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they really were mistakes.
Consider Katrina. Deliberate, apparently malfeasant (and murderous) neglect. But then Halliburton gets the first no-bid contract.
Bush stands out front like a dumbo--eating birthday cake with McCain, playing a guitar--while an entire U.S. city is destroyed. We think he's stupid. Blame him. Mission accomplished.
And with Rumsfeld, I just don't think you can dismiss it as stupidity. He is not stupid. Remember his attitude toward the looting in Baghdad (freedom = the freedom to loot). That smug assertiveness, as if anyone would dare reply, "Are you kidding?" He knew what he was doing. Chaos is fertile ground for mafia-like control--the Bushites' M.O. (The sucker won't pay your "tax"? Get thugs to smash his store window and rape his daughter). And there may be even more to it--certain "missions" that needed to get "accomplished" in Baghdad, for which chaos was the best context. Finding and destroying paper trails (say, on dirty bioweapons deals with Saddam). Targeted assassinations of potential honest leaders. Blackwater torture and black ops teams fanning out through the city. Who knows? The incident of the four mercenaries who were shot, burned and strung up on the bridge--the news narrative excuse for the U.S. slaughter in Falluja--just after the Abu Ghraib photos were published, and the very, very odd story of Nick Berg's beheading in Baghdad, in May '04, point to some truly nefarious deeds being done. (I won't go into it, but suffice it to say that I think he had some connection to 9/11, and was killed both for P.R. reasons and because he had become expendable or a problem of some kind. The connection is through Zacharias Moussoui. Berg's email address was found in that computer--the one that FBI bosses in DC wouldn't let Colleen Rowley have FISA warrant to open, a month before 9/11. Then Berg turns up later in Baghdad? And gets famously beheaded on video? Very, very odd.)
In any case, I also have these suspicions about the Bushites' use of torture--that the mayhem of massive torture crimes and human indecency in the lower military ranks, colluded in by the top brass and Rumsfeld, and random roundups of perfectly innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, who were treated so horribly (something you JUST DON'T DO if your object is an orderly society of friendly natives), may have been cover for other things. I do not believe that the purpose of Bushite torture is to "keep us safe" nor, obviously, to create orderly societies in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if it is not for those purposes, what IS it for? Again, covering up worser crimes, such as Al Q money trails to the Bush Cartel, torturing and eliminating witnesses, doing favors for business pals, planning other very dirty, covert crimes--all come to mind.
The matter of their favoring the fundamentalist Shias is also interesting. First of all, of course, the Bushites are "fundamentalists." They favor male, patriarchal fascism--bullying or violent control of others. The feminine principles of justice, equality, nurturing, diplomacy instead of force of arms, democracy, sharing, discussion, and the values of literacy and education are entirely lacking in the Bushites, and distorted and subordinated (sometimes violently) in Shia culture, by its practice of male dominance. (They may have communality, equality and some feminine principles at work AMONG MEN, but they don't extend to women, who are subordinate.) Both cultures--Bushite culture, and Shia culture--oppress women.
The Sunnis under Saddam were more egalitarian. Women were free of the veil and engaged in many professions. Civil society was in good order, well run. Education was highly valued. Teachers were well paid. Schools were secular. Iraq was a secular socialist state, in which the oil wealth benefited the professional and middle class. There were many engineers. All of this, as well as British colonial background and Soviet help, accounts for Iraq's advanced, modern culture, and its sophisticated weapons and military organization. But, for all this, Saddam was a dictator with territorial ambitions. (The Reaganites, Rumsfeld and Bush I colluded with Saddam, of course, to lead him along that path.) And he furthermore repressed the more populous, but less advanced, Shias.
Why would the Bushites want the Shias in charge of Iraq--their cultural similarities aside--especially given that the Iraqi Shias are religiously allied with Iranian Shias? It could be to create such trouble between the Sunnis and the Shias in Iraq--civil war (possibly helped along by mercenary black ops?), IN ORDER TO draw Iranians into the fight, to help their Shia brethren, and also to try to stabilize the country, which lay right on Iran's border. (Think if China somehow invaded Mexico and made a hash of it--would the U.S. not intervene?). And this would explain everything that Rumsfeld did and didn't do, and why he never intended to be a good occupier--because the ultimate goal was always to attack and invade Iran next. That is the grand prize. And they needed to frighten and stir up Iran, and push them to make a mistake, that could be blown up into an incident. The Bushites are still trying--with what appear to be largely phony items in the news about Iranians in Iraq, and Iranian weapons in Iraq. Laying the news narrative ground work for some concrete evidence or incident.
So-o-o-o, the intention was NEVER to a create society that worked, and only to create a government viable enough to sign away Iraqis' oil rights; a government that can only exist behind U.S. barricades. The goal WAS chaos--to draw Iran in. It's a no-brainer that all this could have been handled differently and much better. This, I think, is why it wasn't. It was not incompetence or ideology. It was by design.
I guess the final question would be, why is Rumsfeld out, if they are still following his strategy? It could be because Iran hasn't bitten. They are a defensive nation, not a territorially aggressive one. (In the big Iran-Iraq war, Saddam attacked them--a surprise attack.) So they just want to be left alone, and to defend themselves. That's why they want nukes. Easy, preventative defense. Not a costly and bloody war. Israel and the Bushites would like the world to believe that Iranian nukes are for a strike against Israel, and there has been some rhetoric that supports that (by a leader who now has reduced power), but common sense doesn't support it. It would be suicidal, for one thing. I think Iran, on the whole, is not suicidal. And they have never invaded anyone. Given this Iranian temperament, the trick would be to draw them into Iraq, with a civil war on its border. But Rumsfeld FAILED. Part of that failure may be that an attack on Iran is so opposed by China and Russia, and they have influenced Iranian leaders to be stoic and patient--which they are inclined to be anyway--and to wait out the U.S. disaster and withdrawal, then join with other Middle Eastern countries to straighten the mess out.
If Rumsfeld is out because he failed to widen the Mideast war to Iran, this does not bode well for the Bush regime's and the Democratic Congress' further intentions. Is Petraeus' and Gates' job to succeed where Rumsfeld failed? Is the U.S. "surge" not to stop the civil war but to exacerbate it, to draw Iran in?
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