So, in one way at least, Iraq WAS "Mission Accomplished." Surprised?

[DFW]

I have always thought from the beginning that the Iraq invasion was undertaken for business purposes at the behest of Dick Cheney, and that the concocted excuses to cover it up were custom-made by him and people under him.

One more bit of confirmation now:
http://rawstory.com/08/blog/2009/05/05/former-unit-of-cheneys-firm-makes-up-vast-majority-of-criminal-audit-cases/

So much for their phony patriotism and Freedom Toast. I hope the indictments for this go all the way to the top, including ALL responsible guilty parties.

[aquart]

1. I'd like to see them hanging all in a pretty row.

But I'm not a nice person.

[NYC_SKP]

2. Actually, the mission was largely accomplished on September 11, 2001

Having the justification for doing what they wanted to do all along was the hardest part.

The rest was just going through the process that couldn't have begun without 9-1-1.

:patriot:

[Individualist]

3. Exactly

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

http://www.theinfovault.net/vault/politics/pnac.html

[leftstreet]

5. Mission Accomplished: Bush v Gore, December 12, 2000 n/t

[ConcernedCanuk]

4. Iraq was USA's goal for a major military presence in the Middle East

.
.
.

any excuse woulda done it - they started setting Iraq up in the 70's and 80's by pitting it against its neighbors

So the War-Machine was pretty sure that Russia, China, India, Pakistan etc., would just let the USA stomp all over Iraq

It worked . . .

(sigh)

[DFW]

6. That was the gamble, not the sure thing

The "maybe six days, maybe six weeks, certainly not six months" was for Fox viewers. No realists
in the Pentagon were really convinced of it. The said on the Sunday talk shows what they were told to.

The only sure thing was the billions that would be spent with Halliburton, win or lose. Actually, like
Leo Bloom in "The Producers," they saw that a flop would make them more money that a hit. The longer the
Iraq military conflict went on, the more contracts Halliburton and subsidiaries would get. And so it was.

[Occam Bandage]

7. They thought a lot bigger than a few quarters of profits for a few contracting firms.

This isn't 1914. The government certainly doesn't need to start a war to throw money at contracting firms for no real benefit. Half of our discretionary budget goes to the military, after all, war or no war. No, their plan for Iraq was to reshape the Middle East into a democratic, secular, free-market fiscal-conservative paradise happy to serve as an American trading partner.

Didn't work out so hot, but let nobody say the Bush White House didn't think big. Everything they tried, they tried in order to reshape America and the world. They tried to turn a projected Social Security shortfall into a campaign to undo the New Deal and replace it with an Ownership Society (that lasted maybe a month). They saw a foreign problem in terrorism and Mideast insularism and tried to reshape the entire region in America's image. That didn't work much better. They looked at the markets and at our tax code and reshaped them to be more business-friendly than America has been in nearly a century. It didn't ever really work out well. But they always, always, always tried to be "transformative."