Reply #17: It was NO mistake. [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

No WMD
No 911 Connection
No Gathering threat
No Harboring of terrorists
No NOTHING

But

Lots and lots of oil,
Lots of no bid, sweetheart deal contracts for the Dickster's war profiteering buddies at Halliburton.
Lots of windfall profits for Halliburton
Lots of vacant space to build 14 permanent US military bases to be used to impose US hegemony on the region.


On April 19, 2003, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times wrote Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq, a front-page piece about plans to build four permanent bases in Iraq. The story was denied by the Pentagon. No major paper in the United States had even mentioned them again by October 2003 when, in "The Time of Withdrawal," I wrote:

"When thinking of withdrawal, it's important to remember that it was never a concept in the Bush administration's vocabulary. Despite all those years of Vietnam ‘lessons' and Colin Powell's ‘doctrine' which said that no military action should be undertaken without an ‘exit strategy' in place, Bush's boys had no exit strategy in mind because they never imagined leaving. Of course, they expected to quickly draw down American forces in the face of a jubilant and grateful population. But there was no greater signal of our long-term intentions than our dismantling of the Iraqi military, and their planned re-creation as a lightly armed border-patrolling force of perhaps 40,000 with no air force. Put that together with the four permanent bases we began building almost immediately and you know that we were expecting to be Iraq's on-site military protector into the distant future."

<snip>

And yet somehow, despite a blanket of self-censorship or inexplicable indifference, the subject has suddenly bubbled up out of the precincts of the Internet and into our Iraq conversation in recent weeks. To offer but two examples, William Pfaff, columnist for the International Herald Tribune last week wrote a piece entitled 'De Gaulle option' may be our best Iraq exit strategy which had the line, "The principal purpose of the invasion of Iraq was to make it into Washington's new strategic anchor in the Middle East, with permanent U.S. military bases there, and an assured American role in its economy and oil industry"; while in The Last Deception, columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote on September 21:

"But if the chance to install a pro-American government has been lost, what's the alternative? Scaling back our aims. This means accepting the fact that an Iraqi leader, to have legitimacy, must be able to deliver an end to America's military presence. Unless we want this war to go on forever, we will have to abandon the 14 ‘enduring bases' the Bush administration has been building."

www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1876