The Collapse of Pretext

On March 20, Operation Iraqi Freedom will enter into it’s sixth year. It’s effects have caused yet unknown short and long-term harm to the world at large with especial significance to the Nation of Iraq.
The Department of Defense is honored as the single largest polluter on the planet, creating more hazardous waste in Iraq alone than the top five US chemical companies combined. World opinion of the US is at it’s lowest point in history with ¾ of the world’s population overtly in disfavor of American foreign policy, according to the BBC. A New York Times article from last year put the total expected cost of the war to the taxpayer at over $1.2 Trillion. 18 allied nations who were active in Iraq have since dropped out and of the current 166,000 troops active in the War only 10,500 are non-American. In fact the second largest military presence in the War after American troops are American mercenary contractors like Blackwater.
As of March 10, 3984 American combat personnel have died in Iraq and another 29,320 have been wounded according to official Pentagon reports. For the actual Iraqis, the actual figure of deaths and wounds may never be known. But the most recent estimate from September of 2007 done by the London based Opinion Research Business put the estimated Iraqi causalities at 1,220,580 (+/- 2.5%).
But lets bring it back for a moment and try to find some higher vantage point.
Following the cause and effect progression backwards we know that before any outcome can happen there most be an action to cause it, the Iraq invasion. But what causes the action? Nothing comes from nowhere just because. There is a reason a motive a logic to give meaning and purpose to the action. It is the all important ‘why’ of the thing. And it is the original, premeditated ‘why’ that we most examine for it leads to all other future ‘whys’. And those said secondary ‘whys’ are in truth nothing more than after-the-effect excuses.
Before all the retroactive pretext, before all the talk by the puppet pundits on the “success” of the surge (or purge), or before that on kicking out Al Qaeda, or even before that on how if the U.S. withdrew now Iraq would descend into chaos. There were the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Do you remember five years ago, most of the mass media refuse to, but it really wasn’t that long ago. Much of us were in high school or middle school or the like and we may have noticed something strange in the air.
The first official mention of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction came from President Bush’s speech to the United Nations Security Council on September 12, 2002. Immediately afterwards, with the loyal intensity of a shepard’s sheep dog, every politician with aspirations to succeed joined into the consensus. Joe Liberman, Hillary Clinton, a totally bipartism effort to convince the American people of the “truth”. Iraq was a threat and must be squashed.
And we ate it up, don’t deny it we all did, me to. But it wasn’t totally our faults you know, the timing was perfect. The first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we were on edge, they merely used that edge. We would have invaded heaven and hell itself if told they were planning a terrorist attack against us.
And then again it’s unlike we were hearing any dissenting opinion from our propaganda. The universality of every news source getting behind their President (including the New York Times) cannot be underestimated. The excepted message was singular, absolutistic and coming at us from all sides.
Hell, if every source of info from our teachers to the news to our leaders to the internet was telling us with conviction in their eyes that we all should become circus clowns, I swear to you that their wouldn’t be one man, woman or child out their not juggling in flamboyant pants.
What is interesting is the speed at which this WMD argument was quickly dropped. Before the war we saw Colin Powell’s photshoped slides at the UN and the pundit arguments on our national security. But after the “boots were on the ground” and we were actually involved in the war every newspaperman wanted, the WMDs seemed to fade away.
If you look at a graph of the number of times the terms “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was seen in news articles you’ll see it peaked in September of 2002 and had already descended to less than half that level by August of 2003. By the Spring of 2005 the numbers had dropped below September 11 levels. Interestingly enough, the number of times the word “Al Qaeda” used in conjunction with “Iraq” has not once wavered since 2002 even though this supposive connection between the two has never been proven.
So what’s the truth. Aristotle once argued that there is a universal objective reality separate from all subjective opinion and perception and it should be our job to attempt to understand it.
The multinational Iraq Survey Group released in September of 2004, a year after George Bush first went to the UN, the Duelfer Report. In it it detailed in absolute fact that Saddam Hussein had ceased all nuclear and other WMD programs in 1991 due to UN sanctions. He did seem to intend to restart these programs once the sanctions were lifted but only in an offensive attack against Iran. He had zero inclination to attack the United States or any of it’s allies and was of no threat to us.
The defining reasoning that the Iraq War is based on is a lie and by extension the war in general is a lie.

But that can’t be, nothing happens for no reason at all. But if the reason we were given is a lie there should there be a truthful reason we were not given. But what is this reason?
In September of 2002, at the same time President Bush went to the UN with his intention to attack Iraq, to justify it he released his National Security Strategy which has since been come to be called the “Bush Doctrine” in remembrance of the equally infamous Monroe Doctrine. It sates, quote, “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”
The point is plane. By the authority of providence, in the post Cold War/9-11 world, the US is the singular dominant power politically as well as economically. Subsequent sections of this document go on to say that the US reserves full right to engage in preemptive war, without any need for legal permission, against any nation that may or may try to threaten this hegemony.
But what this has to do with Iraq? We’ve already stated that Saddam Hussein had no long-range plan to threaten the US. The answers are several.
The most obvious is oil. With the conquering of Iraq, either directly or through one of it’s closets allies, the United States has some control over five of the top six oil producing countries. With the remainder, Iran, currently situated between two US territories, Iraq and Afghanistan, and should thus be considered the next logical target.
The most encompassing answer may be less obvious and may border on conspiracy theory but does have some historical barring.
During the Cold War the US engaged in an offensive/defensive strategy called “containment” against the USSR. They built up military bases in key areas around the Soviet Union in West Germany, Turkey, Greenland, Japan, Finland and Israel in attempt to geographically encircle the threat. It worked pretty well for the most part.
Today the USSR is gone and Russia as of little threat, but a new player has emerged as the key opponent to the US for the next century. China.
Everyday there are more stories of the unbeatable Chinese economy with it’s unbelievable huge military to back it up (100 million strong by the more recent NATO estimates). The likeliness of China surpassing us in all fields has become near inedible in direct defiance of the Bush Doctrine.
In response the US government’s foreign policy has been reconstituted to curb this threat by brining back the old Cold War strategy of containment. Throughout Central and Southeast Asia new military bases are springing up. Indonesia, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq.
What’s more with the addition of these military facilities and their location relative to the top oil producing countries means the US can effectively put a road block to China’s oil supply in a pinch or in general.
Domination is the name of the game. Political Science majors take note.