Another War, Another Big Lie
We all remember it – the time that the most respected member of the Bush II administration, sat before the UN’s Security Council blatantly lying about the fake evidence of Iraqi WMDs that didn’t exist. Colin Powell permanently stained his impeccable reputation by carrying Dick Cheney’s water to invade a sovereign nation just because. As is well documented now, too little and too late, Cheney and company lied their asses off for months to whip up a case against Saddam Hussein, to justify a full-fledged invasion which continues to destabilize the Middle East to this day.
The War Based on Lies killed over 4,000 American lives, maimed over 30,000, and created an entire generation of veterans with PTSD, and other mental problems. This is not to mention the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis murdered on their own soil. Trillions of US tax dollars were spent doing that, and we’re still paying today for a terrible result. These thousands of people and trillions of dollars paid for Bush II’s re-election in 2004.
Trump and his enablers are doing exactly the same thing again, except this time they don’t have a Colin Powell to lie us into war. There’s no one in this criminal administration who hasn’t already sacrificed their own reputations and careers and the altar of Trump Loyalty. Mike Pompeo made the rounds of Sunday talk shows yesterday beating the war drums and miserably failed to make a case that passed the straight faced test. He presented not one shred of evidence beyond the grainy video of an unidentified boat alongside an unidentified ship doing an unidentified activity. It looked just like the manure that Powell shoveled in 2003 to the UN. The others banging the war drums all wrecked what little reputation they had last time around and have no credibility this time around. John Bolton comes to mind as the poster child for lying us into war.
I’m no genius, but I knew from the very first moment that Bush and company were lying in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. I’m seeing exactly the same thing right now. Trump is lying. Pompeo is lying. They’re all lying to get us into a war because that is Trump’s only chance for re-election. Let’s not give him that opportunity.
Colin Powell permanently stained his impeccable reputation
Um.
Would that be the impeccable reputation he got by covering up for My Lai ?
1@joel – That’s overstated. He uncovered My Lai during the investigation over a year after the massacre. Did he actively cover it up? It depends who you ask.
2The Rethugs have been responsible for so many catastrophes in recent history, like Watergate, the Great Recession, the Afghan and Iraq Wars. And now Trump is wagging the dog by abandoning the Iran Nuclear Deal and forcing that country into a military confrontation. He and his henchmen have to go ASAP before the start of another world war.
3Sure as hell all this Iran bullshit smells like a four day dead skunk.
One tell is that almost no other nation is getting suckered into this one. A second clue is that the price of crude oil has remained static or declined, the “PTB’ ain’t falling into a panic either [in past years such ‘attacks’ near the Hormuz Straits would have provoked a frenzy].
Correction: “Colin Powell permanently stained his impeccable reputation”– MJ Colin Powell certainly had no “impeccable reputation”, he made his Vietnam bones helping to cover up the My Lai massacre. He’s been a ‘fixer’ ever since.
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Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station also nailed this whole jiveass Iran war runup.
He more or less concludes that these tanker “attacks’ are a false flag op by YKW. He was a [career] Navy intel guy in Cheney-Boosh’s Iraq War. His latest is :Remember The Maine”.
http://www.stonekettle.com/
‘Remember The Maine…the Lusitania…Gulf of Tonkin…EyeRak…’
Not that there aren’t valid hotspot issues out there. But Russian attacks on our democracy just don’t stiffen Chickenhawk woodies, not ‘sexy’ enough, no ‘shock ‘n awe’; besides ‘the bossman’ gets very nervous about that stuff.
4Way offfffffffffff topic, but. blog neighbor Sheilah Kennedy pays Ms Juanita Jean the highest compliment ever and is a must read. I will not spoil the moment for you. Click on Sheilah kennedy on the right sidebar and be impressed.
5Well deserved. Ms Juanita Jean. 🙂
6My clue that the Bush administration was lying was the WMD claims, the ones concerning biological and chemical weapons. In the 1990’s one of Saddam’s sons-in-law (Hussein Kamal al-Majid) who headed the Military Industrialisation Commission and supervised Iraq’s weapons development programs from 1987, defected to the West. He told UNSCOM as well as the CIA and MI6, that “Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction and related programs after the end of the first Gulf War. ‘I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.'”
7While the intelligence services were not initially certain of the validity of these claims, the likelihood the he was telling the truth was bolstered by subsequent events. Saddam enticed the son-in-law to return to Iraq with promises of forgiveness and, when he did, Saddam ordered him to divorce his wife (Saddam’s daughter) and then denounced him as a traitor. The son-in-law was killed a few days later in a firefight when Iraqi security forces tried to arrest him.
Combover Quisling likes to refer to things he doesn’t like as treason. I don’t like what Pompeo, Bolton, et al, are doing. Would anyone mind if I called that treason?
8Along with IQ4.5, Mike Pompeo deserves a Putin Participation Trophy. Those criminals used OUR State Department to hire trolls to attack journalists (basically everyone not Faux Not the News) who dared publish facts that do not support their “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” pipe dream. To further add to our pain those crooks used The Global Engagement Center which was supposed to be focused on combating Russian disinformation in campaigns and funded with $80 million to do just that. Wait for it, Donnie will probably expect us to be grateful he hired American workers. Although it would not be at all surprising if he hired ‘trainers’ from Russia’s FSB along with other ‘assistance’ from Putin.
9Gulf of Tonkin Affair anyone?
10I’m old enough to remember Tonkin Bay, which seemed dubious to me at the time. A whole series of ridiculous claims since then have left me generally skeptical of war-provocation rhetoric: Grenada, Iraq, and more. Given that Mango Mussolini and his enablers lie with virtually every word, their claims for this episode are both disturbingly reminiscent of past lies, and implausible on their face.
That’s not to say that I take all statements from Iranian officials at face value, since they have their own history of distortion. But it sure looks to me like an ordinary war-provocation skunk, dressed up in mullah-garb so we’ll just shriek in terror and not notice the fetid odor.
11Even my (then) 82-year-old life-long-Republican mother knew that claims about Iraq WMD were bogus….a woman who had mostly stopped listening to the news 20 years earlier.
I call “BULLSH*T” on this mess…so, how do we stop them?
12Ronnie Raygun’s had his “Gulf of Tonkin” moment when the U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner with missiles in 1988, killing all 290 people aboard, including 60 children. Captain Will Rogers claimed he saw a jet fighter descending in fast attack approach not a widebody airliner ascending after taking off from an airport. Anyone who has worked with radar would spot that lie. That lie was followed by more lies. Claiming Iran allowed its airliner to fly outside the corridor for commercial airliners. Claiming the airliner operated without using identification signals for civilian airplanes. Claims that evidence from civilian and military radars would disprove.
Prior to the Vincennes attack on the Iranian passenger plane, the U.S. Navy destroyed half of Iran’s Navy after Reagan officials blamed Iran for planting a sea mine that damaged a U.S. warship.
Now the IQ4.5 maladministration is blaming Iran for attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Trump officials claimed Iranian forces attacked the ships with naval mines and/or torpedoes. That despite the fact that Japanese company that owned one of the tankers clearly state that was not what they saw.
Calling and writing our Congress varmints is our only option to halting IQ4.5, Bolton, Pompeo and the rest of the maladministration. That and pressuring the media to tell the truth.
13Remember the protest crowds in D.C. and around the Pentagon years ago? We could have a rerun on that!
14We’ve got to take a break from this gaslighting, mind-numbing deluge of trying to make sense of our current situation.
15Monty Python, The Onion, Transcendental meditation, Jack Daniels, or a big fat joint. Pick yer poison. Just as long as we can take a break, and remember that our existence didn’t use to be this way.
Assume for a moment that all of Trump and Pompeo’s accusations about Iran are true. So what! This is really a fight between the evil autocracy of Iran and the evil autocracy of Saudi Arabia. No reason for us to be carrying the Saudi’s water in this. When Iranians fly planes into the Empire State Building, come talk to me about a possible military response.
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