Playboy: "If You Think The Iraq War Hasn't Worked Out Well For Anyone, Think Again..."

[kpete]

by Richard Cummings

In November of 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, asked Bruce Jackson to meet with him in the White House. They met in Hadley's office on the ground floor of the West Wing, not far from the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Hadley had an exterior office with windows, an overt indicator of his importance within the West Wing hierarchy.

This was months before Secretary of State Colin Powell would go to the United Nations to make the administration's case for the invasion of Iraq, touting the subsequently discredited evidence of weapons of mass destruction. But according to Jackson, Hadley told him that "they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale" to justify it. Jackson, recalling the meeting, reports that Hadley said they were "still working out" a cause, too, but asked that he, Jackson, "set up something like the Committee on NATO" to come up with a rationale.

........................

What Bruce Jackson came up with for Hadley this time, in 2002, was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The mission statement of the committee says it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations." The pressure group began pushing for regime change -- that is, military action to remove Hussein -- in the usual Washington ways, lobbying members of congress, working the media and throwing money around. The committee's pitch, or rationale as Hadley would call it, was that Saddam was a monster -- routinely violating human rights -- and a general menace in the Middle East.

....................

Bush couldn't go into Iraq without a major ally and Lockheed knew it. To sweeten the pot for Blair, Lockheed dragged BAE Systems (British Aerospace) into the F-35 deal. When BAE still struggled prior to the war (Goldman Sachs reported that BAE would have to cut its dividend), Lockheed began renegotiating the contract -- with the new version unveiled in 2005, giving BAE billions more to be paid "as needed." This put BAE back on its feet, able to build the Typhoon jet fighter for sale to Saudi Arabia in a $70 billion deal, saving 10,000 BAE jobs and 4,000 Rolls-Royce jet engine building jobs.


much much more at:
http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/lockheed/index.html

[Parisle]

1. This is how the game is played, unfortunately...

--- Every political figure is connected to industrial power hitters, and those are connected to others. Support and cooperation are traded, quid pro quo,.. with money at the bottom of nearly every deal or assertion. For the democrats to tackle this system will require some serious overhauling of our entire "political industry."

[redqueen]

4. game? GAME?!

forget 'mother's day'

it's time for us to get serious. it's far too late for this $#!^.

[Beelzebud]

2. When you profit from war, there must always be war.

Sick bastards.

[StClone]

3. Ahem, it's an old story

U.S. Civil War to Iraq's Civil War the constants include death and war profiteers. Both are the most detestable and should be diametrical oppositions yet brave men still swell with pride and die to make some pudgy white guy materially rich while patriotic dreams are fed to hoi polloi.

[redqueen]

5. beautifully said.

patriotic dreams, indeed. *sigh*

[zonkers]

6. "War is a Racket" by two time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler...

(snip)

WAR is a racket. It always has been.


It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives......

In the World War I a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?


http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm