A Day for Sadness and Mourning: The Eighth Anniversary of the Iraq War

by T. F. Kelley

March 19, 2011 marks the eighth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. I wrote an editorial that was published in the local regional newspaper on February 24, 2003, four weeks before the invasion. I pointed out all the reasons that should have kept us from this criminal venture which has cost us at least three trillion dollars, so far. That’s $3,000,000,000.00!

There were a number of reasons the administration and other interested parties put forward (all of whom stood to make money from this war they so lusted after).

How many of you remember? How many of you believed? Anybody remember what Bush’s motivation was? As the announcement he made one Sunday morning on of a “talk” shows (they don’t call them “think” shows”) Bush was going to be a “war president.” He said that all of the successful presidents were war presidents and he was going to be a successful president because he was going to be a war president. He first announced his “interest” in Iraq at an election rally somewhere in Maine before he had been nominated.

First, it was going to be a quick war. One of his warmongering friends remarked that the Iraqi army would surrender when they got the first sniff of gunpowder.

And it was going to be an inexpensive war as well (maybe like our invasion of Panama). We were going to be establishing a democracy which would spread across the Middle East, apparently on autopilot. Another of the reasons was to strike (at) terrorism and enhance our safety, indeed the safety of the world.

Readers should remember also that the geniuses in the Bush administration determined that an invasion of Iraq was much more important than keeping track of Korea. Indeed our representative to those meetings had to be replaced because he did not “play well with others.” Only after the Koreans detonated their little bomb (a reminder, it was more difficult to make a small bomb than a larger one) did we take them seriously. Indeed the administration had classified them as part of their historically nonsensical “axis of evil.”

Does everybody remember when Condoleezza Rice said those 3″ x 36″ aluminum tubes were “only suitable for use in enriching uranium” without asking anybody at Oak Ridge National Laboratory? She failed to read the material transferred by the Clinton administration which mentioned that there was talk among the bad guys about using airplanes as weapons. The tubes were identical to rocket casings in Iraq’s inventory.

The final death blow (to millions of people) was Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations. He made 36 different claims all of which turned out to be nonsense. Indeed, the European press had shown that over 28 of them were fraudulent in their next day’s newspapers.

I’ll conclude with the last sentence of my editorial:

If Iraq poses no threat to our safety and security, how many American lives are a “regime change” and an exercise in “nationbuilding” worth?

T.F. Kelley is a writer and entrepreneur. He can be contacted via his website at www.kelleysview.org.