The United States is Responsible for Up To 1M Deaths in Iraq from 2003–2023
medium.com
medium.com
> In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Larry C. Johnson said the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was "dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated."
> Seymour Hersh writes that, according to an unnamed Pentagon adviser, "[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons (WMD) that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. 'The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' the Pentagon adviser told me. 'That's what drove them. If you've ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.' The goal of Special Plans, he said, was 'to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can't see.'"
> These allegations are supported by an annex to the first part of Senate Intelligence Committee's Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq published in July 2004. The review, which was highly critical of the CIA's Iraq intelligence generally but found its judgments were right on the lack of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, suggests that the OSP, if connected to an "Iraqi intelligence cell" also headed by Douglas Feith which is described in the annex, sought to discredit and cast doubt on CIA analysis in an effort to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. In one instance, in response to a cautious CIA report, Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky Relationship, the annex relates that "one of the individuals working for the [intelligence cell led by Feith] stated that the June [2002] report, '...should be read for content only – and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored.'"
> In open letters to Clinton and GOP congressional leaders the next year, the group called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" and a shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the use of force if necessary to unseat Saddam.
> And in a report just before the 2000 election that would bring Bush to power, the group predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."
> That event came on Sept. 11, 2001. By that time, Cheney was vice president, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz his deputy at the Pentagon. [1]
This information seems to have left our collective consciousness. Please remember this history and pass it on. We owe this to the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed due to the decisions made by these specific men.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
At a 1998 Senate hearing, Biden argued that “taking this son of a — taking Saddam down" was the only way to guarantee Iraq’s disarmament. "
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-histo...
When Obama first ran for President, having voted no on the invasion was the litmus test.
That's one of the reasons he jumped ahead in the running.
We all knew it was a giant mistake at that point. Now history is being revised. I have recently heard an active US Admiral on YT say "it's the best intelligence we had at the time." No, it was devoid of actually intel. As criminal as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, minus most of the ethnic cleansing. The USA lost so much global goodwill. It was soooo stupid and unnecessary. Arguably the end of Pax Americana.
Over 80 percent of four-star retirees are employed in defense industry[0]. Biden continues the bipartisan tradition of putting Defense Contractors in top posts.[0]
Lloyd Austin was on the board of Raytheon.
"Before Austin, another person with ties to Raytheon, the contractor’s chief lobbyist Mark Esper, held the reins of the Pentagon. Esper’s predecessors, Patrick Shanahan and James Mattis, had respectively been a senior vice president at Boeing and a board member of General Dynamics. Ellen Lord, the former president and CEO of Textron Systems, oversaw the Pentagon’s weapon acquisitions.
...
Frank Kendall, chosen by Biden to lead the Air Force. Kendall, a former vice president at Raytheon who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics for President Barack Obama, has spent the last few years as an adviser and consultant to defense contractors. Kendall’s disclosures show that the bulk of his income has come from advising Northrop Grumman, followed by income from Renaissance Strategic Advisors, an investment firm that arranges mergers and acquisitions in the defense sector."[1]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/10/04/...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/28/biden-pentagon-defense-c...
It was foolish as is, to get into proxy war with Russia. Then came the aggression towards China. And now pissing off the entire middle east with arming Israel. Top it off a cold war with India.
There is absolutely no sane scenario where all these ends in favor of the US. Elect a dementia expect a circus.
Putin told the Duma that he wanted to rebuild the USSR, is that still going to happen?
I suppose Putin also blew up Nord Stream pipelines?
And Russia also ran out of missiles?
And Russian army is fighting with shovels?
Will Putin be able to rebuild the USSR?