While Petraeus Read Bush's Lies, Iraq Burned and Terrorism Grew Worse

One day after Gen Petraeus reassured an increasingly hostile Congress that things were actually going according to plan in Iraq, a bomb --in Iraq's western province of al-Anbar --kills the head of the US backed Sunni alliance. [See: Iraqi insurgents kill key US ally ] It will be interesting to see how Bush's gang of venal crooks try to spin this one.

Screw Bush's "intentions" in Iraq. We've heard the speculation before. It's about oil. The chaos is deliberate! Bush is actually succeeding in achieving his goals.

I don't care what Bush's personal goals are. Accident or deliberate, chaos is still chaos. Whether it works for Bush's goals or not, mass murder is still mass murder, war crimes are war crimes. I don't care whether Bush gets his jollies hearing about Abu Ghraib tortures, it is still a crime, perverted and punishable under international conventions. Whatever Bush's intentions, the war against Iraq is a war crime prohibited by our own federal statutes. They state clearly that what Bush has done in and to Iraq is punishable by death. Bush is a felon and there is probable cause to charge him with mass murder.

Am I getting through to anyone? Or --do Americans no longer care what their "presidents" do? Let's take a sober look at the facts. What Bush has done in Iraq is punishable by death. In our system, charges are brought when there is "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. There is, in fact, right now, probable cause to bring just such charges against George W. Bush.

It gets worse.

Gen. Betrayus should be fired and retired. Clearly --the speech he read had been written for him by Bush's propagandists and focus groups. Clearly, he put his own lousy career ahead of the truth, the interest of the American people. Such venality approaches high treason.

It's time to take a good, hard look at the scam, the fraud that this gang of GOP Bushies and hang overs from the Reagan years have perpetrated upon this nation. It's time to round up every one of the crooks and put them on trial for the capital crimes that they have committed under the cover of our national sovereignty.

There is a word for that. High treason. When "integrity" still had meaning, high treason was hanging offense.

In the meantime, read US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441 and then try to explain to me why George W. Bush and his gang of crooks and perverts are above the law!

§ 2441. War crimes

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

The Iraq Effect: The War has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide

By Peter
Bergen and Paul Cruickshank
Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people." So said President Bush on November 30, 2005, refining his earlier call to "bring them on." Jihadist terrorists, the administration’s argument went, would be drawn to Iraq like moths to a flame, and would perish there rather than wreak havoc elsewhere in the world.

The president’s argument conveyed two important assumptions: first, that the threat of jihadist terrorism to US interests would have been greater without the war in Iraq, and second, that the war is reducing the overall global pool of terrorists. However, the White House has never cited any evidence for either of these assumptions, and none appears to be publicly available.

The administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States," circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that "the Iraq War has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists...and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

Iraq is falling apart. The world has become a more dangerous place amid increasing terrorism. It does not surprise me. I've been writing about it for almost ten years now. More recently, I was attacked by the Heritage Foundation for daring to quote FBI stats that support what I have been saying for years: Terrorism is Always Worse Under GOP Regimes.

So much so that one would think GOP regimes cause terrorism. According to FBI stats, terrorism has been worse under GOP regimes at least since 1980. Reagan's "War on Terrorism" caused terrorism, or at least, made it worse. During a period of two years, terrorist attacks against the United States increased. [Source: Total Acts of Terrorism in the US 1980-98, America's Response to Terrorism, The Brookings Institution (Based on FBI Statistics)]

Some history is needed to put this all in context. Ronald Reagan ordered a US invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and, like Bush now, his invasion was premised upon what was politely called a "deceitful pretext", in other words - a lie! The "pretext" was that the PLO, called a terrorist organization, had shot the Israeli ambassador to London. In fact, the shooter may never have been a PLO member.
[Fading Illusions: D-Day and Reagan].

...

Like Iraq today, the Lebanon Reagan invaded became a magnet for various "terrorist groups". They grew more active over the duration of the American occupation. Armed and dangerous, they tested Reagan's resolve and eventually won. Like Bush today, Reagan's definition of victory was defined with meaningless slogans -like "you can run but you can't hide". They did both and then counter-attacked. Reagan lost his war against "terrorism".

Terrorism, in fact, grew worse over the two years that he waged it. The trend did not abate until Bill Clinton became President. There were about three times as many terrorist attacks against US interests during the Reagan regime than against US interests under Bill Clinton.

Nevertheless, Reagan's adventure in Lebanon is remembered for two things: a) the thousands of lives lost amid even more waves of refugees; b) Reagan's ignominious pull-out following the bombing of the US marine barracks. Thought cowardly at the time, it may be too charitable in retrospect to attribute to Reagan remorse for having wrongly invaded to begin with. That's too much to expect from the GOP. In this earlier invasion, Ronald Reagan supported Israel just as Bush has more recently, just as the US always has. [See: Reagan Orders Marines Out of Lebanon]

--Terrorism is Always Worse Under GOP Regimes

It's all been a callous, cynical, criminal fraud --nothing less than the hijacking of the United States of America.

The Great Iraq Swindle

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

--Rolling Stone

Additional Resources

• Worldwide Terrorism is up 30% Since Bush Attacked Iraq
• America's Fate Depends Upon Whether Gen. Petraeus is an Honest Man
• Iraq 101
• Protest Bush: Show Your Outrage
• The Swamp

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