despise the United States, our presence in Iraq became a clarion
call that echoes still today. We left
Iraq as a critically wounded nation/state poised on the verge of self-emollition
as we are witnessing today.
Our military actions have
created a new generation, if not generations,
of young people who have known nothing but war and hardship that the United
States is responsible for. We have
given birth to that next generation of terrorists immersed since birth in the
belief that America is “the Great Satan” and, in their eyes, they are right; we
have wreaked havoc in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan while opening up new theaters
for drone strikes in Sudan, Yemen, Mali, Somalia and other unknown locations.
It will be interesting to
watch as the chaotic situation Iraq plays out in the short term although it is
likely not going to be a short term scenario.
The same imbecilic hawks in the US Senate that said we would be greeted
in Baghdad as “liberators”, addled men like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are
again beating the war drums for military intervention in Iraq. On whose “side” we would fight is as unclear
today as the nature of the insurgency was in 2003 through 2011. It is not that we have “unfinished business”
in Iraq as some would argue; we had no business being there in the first place.
George W. Bush has retreated
to his home in Houston and spends his time with watercolors and pastels
producing childish portraits while his old master Dick Cheney is a vocal critic
of the Obama Administration and still maintains that his incursion into Iraq
was a “just cause”. These two men have
unleashed waves of violence and evil that will long out live them. It may out live us all.
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Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
