Truth is stranger than make believe - The real mission in Iraq

Five years ago, President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and said, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Though he now says it should have read, “mission accomplished for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” the truth is the banner was accurate and the President’s real mission, to get us into Iraq by any means necessary, had been accomplished. I can handle the truth, I’m just sick of being lied to about the mission.

The lie was that we had to invade Iraq because Saddam might give a nuclear weapon to Al Qaeda, and in a 9/12 world, the risk was too great. The truth is Saddam Hussein was about as likely to have a nuclear weapon as the Lakers are to see Andrew Bynum in this year’s playoffs. And he was about as likely to give one to Osama Bin Laden as Kobe Bryant was to happily share a locker room with Shaquille O’Neal.

The truth is the President and the Vice President knew that once we went into Iraq, it would be almost impossible to get out. Vice President Cheney (who oversaw the first Gulf War as Secretary of Defense) said, “Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily end up seeing parts of Iraq fly off. It's a quagmire…If you go that far, and try to take over Iraq.” He went on to say, “The question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth, and our judgment was not very many. And I think we got it right.”

What changed? As Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney discovered there are some duties (like laundry, cooking, and cleaning) the U.S. military believed our soldiers, as professionally trained killers, shouldn’t be doing. He also discovered that “troop morale” could be boosted by providing soldiers with reminders of home. So when he became Chairman and C.E.O. of Halliburton, he basically created the Military Services industry. Through his connections inside the Pentagon, Halliburton and it’s subsidiaries have won billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to provide our soldiers with clean clothes, clean barracks, and all the same fast food they would find at the food court in their local mall. All of this stuff gets to our soldiers via convoys of trucks which have to be guarded and protected by (you guessed it) our soldiers themselves. Meanwhile, the bulk of the casualties (those “additional dead Americans” that Saddam wasn’t worth back in 1991) haven’t come in combat, but from cars and trucks randomly exploding. I’ll bet a dollar to a Krispy Kreme donut that our soldiers in Iraq would happily give up these tastes of home if it meant they didn’t have to risk their lives guarding the convoys that bring them Pizza Hut pizzas, Taco Bell tacos, and Baskin-Robbins ice cream. Meanwhile, the Vice President’s former business associates get richer and richer.

In the President’s case, all we have to do is look at what he did for work before he got into government: He was an oil man, and not a very good one. He has made a lot of money failing to find oil in Texas. I won’t say he was trading on his name and family connections, but just about every company he worked for was eventually bailed out of financial ruin by someone with ties to his father or his grandfather. The point is that he took office owing favors to Big Oil, and his disastrous experiment in Iraq has proven to be a nice payback for the industry. Look at the numbers: When he took office, oil was about $30 per barrel (now $120) and gas was about $1.50 per gallon (now $4.00). Does anyone believe it’s a coincidence that during the oiliest administration in American history, prices for crude and gas have gone up 400%?

I’m not trying to get all “Manchurian Candidate,” but forget all the reasons we’ve been told we’re in Iraq (from WMD, to the “Freedom Agenda”, to checking Iran’s influence) and just follow the money. You’ll find the people who have benefited the most from the Bush administration’s Iraq policy are people who did business with the President and the Vice President long before they took office. Then ask yourself if you can handle the truth.