[Peace-discuss] The Thing We Don't Talk Abo (1 of 2)

[jencart]

Would you believe that on Monday, Sept 10, 2001 -- the day BEFORE the WTC was hit -- I said to a friend, Well the economy's in the tank, time for another war....

Jenifer
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Well, some of us talk about it, occasionally...

--- Chuck Minne <mincam2 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The Thing We Don't Talk About 
>     By William Rivers Pitt 
>     t r u t h o u t | Perspective 
>     Thursday 23 June 2005 
> 
>     With the revelation of the secret Downing Street
> Minutes, which exposed the fact 
> that George Bush and Tony Blair had decided to
> invade Iraq in April of 2002, a 
> heated debate has blown through media, congressional
> and activist circles. The decision 
> to go to war in Iraq was made before any public
> debate was initiated, before the 
> United Nations was brought into the conversation,
> confirming that Bush's blather about 
> wanting peace and leaving war as the last resort was
> just that: blather. 
> 
>     So why did we go? 
> 
>     It had been suspected, and has now been
> confirmed by the Minutes, that Bush took 
> us to war on false pretenses and by way of a whole
> constellation of lies and 
> exaggerations. First it was the weapons of mass
> destruction that were not there. Then it 
> was connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda
> that did not exist. Finally, it 
> became about bringing freedom and democracy to the
> region, which has emphatically not 
> happened. 
> 
>     Threaded through the discussion was the belief
> that Bush and his 
> petroleum-company allies lusted after Iraq's oil.
> There was also the idea that Bush wanted Saddam's 
> head because of the "unfinished business" left by
> his father in 1991. Some whispered 
> that Iraq had intended to change the monetary basis
> of its petroleum dealings from 
> the dollar to the Euro, an action that would have
> spelled financial disaster for the 
> boys in Houston. Finally, many believed Bush ramped
> up a war push in order to give 
> Republicans a flag-waving platform to run on in the
> 2002 midterms. 
> 
>     All of these were on the table as reasons for an
> invasion, though most of them 
> were not included in public debate. Yet the real
> reasons behind this war, the real 
> reasons for many of our military actions over the
> years, were never discussed. As with 
> almost everything we deal with today in the foreign
> policy realm, the real reasons 
> we invaded Iraq harken back to World War II and the
> Cold War. 
> 
>     When the United States jumped into World War II,
> President Roosevelt ordered the 
> American economy be put on a wartime footing. This
> was a sound decision: the country 
> had to speed its industrial capabilities up to a
> sprint in order to manufacture a 
> huge fighting army out of whole cloth. The action
> was successful beyond measure. The 
> economy was invigorated, the war was won, and in the
> process the military/industrial 
> complex, so named by President Eisenhower, was
> established as a power player in the 
> American economy. 
> 
>     In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the
> Truman Doctrine, a broad policy of 
> foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of
> Communism around the world. The 
> Doctrine was essentially created by a small band of
> men like Paul Nitze, who were 
> the precursors of what we now call
> neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was 
> the mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to be the
> mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and 
> Dick Cheney. 
> 
>     The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the
> establishment of the "permanent 
> crisis" that was the Col