Oops, as it turns out, President Bush ordered the invasion of the wrong country in March of 2003. It wasn't Iraq but Iran we should've shocked and awed. Maybe somebody at the White House just got a little confused. After all, the names of those nations are spelled almost exactly the same . . . except for the last letter. And both are full-fledged members of the Axis of Evil, right? But according to the bipartisan 9-11 Commission, we blew it. Iraq didn't have a collaborative relationship with al Qaeda or the capability of building nuclear weapons, but Iran may well have had such a link and certainly has a functioning nuclear program. It seems that eight to ten of the al Qaeda who helped commandeer the four airplanes on September 11, 2001 passed through Iran from Afghanistan on their way to the U.S. Rumor has it that Iranian officials were kind enough not to stamp their passports so that fewer suspicions would be raised when eventual hijackers arrived on our shores. And Iran's efforts to produce nuclear weapons continue unabated (though some have intimated that an Israeli air strike might put an end to that prior to the November 2 election). The consequences of this little faux pas? More than 900 American soldiers killed, nearly 6,000 wounded plus ten to twenty thousand Iraqi dead so far. Over $120 billion spent on the war to date. Zero weapons of mass destruction found. And the U.S. military is stuck in an untenable position in Iraq for years to come, stretched so thin that responding to a real crisis elsewhere in the world might be a bit problematic.
Goodbye to the old ruthless tyrant, hello to the new one
Old Saddam has been tossed into the brig, but you've got to wonder about the Iraqis our government leaders have been hanging out with since then. First they cozy up to Iraqi expatriate Ahmed Chalabi and pay him millions to lead our nation down the primrose path to war. Chalabi and his cohorts claimed that U.S. troops would be welcomed with open arms in Iraq, then they supplied bogus intelligence about Iraq's imaginary stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, disinformation that Many of the neo-cons in the Bush administration and much of the news media in the U.S. took as gospel. Later we find out that Chalabi was supplying critical American intelligence secrets to Iran, disclosing that the U.S. had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service. The CIA wrote this guy off years ago, but like country bumpkins on holiday in the big city, the Bushies continued to bet on the three card monte until they lost their shirts.
Next we get hooked up with Ayad Allawi, recently-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq and relative of Chalabi. Australian journalist Paul McGeough reports in The Sydney Morning Herald that two witnesses saw Allawi summarily execute seven handcuffed and blindfolded Iraqi prisoners with his handgun at close range at the Al-Amariyah Security Center in late June. Allawi categorically denies the incident. U.S. officials in Iraq, however, have yet to do so themselves.
Abu Ghraib redux
Remember Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who expressed outrage at the furor over the Abu Ghraib scandal when it first broke and disparaged "humanitarian do-gooders" investigating the allegations? You might notice that he's been mysteriously silent since a May 12 Pentagon briefing for members of Congress where still-unreleased graphic photos and videos were viewed. Despite their confidential nature, Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has had access to some of the video footage and other images from Abu Ghraib. In a speech on July 7, Hersh revealed what some have suspected:
"And I can tell you it was much worse, and the government knows it's much worse, than they've even told you. There are worse photos, worse videotapes, worse events. . . .
"Those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. . . ."
If Saddam Hussein and other members of his regime are going to be held accountable for the atrocities that occurred while they ruled Iraq, who's going to be held accountable for the rape of young boys, the slaughter of innocent civilians and the needless deaths our young men and women that have occurred under U.S. sponsorship in Iraq? Just wondering.
