Adam's blogbox: AMERICA, WHY ARE YOU IN IRAQ? THE FOUR REAL REASONS THEY NEVER TOLD YOU, AND THE THREE FAKE ONES YOU FELL FOR.

"To this day I still don't know why we went to war in Iraq." Richard Haass, Colin Powell’s former policy director at State, made this confession to New Yorker writer George Packer. He should know, but he doesn't -- like most of us.

Fear not: in 10 years, the truth will come out, like a big turd dropping from the constipation of history. But meanwhile, you can read it here now.

There are seven reasons why we’re in Iraq. Four of them are real, but they've been kept hidden from the American people. The remaining three are fake, and they've been used to bamboozle us, or as the pundits say these days, “mislead us into war.”

1. THE REAL CHENEY REASON: OIL.

As CEO of Halliburton, Cheney shared the mindset of Texas oilmen. And for them, Iraq was a mouth-watering treasure ripe for pillage.

In Cheney’s Halliburton days, Iraq was producing almost 3m barrels a day. However, its potential was much more. Within 20 years its oilfields could, if fully exploited, reach Saudi levels (full-steam, that’s 11m barrels a day).

So there was Iraq, “floating on a sea of oil” -- this rich, plump, juicy plum.

But:

Iraq was socialist. The state owned the oil. And the state was ruled by a two-bit dictator.

Goddammit, thought those Texas oilmen, some foreign dictator owns our oil! The oil they stole from us when OPEC nationalized our businesses! Who does this Saddam guy think he is? Our future depends on one man’s whim. No stability. And the man’s a psycho: he could unilaterally crank up production to 5m barrels day just to mess with our pricing and sabotage our profits.

Only one solution. Take the bastard out. Divide the oilfields up among friends. Let some other dude – this Chalabi guy sounds OK – take care of running the rest. We can pay him and his cronies out of our oil profits to do our bidding.

Let’s have an energy meeting, Cheney tells his oil pals. They gather and have a proper conspiracy, divvying up the oilfields among them after their planned war.

Then some Federal body wants to know what happened at the secret meeting. No way. We’ll go to court before we tell you. We don’t want anyone to know we’ve been planning this war since before we ran Bush for president.

Cheney is one slick operator, smoother than a greased dildo up a virgin ass. Even when he was CEO of Halliburton and doing $73m in business face-to-face with Saddam, the future VP was positioning the company to move in after Saddam’s ouster. The month he became CEO of Halliburton (October 1995), was the same month Halliburton got a deal to put them first in line if war broke out in Iraq. They’d get the job of taking over the burning oil wells and putting out the fires.

Their subsidiary Brown & Root got a share of the $900m government contract for the post-war rebuilding of bridges, roads and other infrastructure. More important, it got the job of repairing the oil wells after Halliburton put out the fires.

The whole thing was set to go when Bush became president and Cheney became VP. From the month he started his new job, Cheney’s conspiracy started scheming how to pull off a war toute smooth. Then came 9/11 to make their job real easy.

Not that there’s anything inherently evil about invading a country for its oil, especially if the invasion can be said to be some sort of liberation. It might be bad manners, but it’s a good reason. Oil is oil. We use it, so maybe it ought to be ours to start with. You can do what you want with your country -- as long as we get to pump out your oil. The only problem with this good reason: it doesn’t sound all that good. Too damn mercenary. A scary, fake reason was needed to cover up the real reason.

2. THE FAKE CHENEY REASON: WMD.

Hey, those scary Arabs came and bombed us with our own planes. Our own goddam jet fuel -- from our own refineries -- burned so hot, the two towers collapsed like erections deprived of Viagra.

We’ve got to fix those scary Arabs. That Saddam dude is the scariest of them all. Imagine if he were stockpiling chemical weapons, and developing germ warfare capabilities, and trying to build a nuclear bomb … he’d be really scary.

Listen, that’s exactly what he’s doing!

We’ve got to stop him before he bombs us! We can’t wait for him to attack us! That would be suicide! We’ve got the smoking gun! It could turn into a mushroom cloud -- right here in our backyard!

You want evidence? Well, listen, we’ve got these satellite photos, and this is what one of their generals told us, and here are some documents that show Saddam tried to buy uranium rods from Niger, and there’s this source “Curveball” who told us of mobile bio-weapon labs. It all adds up.

It actually all adds up to a flimsy case, and they knew it, but they went ahead and scared the country, and it worked, even if the rest of the world didn’t believe that Powell’s UN speech proved anything, notably France and Germany -- with the exception of good old Tony Blair, who’s always found a comfortable living inside the US presidential ass. Good old Tony jumps up to help us with his own hype (Saddam’s WMD can hit Britain in 45 minutes!), while in Washington “the intelligence and the facts are being fixed around the policy” (as the Downing Street memo told us later).

Paul Wolfowitz famously called WMD the “bureaucratic” reason for the war. In other words, not the real reason.

The question is, did Cheney himself believe his hype?

Let’s consider the known facts. Cheney was looking for a reason to sell his oil war. He was bugging the CIA to come up with evidence that Saddam had to be taken out. He was grabbing on to the slightest hint, the merest rumor -- on to any scrap of information, any data, any source, no matter how compromised or dubious. “Curveball,” by all accounts an alcoholic “crazy, congenital liar,” was the source for Saddam’s biological weapons: but the mobile labs turned out to be trucks that made helium for weather balloons.

Why would Cheney believe any of this crap when he had his good reason already – oil -- and didn’t need WMD to be a good reason, as long as it was enough of a reason to sell the country?

He didn’t need real proof for WMD at all. Far from it – because if the truth be told, it was all BS. He sure wouldn’t like that to come out. So he started the war before the UN could finish their investigation. And to stop any truth-telling, he went so far as to commit treason and leak the CIA identity of a whistleblower’s wife.

Why would Cheney come down so hard on a tittle-tattler -- unless he knew for a fact that the guy was right? And that other truth-outers were waiting in the wings to embarrass him, if he let this Wilson bastard get away with it?

Let’s get down to the basic basics: Cheney would’ve had to be one massive dumbass to fall for his own bullshit, and Cheney is not stupid. You don’t get to manipulate a whole country into war by being stupid.

Ooh, and it worked so beautifully. Cheney and Chalabi fed their WMD “facts” to journalist Judy Miller, who dutifully wrote them up for publication in the NY Times.

The next day, if anyone asked Cheney about WMD – say, another reporter, or Tim Russert on TV -- Cheney would quote the NY Times as a reliable source that Saddam had WMD.

Slick. They even conned poor Colin Powell into trying to sell their story to the UN.

Cheney had a whole task force devoted to selling the war to the public: the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. They met weekly in the Situation Room (Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes, and Mary Matalin – bare-faced liars who’d bullshit their own grandmothers that they were virgins while fresh sperm was running down the insides of their guilty thighs).

When it came out that there were no WMD, Cheney and his conspiracy neatly sidestepped all responsibility and pointed at the CIA -- acting like they’d been sheepishly fooled, and shaking their heads sorrowfully over the CIA’s “faulty intelligence.”

The NY Times duly reported this “fact,” too. Having helped the war-makers to sell the war, the newspaper of record then helped these same instigators escape responsibility by blaming everything on the CIA. A full-service media support system.

A huge hue and cry was instigated over the CIA’s “incompetence.” George Tenet dutifully fell on his sword and was rewarded for his loyalty with a Medal of Freedom by the president himself (Tenet’s claim to Bush that the existence of WMD was a “slam-dunk” wasn’t proof of evidence -- only evidence that proved his tongue knew its duty was to lick Bush’s butt).

“We were all wrong,” they chorused. No, they weren’t all wrong. There were the bullshitters and the bullshitten. The bullshitters knew, and the bullshitten didn’t. The whole hype was neatly flagged by the President himself when he made a funny film for reporters of him looking for WMD under the furniture at the White House and not finding a thing. Only a man who didn’t believe any of it in the first place could make jokes about it. Wink-wink, nod-nod: see me make fun of my own bullshit.

3. THE REAL BUSH REASON: VINDICATE HIS FAMILY’S NAME.

Bush, also an oil man, subscribed to Cheney’s oil reason – hadn’t Texas oil companies given him $50m to run for President? But he had his own reasons for wanting a war with Iraq, before he even became governor of Texas.

He had personal family reasons.

His Dad had made war on Saddam. His Dad did not like Saddam. The feeling was mutual. Saddam had tried to kill his Dad. Saddam was a bad guy. A boogieman.

His Dad had expected one of two things to happen after the Gulf War: that a Shiite uprising would topple Saddam, or that the Iraqi officer corps would remove Saddam for screwing up by exposing them to a war with America (the way the WASP elite steps in and removes anyone who fails them).

But Saddam survived -- alive and well and taunting America. His survival was a personal blow to the Bush family prestige. Bush wanted to vindicate his family and “take out Saddam.” The defyer of America and the Bush family had to go.

4. THE FAKE BUSH REASON: 9/11.

9/11 gave Bush a good fake reason to invade Iraq. He let it be known that Saddam was connected to 9/11, and cloaked the Iraq War in the mantle of a pre-emptive war on terror.

Richard Clarke revealed that Bush had asked him to find out if Saddam had anything to do with 9/11 right after it happened -- even when Clarke told him there was no connection. (Actually, Saudis were behind it. But Bush allowed the Saudi royals -- two-generational friends of the Bush family – to refuse the FBI access to any suspects in their country.)

Bush only had to hint at a connection between 9/11 and boogieman Saddam, and the rest of the country ran with it. They wanted to believe it, so they did. Even after Bush himself admitted that there was no connection, more than 40% of the country still believed there was one.

5. THE REAL KARL ROVE REASON: RE-ELECTION.

Karl Rove had watched Margaret Thatcher fight a teeny war in the Falklands, and saw her polls soar because of it. A war can make you popular. Rove knew the best way to assure his boss’s re-election was to make Bush a wartime president. The country always rallies behind a president at war (hey, Bush ain’t like those namby-pamby Democrats -- watch him take the fight to the terrorists; trust him to keep you safe). A second term would give Rove the opportunity to push his far-right agenda through, starting with the destruction of Social Security.

6. THE REAL WOLFOWITZ REASON: U.S. EMPIRE.

The other good but covert reason (like oil) was the neocon reason: to establish a US empire after we won the Cold War, when Russia couldn’t check our imperial ambitions anymore. The neocons even had a cute name for our empire: the Pax Americana.

In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had a strategy report drafted for the Department of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy.

In it, the U.S. government was urged, as the world's sole remaining superpower, to move aggressively and militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions, but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when "collective action cannot be orchestrated."

The central strategy was to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

An imperial posture. Hubris of the highest order. The doctrine of a python fixing to hypnotize a helpless rat.

Wolfowitz outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.

In 1997 The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, was founded to press for this new strategy –- and for a war with Iraq. (The PNAC’s members were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condi Rice, John Bolton, Richard Armitiage, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Kahlilzad -- now US Ambassador in Iraq. It’s amazing how the fortunes of this bunch have risen since, like gilded turds ascending Parnassus.)

The PNAC urged:
a) a policy of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a country may be amassing too much power or could provide some sort of competition in the "benevolent hegemony" region, it can be attacked, without provocation.

b) nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political/economic ends; so-called "mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.

c) international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals.

d) The new policies "will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."

In September 2000, with Cheney now VP, the Project released its grand plan for the future in a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century."

It reads like a clear prescription for empire, as blatantly obvious as a donkey’s woody in heat.

The report begins with the premise that "The United States is the world's only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world's largest economy ... America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”

The report recommends new missions for the U.S. armed forces, including a dominant nuclear capability with a new generation of nuclear weapons, sufficient combat forces to fight and win multiple major wars, and forces for "constabulary duties" around the world with American rather than U.N. leadership.

Hey, we’ve got to rule the world, y’all. As owners of the biggest military dick, we’ve got to wave it over the world’s heads for all to see and suck on.

The report states that "the presence of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower" and proposes "a network of 'deployment bases' or 'forward operating bases' to increase the reach of current and future forces."

(Currently the U.S. has nearly 150 military bases and deployments in different countries around the world, with the most recent major increase being in the Caspian Sea/Afghanistan/Middle East areas. Call it a Pax Americana if you want, but the real name for this is Empire.)

As for the Persian Gulf, the report says "the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein … Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has."

Making no secret of its imperial posture, the report baldly remarks that "the failure to prepare for tomorrow's challenges will ensure that the current Pax Americana comes to an early end."

To further its ambition for a US empire, the PNAC channels millions of taxpayer dollars to a Saddam opposition group called the Iraqi National Congress formed by Iraq's self-styled leader-in-waiting Ahmed Chalabi (overlooking the fact that Jordan sentenced Chalabi in absentia to 22 years in prison on 31 counts of bank fraud). Chalabi’s INC had been gaining support for their cause by promising oil contracts to anyone who helped put them on top in Iraq. The Cheney oil conspiracy couldn’t have wished for a better partner. The PNAC reckoned a Chalabi-led American protectorate in Iraq was needed to:
a) acquire control of the oil heads to fund the entire enterprise.
b) fire a warning shot across the bows of every leader in the Middle East.
c) establish a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes, even those who were US allies.

In the September 2002 issue of his journal, 'Commentary,' editor and fellow neocon Norman Podhoretz writes that the regimes "that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced, are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen." This, he says, is all about "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam."

So this was the theory of empire in the Middle-East. The hard plan was to get Brown & Root in there to build permanent American military bases. There are 12 permanent U.S. bases in Kosovo today, all built and maintained by Brown & Root for a multi-billion dollar profit.

Why has the administration not offered an exit strategy in Iraq? Maybe the presence of Brown & Root hints at an answer. We don’t want to exit before Brown & Root builds our permanent bases, from which we can attack other Middle Eastern nations.

Halliburton and Brown & Root have worked cheek-by-jowl with governments in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia, Haiti, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Somalia during terrible times for these countries. Many environmental and human rights groups say that Cheney, Halliburton and Brown & Root were central to these terrible times. More recently, Brown & Root was contracted by the Defense Department to build cells for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for $300m (sounds like one more overcharge, doesn’t it?). Another company with a vested interest in both war on Iraq and massively increased defense spending is the Carlyle Group. Former President George H. W. Bush is himself employed by Carlyle as a senior advisor, as is long-time Bush family advisor James Baker III.

7. THE FAKE WOLFOWITZ REASON: FREEDOM FOR IRAQ.

On May 7, 2005, Bush heralded a remarkable change in his Iraq policy in a speech in Russia of all places:

”We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one’s liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others. And so, with confidence and resolve, we will stand for freedom across the broader Middle-East.”

This was a remarkable rhetorical about-face. Suddenly Bush was saying that instead of boning the Middle-East with a blood-hard military dick, he was going to zip up America’s pants. Why this 180-degree turn?

Let’s go back to what happened after the Administration rigged a brilliant photo-op by staging the “spontaneous” pulling down of the Saddam statue, and declared “mission accomplished” with Bush in a pilot outfit, his testicles deftly strapped to show a bulging package.

At first the Cheney conspiracy moved quickly to impose its neocon vision of empire on Iraq (even though, to its great surprise, our troops weren’t welcomed with flowers as liberators, as Chalabi had promised). When the first viceroy, General Garner, a great friend of the Kurds, wanted to have elections, they pulled him out pronto, like an unwanted pig from their ripe little pasture. They sent in Paul Bremer instead with a list of instructions. He worked on establishing voting caucuses in various areas, with the voting taking place in a controlled manner over a number of months – a rather obvious attempt to rig elections in favor of US-paid cronies. Even after a smokescreen of tasking the UN to pick an Iraq leader, the US still foisted their own stooge on everyone, Dr. Ayad Alawi, who happened to be a former CIA-controlled Iraqi agent.

Bremer also decreed an entirely new economy. Corporate taxes were capped at 15%. Anyone could buy a business in Iraq and repatriate their profits. The stage was set for Texas to take over Iraq’s oilfields. Bremer’s decrees guaranteed the perfect Republican business-friendly state. The people would not necessarily be free, but the business people sure would.

In the event, these economic decrees turned out to be mere wishes on paper for empire. Because most disastrously, Bremer enacted two real-world decrees:

a) Urged on by Chalabi, he fired all the Sunni Baathists in government – the entire bureaucratic leadership who were actually running the country. In one instant, he created the insurgency, and gave them their leaders.

b) He fired the army as well, and created the foot soldiers of the insurgency, as well as providing its weapons.

With these two acts of epic psychopathology, Bremer destroyed all security in Iraq. More: he nuked the entire fabric of a working Iraqi society, and ensured a rebellion (now bubbling up into a mini-civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, with the Kurds ready to hive off into their own state).

The Iraqi people will be paying for this mistake for the next generation at least. It’s got to be the most ham-handed, thoughtless act of modern history. It would have been better for Iraq if Bremer had covered its entire landmass in a six-inch coat of hillbilly diarrhea imported from Kentucky.

And then reality stepped in big-time to slap all U.S. imperial pretensions back into the dark bunghole they’d steamed from. The leading Iraqi cleric, a doddering old codger from Iran, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, got pissed at America for trying to rig elections. He demanded a same-day general election by all Iraqi citizens. He called out his followers, the 60% Shiite majority who’d been oppressed by Saddam, and they marched in thunderous protest against America’s gerrymandering.

Abruptly, power switched -- from the occupiers to the occupied. The Shiite majority flexed their muscles; and the imperial Cheney oil conspiracy was forced to blink.

8. UNFORESEEN: THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

''Wars generate their own momentum," Robert McNamara once wrote, ''and follow the law of unintended consequences."

Damn right. With al-Sistani and his Shiite majority calling foul, Chalabi was no longer an option (especially since he’d been unmasked as being an agent for Iran all along). Establishing military bases became fraught. Most frustrating of all, divvying up Iraq’s oil riches for Texas became less likely.

The administration was stumped; they couldn’t go against 60% of the occupied. They blinked and announced general elections, bending over for the cleric. In the election, they managed to rig a goodly chunk of votes for their stooge Alawi, but not enough to save his ass. A rigid Shiite won. Al-Sistani had single-handedly saved his nation from a US puppet government.

The real reasons for the war – oil and empire -- were marching right out the door, leaving their holders bereft: and one of the fake reasons walked in and said, hey, I’m the only reason left for you to be in Iraq. So now freedom for Iraq has turned out to be why we’re in Iraq. The last thing the Cheney conspiracy had in mind.

Because if freedom succeeds, Texas won’t get the oilfields, and the Pentagon won’t get the 14 permanent military bases it needs for US empire-building in the Middle-East. No way will a freely elected Iraq government allow either.

Ironically, the fake reason of freedom is killing the real reasons. Ironically, the folks who never wanted nation-building, who never got ready for it … now find themselves doing it … and worse, they’re helping Iraq to become our natural enemy in an alliance with Iran, the only other Shiite-ruled nation in the Middle-East.

Needed: a new rhetoric to put an engaging face on this humongous, unforeseen f-up. Hence, Bush’s speech. We’re getting shat on, but we’re smiling about it, all upbeat and bravado-positive, trying to ignore the Shiite crap in our teeth.

America has gone from the “paranoid style in American politics” during the Cold War … to the post-9/11 swagger of the Bush “unilateral” style … to what may now be called the “helpless giant” style. Instead of dominating the world, we’re helping it to defy us. Somewhere, Bin Laden is smiling. His reasons have worked out for him, even if ours haven’t for us.

Talk about the chuckling irony of history. We thought we were going to bone the planet, but now we’re the ones being boned big-time -- with Iraq as the world’s most uncomfortable Dick shoved right up Cheney’s ass. Instead of guaranteeing our empire, the Cheney conspiracy has guaranteed its downfall. In the end, absolute power has turned out to be absolutely powerless.

For the ancient Greeks, hubris unerringly invited tragedy. But our hubris cannot even console itself with the dignity of tragedy.

We’ve ended up with something merely pathetic. Blame the nature of our hubris, which is neither high-born, nor the flaw of us taking our noble status too seriously. Instead, it sprouts from the shallow soil of our boner for oil, and from the pitiful vainglory of us masturbating the biggest military phallus on earth. No nobility there. Only things grubby and mean. No wonder we’re meeting a grubby, mean, and most undignified end.

We think we can ignore it; shrug it off, tralala. Hey, we homebodies and Cheney chickenhawks are not the ones dying over there.

But meanwhile our kids, whose mothers live among us, are getting their faces blown off by explosive devices. For no noble cause at all. For the vanity of oil and empire. Tragically, we lack the moral dimension one needs for true tragedy. We lack the heroism we demand of our troops: we’re a nation of moral dwarves, starting with Messrs Bush and Cheney.

Cry, my beloved country. You’ve been duped into war. You’ve let down your sons and daughters. You’ve lived up to nothing. The stink of your grubby reasons will follow you for decades to come. Would that there was some miracle detergent to wash your hands clean. But there isn’t. There is only the smell of blood crying out to you from countless graves – 2,056 of ours, over 30,000 of theirs -- to stop this madness.

Yet now, having run out of reasons for being in Iraq, we can’t even do that.