Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Tuesday March 14, 2006 The Guardian Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos.
John Sawers, Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion, sent a series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May and June 2003 cataloguing US failures. With unusual frankness, he described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as "an unbelievable mess" and said "Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals" were "well-meaning but out of their depth". That assessment is reinforced by Major General Albert Whitley, the most senior British officer with the US land forces. Gen Whitley, in another memo later that summer, expressed alarm that the US-British coalition was in danger of losing the peace. "We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes'," he concluded. Comment: It would appear that all those involved in the Iraq invasion knew long ago that such an invasion would lead to a destruction of Iraqi society and infrastructure and the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, yet rather than letting this stop them it seems that their reaction was to simply subvert this truth and present it as completely the opposite - that an invasion of Iraq would bring "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people. Raving Psychopaths anyone?
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03-14-2006
WASHINGTON (AFP) Ousted president Saddam Hussein did not plan the insurgency in Iraq because he thought the United States would never invade the country, a US military history has concluded.
Even with US armored columns 100 miles (161 kilometers) from Baghdad about to make their final push, Saddam apparently believed the war was going Iraq's way, according to the history, called "The Iraqi Perspectives Project." "As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there were no national plans to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of military defeat," it said. "Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such plans as its world crumbled around it," it said. "Buoyed by his earlier conviction that the Americans would never dare enter Baghdad, Saddam hoped to the very last minute that he could stay in power," it said. Excerpts of the partially de-classified study for the US Joint Forces Command are being published in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The study was written by Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray. The history, an attempt to reconstruct the war from the Iraqi perspective, drew on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi leaders and politicians and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents. It concluded, as others have, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, but that he maintained ambiguity on the issue for fear that otherwise Israel might be encouraged to attack Iraq. Comment: So it seems that even the "evil Saddam" could not fathom the depths of depravity that the minds of people like Sharon, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Blair, Wolfowitz and the rest of the Zionist Neocons are capable of.
The claim made by the abovementioned US military study that Saddam was expecting to hang on to power until the very last minute is contradicted by press reports leading up to the illegal Iraq invasion: Flashback: Iraqi Commander Swears he saw USAF fly Saddam out of Baghdad See this link for more on the fantastical farce that was the capture and trial of "Saddam Hussein". |
by Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst Mar 15, 2006 Washington - A major new report extracted in Foreign Affairs confirms that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 Iraq war began. The report also documents Saddam's remarkable incompetence and unreality as his almost quarter century-long tyranny collapsed around him.
The report, entitled "Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside," was produced by the Pentagon's Iraq's Perspectives Project and written by Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray. It was commissioned by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or USJFCOM, and it is based on previously inaccessible primary sources, Foreign Affairs magazine said. Extracts from the report are being published in an 8,500 word article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs. Comment: Given the current trial of "Saddam", the truly important information in this report is the admission by US officials that the real Saddam never had any WMD's - and therefore Bush's case for war was a lie - and that the administration's assertions that Saddam was behind the insurgency are completely false.
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March 14, 2006
Hugh White Sydney Morning Herald The US and its allies are trapped in Iraq with little hope of a dignified way out, writes Hugh White.
AdvertisementAdvertisement WHEN he sent our forces to help invade Iraq, John Howard was sure they would not be there long: months, not years, he said. Last week his new Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, was visiting the troops still in Iraq three years after the invasion. And he made it clear he expected them to stay a lot longer. I'm sure Nelson is right. So how and why was Howard so wrong? The conventional view is that a brilliantly successful invasion was followed by a hopelessly ill-planned and mismanaged occupation. The US-led forces didn't stop the looting after Saddam Hussein fell, they didn't restore power and water, they didn't crack down early and hard on the insurgency, they didn't have enough troops in the country. If only these errors had been avoided, Iraq would now be well on the way to stability and democracy, and our troops would be safely on their way home, the argument goes. I don't buy it. The failure in Iraq is not a failure of execution; it's a failure of conception. The occupation and political reconstruction of Iraq was not a good idea badly implemented. It was a bad idea that no amount of administrative skill, political savvy, cultural sensitivity or military firepower could have made work. |
By Howard Zinn
March 8, 2006 On the third anniversary of President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.
I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture. One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again. President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico. |
By Dahr Jamail
Tuesday 14 March 2006 Why does the Bush Administration refuse to discuss withdrawing occupation
forces from Iraq? Why is Halliburton, who landed the no-bid contracts to construct and maintain US military bases in Iraq, posting higher profits than ever before in its 86-year history? Why do these bases in Iraq resemble self-contained cities as much as military
Why are we hearing such ludicrous and outrageous statements from the highest
I wonder if there is a training school, or at least talking point memos for
General Pace also praised the Iraqi military, saying, "Now there are
Wow! General Pace must have waved his magic wand and materialized all these
During a late-September 2005 Senate
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