CHAPTER 11 - IRAQ

“A nation of sheep will beget [bring about] a government of wolves.”

     -- Edward R. Murrow, legendary American journalist and news anchor

“Now that we’re there …”

These were the opening words for the script following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Across the media, across the board, it was only a matter of time before each and every analyst or host uttered some form of “Well, since we’re there ...” Meaning okay, we lied, we invaded, it’s an absolute disaster, but “Now that we’re there, what can we accomplish?”

Nothing, actually. Although there was no imminent threat to Israel, the US of I needed a fiction to tell a gullible public because Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein were indeed arch-enemies of the Jewish state. Destroying and destabilizing the country was of benefit to Israel, not the United States. Wealthy American individuals in oil-related industries, including Vice President Dick Cheney, benefited from the destruction and eventual rebuild of the infrastructure, which is a crime unto itself, but as a US security measure, the invasion contributed zilch. 

The opening paragraph of Bob Woodward’s article in the Washington Post on September 17, 2007 says, 

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Garry Trudeau is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who created Doonesbury while at Yale in the late 1960s. The strip still runs today. Offhand, it’s difficult to find one of his strips that refer to issues in the occupied territories, but Trudeau is no stranger to criticizing the American military-industrial complex and its manufactured conflicts. In his December 20, 2011 strip, he went as far as to call out those responsible for the Iraq invasion in four frames. 

In all four frames a college professor is lecturing. In frame one he says, “For conservatives like me, especially those of us who have served, accountability is everything. It’s part of the conservative brand.” In frame two he continues, “And yet not one of the architects of Bush’s war has taken responsibility for the biggest foreign policy disaster in U.S. History.” 

Frame three stands out: “So as the war winds down, do not forget their names. Dick Cheney. Donald Rumsfeld. Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. Douglas Feith.” Frame four concludes with a question from a student off-stage: “So they’re on the exam?” The professor answers, “Yes. But let’s shoot for long-term memory.”

For the sake of our long-term memory, let’s remember that the only country in the world that benefitted from the US invasion of Iraq was Israel.

Feith had strong reason to support the cause. A Jew who had lost relatives in the Holocaust, he fell in line with neoconservative (“Neocon”) causes. This brand of recent conservatism includes aggressive pro-Zionist viewpoints. For those prominent Jews who made up the main core of President George W. Bush’s advisory group, promoting and protecting Israel took precedence over promoting and protecting the United States. Obviously. Who else would advocate policy that led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the deaths of more than four thousand US military personnel with more than thirty thousand wounded?

Feith’s family included members of Revisionist Zionism organizations—people who support maximum territorial gain, meaning the Jewish commandeering of all of Palestine. (Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu adheres to the doctrine, passed down from his hardcore revisionist father Benzion.) 

Paul Wolfowitz had similar motivation. His father’s family had lost relatives in the Holocaust as well. He’s considered a leading Jewish neoconservative. His views took shape in college. A professor and his mentor at the University of Chicago was Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent Jewish academic behind the neoconservative movement. After jobs as a Congressional aide and at the Pentagon, Wolfowitz landed in the Reagan administration as the State Department Director of Policy Planning. 

According to journalist and foreign policy author James Mann, who later wrote about the Iraq war years and its background, “Wolfowitz demonstrated himself to be one of the strongest supporters of Israel in the Reagan administration.” 

Along the way, Wolfowitz became US ambassador to Indonesia, he taught classes at Yale, and he worked his way up through the State Department. He climbed his way to the prominent position of deputy secretary of defense under President George W. Bush. He and his immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were directly responsible for setting up the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which involved spreading propaganda at home and abroad that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), the eventual justification for military action.

It was done for Israel’s benefit and for American corporate control of Iraqi oil. All of the negative effects were absorbed by the United States government, taxpayers, and soldiers, summed up nicely inside Bob Herbert’s editorial on July 28, 2005 in the New York Times called “Oil and Blood.”

The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington’s budget. A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yurgin tells us, as “the greatest single prize in all history.”

Mission accomplished. After moving on, Wolfowitz was rewarded for his efforts by being named the president of the World Bank in 2005, a position he resigned in 2007 over a scandal. He had apparently given his girlfriend a high-paying bank promotion. 

Speaking of the Office of Special Plans, enter Richard Perle, like Wolfowitz, a Jewish native of New York City. He also worked under President Reagan as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs. For George W., he headed up the OSP. The office existed for less than a year starting in September of 2002, literally with the sole purpose of promoting war against Iraq. 

Former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson is quoted as saying the OSP was “dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. (It) lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam.”

Perle and Wolfowitz have something else in common. Remarkably, despite their obvious involvement in pushing for war, they both continue to downplay it. 

In a March 18, 2013 article on the Real Clear Politics website written by Toby Harnden, Wolfowitz says, “It wasn’t conducted according to my plan.” He claims he wasn’t the architect and instead blames then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wolfowitz:

“I don’t think I ever met with the president alone. I didn’t meet with him very often. Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it. And if he (Powell) was so sure it was such a mistake, why didn’t he say so?”

In the 2009 book Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market by Janine Wedel, Perle is quoted:

“Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened …”

Sometimes public relations is comical in its gall. 

By the way, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff from 2001 to 2005 was Scooter Libby, a wealthy Jew from Connecticut, who attended Yale and found Paul Wolfowitz to be one of his favorite professors. 

Some have referred to this particular extended group of neocons who influenced US policy as a “cabal,” or a secret political faction. Secret in this case meant operating out in the open. The only thing not uttered was their true motivation—using the United States to help Israel. 

Europeans saw right through the verbal manure that many Americans accepted. The war seemed to insult the intelligence of continental Europe’s population, never fooled by the WMD pretext.

Back on August 31, 2003, the New York Times Magazine published a photo on page twenty-nine of French war protesters displaying a sign that read “Bush-Blair-Sharon—L’AXE DU MAL.” It was referring to George W. Bush, Tony Blair the prime minister of Great Britain and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon as the “access of evil.” 

Bush of course had famously referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the Axis of Evil during his State of the Union address in 2002.

Outside of the carnage, the saddest story regarding the United States of Israel’s war in Iraq was written by Thomas L. Friedman in his New York Times column on October 24, 2004, “Jews, Israel and America”:

“I was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS News’s 60 Minutes about the mood in Iraq. He had just returned from filming a piece there and he told me something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops—wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we used to call the Nazis “Krauts” or the Vietcong “Charlie.” And what did he find? Many Iraqis have so much distrust in US forces we found they’ve come up with a nickname for our troops,” Scott said. “They call American soldiers ‘The Jews,’ as in, ‘Don’t go down that street; the Jews set up a roadblock.’”

Ugh. Pretty much says it all.

Meanwhile the American government took an Israeli approach to public relations related to the slaughter and to their own losses. Don’t give them access to photograph the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers returning to the US, a.k.a. censorship, and the less news the better. 

Bob Hebert again, refers to it in the New York Times on April 25, 2005 under “The Agony of War”:

The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the US-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can’t think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can’t put a positive spin on dead children. As for the press, is has better things to cover than the suffering of civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the election of another, and the media’s manic obsession with the comings and goings of Martha [Stewart], Jacko [Michael Jackson], et al.

Look! Over here! Celebrities! Who was in charge of prioritizing content? Who determines what Americans see or don’t see?

There’s been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It’s an ugly subject, and idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage war, but we don’t want the public to be too upset by it. So the public doesn’t even hear about the American bombs that fall mistakenly on the homes of innocent civilians, wiping out entire families. We hear very little about the frequent instances of jittery soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding men, women and children who were never a threat in the first place. We don’t hear much about the many children who, for one reason or another, are shot, burned or blown to eternity by our forces in the name of peace of freedom. Out of sight, out of mind. 

Iraq. Palestine. The United States of Israel.

But then again, they are just brown people. Americans are conditioned to hate them and fear them because they may be “terrorists.” 

In reality, a great majority of them, similar to a great majority of Americans, just want to live, work, and raise their families. 

And similar to the US’s follow-up strategy after helping Afghanistan repel an invasion of the Soviet Union in the 1980s with a covert weapons program, as encapsulated in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War, the US again had no plan for after the invasion and destabilization of Iraq.

“Let’s Talk About Iraq” was the column by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times on June 15, 2005, twenty-seven months after the invasion began:

Our core problem in Iraq remains Donald Rumsfeld’s disastrous decision—endorsed by President Bush—to invade Iraq on the cheap. From the day the looting started, it has been obvious that we did not have enough troops there. We have never fully controlled the terrain. Almost every problem we face in Iraq today—the rise of ethnic militias, the weakness of the economy, the shortages of gas and electricity, the kidnappings, the flight of middle-class professionals—flows from not having gone into Iraq with the [Colin] Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force.  

The New York Times printed a letter from Barry R. Posen, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called “Fighting Blind in Iraq” on June 7, 2005:

Thus in Iraq, the American and Iraqi counterinsurgents face two key tasks: they must collect intelligence on the insurgents, and they must prevent the insurgents from collecting intelligence on their own troops. Though there have been a few successes, the weight of evidence suggests that the Americans and Iraqis are failing on both counts.

Finally, Frank Rich wrote a column in the New York Times on October 23, 2005 called “Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure”:

There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing a peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly did, we go to war in Iraq?

Rich may be tongue-in-cheek, but the message is serious:

… But here, too, was an impediment: there had to be that “why” for the invasion, the very why that today can seem so elusive that Mr. Packer calls Iraq the “‘Rashomon’ of wars.” Abstract (and highly debatable) neocon notions of marching to Baghdad to make the Middle East safe for democracy (and more secure for Israel and uninterrupted oil production) would never fly with American voters as a trigger for war or convince them that such a war was relevant to the fight against those who attacked us on 9/11. And though Americans knew Saddam was a despot and a mass murderer, that was also insufficient to ignite a popular groundswell for regime change. Polls in the summer of 2002 showed steadily declining support among Americans for going to war in Iraq, especially if we were to go it alone. For Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush to get what they wanted most—slam-dunk midterm election victories—and for Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to get what they wanted most—a war in Iraq for reasons predating 9/11—their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by fictional, more salable ones.

But now that we’re there … It was little more than a month after the invasion, April 20, 2003, that an article by Ed Vuillamy, “Israel Seeks Pipeline for Iraqi Oil,” appeared in the UK’s the Guardian and online:

Plans to build a pipeline to siphon oil from newly conquered Iraq to Israel are being discussed between Washington, Tel Aviv, and potential future government figures in Baghdad. The plan envisages [envisions] the reconstruction of an old pipeline, inactive since the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948, when the flow from Iraq’s northern oilfields to Palestine was re-directed to Syria. Now, its resurrection would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel’s energy crisis at a stroke. 

One might get the idea Israeli oil interests were in on the invasion plans all along. Sure didn’t take long to introduce the payoff:

The revival of the pipeline was first discussed openly by the Israeli Minister for National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Israel more recently has discovered an abundance of natural gas off its shores, and is turning to that resource and renewable energy like solar power to gradually replace the traditional oil and coal options.

In the years immediately following the US invasion of Iraq, the perspective was different. “Victory” brought spoils; the Israeli energy crisis reduced by 25 percent while the rich got richer in the US, regardless of the major collateral damage. This was spelled out in the New York Times article called “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat” by Mark Mazzetti on September 23, 2006:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Among other things, the US occupation led to the formation of the dramatically radical group ISIS, the Islamic State. None of this was unexpected, but the US of I attacked and occupied regardless. Mazzetti wrote: 

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, just two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives. 

So, bad for America, good for Israel. The moral of the story? Hey, now that Iraq’s out of the way, let’s see if we can do that again.

Maureen Dowd wrote her column on October 24, 2007 in the New York Times under the headline “Madness as Method”:

The hawks are pounding the drums on Iran as they once did on Iraq, acting as if the hourglass is running out and we have to act immediately or, as the president apocalyptically [end-of-the-world scare) suggested last week, we could be facing World War III. Or World War IV, as Norman Podhoretz, a neocon who is top [Rudy] Giuliani adviser, says. Podhoretz urges bombing Iran “as soon as logistically possible” and likened [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad to Hitler, as Poppy Bush [the older George Bush] did with Saddam.

Podhoretz, a Jew with an obvious desire to promote Israel’s best interests, once co-founded a powerful conservative think tank that sent a letter to President Bill Clinton trying to get the US to take out Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. He would later join others in professing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

What would it mean for Iran if Israeli interests managed to get the US to carry out an unjustified invasion on that country? Just look at Iraq. From the publisher’s editorial in the New York Times on April 22, 2007 called “Iraq’s Desperate Exodus”:

And an incredible total of four million people—one out of every seven Iraqis—have been forced to flee their homes. If Iraq continues this descent, the refugee tide could turn into a regional tsunami, with potentially convulsive political consequences. Yet, as with so much about this war, the Bush administration is refusing to acknowledge the human cost of its horrendous errors and pretending that the problem will be contained within Iraq’s borders. It will not.

That, on top of the senseless murder of tens of thousands of a contrived enemy. In Iran, the regime in Israel would love nothing more.