The U.S. Simply Took Over Saddam's Role

On May 1st 2003, President Bush presented us with his falsely staged presentation - with himself cast as a hero strutting around on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln - of a war that had been won.

Of course, we know now that it had actually been lost the moment it was launched, thanks to Donald Rumsfeld. He told the Pentagon to ignore the 1200 page State Department report that predicted Iraq's deterioration into chaos and civil war. Experts had outlined strategies for preserving order and infrastructure and making a relatively quick transition so the U.S. could get out before we were resented and Iraqis turned on us.

But remember - Rumsfeld said from the get-go that it would be a "long war." It was started to have a place to build bases. There was never any plan to leave. And if things were thrown into chaos, that would just give us reason to occupy Iraq in perpetuity.

So it was nonsense when Bush said we were there to "rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools."

We did nothing to protect the ones that were there from being destroyed by looters who wrecked Baghdad's infrastructure by ripping out plumbing, electrical wiring and anything that they could sell to make a buck.

Yet he insisted that was outside of his hands, that our troops were sent to protect civilians, stop torture and eschew the building of palaces.

What rot.

We are protecting no one.

The latest story about marines killing civilians and, in the words of a military spokesperson, "committing an atrocity" is no surprise.

PHOTOGRAPHS taken by American military intelligence have provided crucial evidence that up to 24 Iraqis were massacred by marines in Haditha. One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer. They have been shot dead at close range.

There have been, of course, rumbling from returning troops about theft, about unjustified civilian deaths, about civilians being labeled as "insurgents" in order to make kill quotas. So anyone who was paying attention knew it was just a matter of time until something like this happened, was discovered and brought to light.

And, of course, there remains the fact that even our best and bravest who are dying trying to create order cannot stop the bloodshed because the hot spots in Iraq are total chaos and portions have descended into civil war.

The number of Iraqi civilians that have been killed has been estimated by the U.S. military at between 38,000 and 43,000 but, then, it is not U.S. policy to keep a body count.

Yet, sources outside the U.S. Military suggest that 250,000 is a more accurate number representative for Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion.

Gee, didn't Saddam kill only about 100,000? Oh, but the torture has stopped, right?

Wrong. We do the torturing now.

When we don't, we farm it out to Syria. So we have, essentially, just replaced Saddam Hussein.

But the raison d'etre is that, like Saddam, we have built a "palace" for our government instead of schools and hospitals.

From Frank Rich: Bush of a Thousand Days

"...courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers...our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields.

Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker.

These days Mr. Bush seems to be hoping that we'll just forget every falsehood in his "Mission Accomplished" oration.

Trying to deflect a citizen's hostile question about prewar intelligence claims, the president asserted at a public forum in April that he had never said "there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." But on May 1, 2003, as on countless other occasions, he repeatedly made that direct connection.

"With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States," he intoned then. "And war is what they got."

It was typical of the bait-and-switch rhetoric he used to substitute a war of choice against an enemy who did not attack us on 9/11 for the war against the non-Iraqi terrorists who did.'

You know, BushCo has even blown being an effective replacement for Saddam Hussein. Saddam used all his torture and death to keep order. Iraqis lived under a brutal dictator, but it was a trade-off for having a working country with water, electricity, jobs and order. Say what you like about him, there weren't any terrorists blowing themselves up in police stations under Saddam.

Under BushCo Iraqis have the worst of all possible worlds. With none of the basic services they had before, yet with the disappearing, torture, death and occupation they don't even have the freedom to move about that they had under Saddam. They have Saddam in spades plus daily, crazy-making chaos.

But that's the neo-con way. They started out as poor left-wing extremists, then made money and became right-wing extremists. Either way, they believe in "creative destruction" of others in order to attain power.

This just goes to prove that an extremist on either side of the spectrum is basically the same: a destructive nut job who doesn't belong in power.