Stirling Newberry: Why We Went To War

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6199

Why We Went To War
by Stirling Newberry | Mar 19 2007

Today, according to the FT, Bush demanded "No Strings" backing on Iraq. His proxies have filled the airwaves telling us how they were, despite all appearances, resoundingly right about invading.

Four years ago, America invaded Iraq. We had been engaged in a covert struggle with the government of that country virtually since the armistice that ended the Gulf War. The Clinton Administration backed a failed coup, and both the first Bush and Clinton had aggressively used the grey margins around war powers to bomb Iraq and constrict its commerce. The hope was to use contaiment to topple the regime in Baghdad.

We went to war, in essence, because both public and elite faith in this policy of imploding the regime through external military, diplomatic and economic pressure collapsed. 9/11 did not merely give Bush the political capital to invade Iraq, it created the rationale by which actors who did not stand to directly benefit by the war signed on board to support it.

When there has been a disaster of public policy, it is generally easy to point a finger at those who clearly intended to enrich themselves greatly. The attempt to create an annex to Texas in Iraq - a low wage, no law, low tax place to extract oil - is obvious enough from seeing how the true believer neocon hacks ran the occupation into the ground. It is not hard to see how Bush himself hoped to leverage both the positive and negative impact of the war for political advantage.

However, if it had merely been the dream of a few oil service companies, bankers and assorted military contractors to have a war, we would not be hip deep in the sands of Iraq with 3475 allied fatalities and more than 30,000 other casualties. Worth noting that if Iraq produced fatalities per casualty at the same rate as Vietnam, we would have over 12,000 dead. A number which, I am sure, would grab people's attention.

The places to look for why a small group could drag a much larger nation along for a misbegotten, ill conceived, misplanned, misexecuted adventure in imperialism, is because a large number of other people though they stood to benefit, or thought they stood to lose, a great deal more. It is these shells of interest which also had to be present for Iraq to have happened, and which those who cling tenaciously to lies and bombastic deceptions constantly are seeking to recreate. They hope that some event like 9/11 will come along, and reignite support for their failing enterprise.

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