Replies to post #199237 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Learning From Iraq A Final Report From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction

3/6/13

A Final Report From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction culminates SIGIR's nine-year mission overseeing Iraq's reconstruction. It serves as a follow-up to our previous comprehensive review of the rebuilding effort, Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience.

This study provides much more than a recapitulation of what the reconstruction program accomplished and what my office found in the interstices. While examining both of these issues and many more, Learning From Iraq importantly captures the effects of the rebuilding program as derived from 44 interviews with the recipients (the Iraqi leadership), the executors (U.S. senior leaders), and the providers (congressional members). These interviews piece together an instructive picture of what was the largest stabilization and reconstruction operation ever undertaken by the United States (until recently overtaken by Afghanistan).

The body of this report reveals countless details about the use of more than $60 billion in taxpayer dollars to support programs and projects in Iraq. It articulates numerous lessons derived from SIGIR's 220 audits and 170 inspections, and it lists the varying consequences meted out from the 82 convictions achieved through our investigations. It urges and substantiates necessary reforms that could improve stabilization and reconstruction operations, and it highlights the financial benefits accomplished by SIGIR's work: more than $1.61 billion from audits and over $191 million from investigations.


This report is also broken out by Figures, Pictures, and Tables.


http://www.sigir.mil/learningfromiraq/index.html

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Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq
Mushroom clouds, duct tape, Judy Miller, Curveball. Recalling how Americans were sold a bogus case for invasion.



—By Jonathan Stein and Tim Dickinson
| September/October 2006 Issue

At A congressional hearing examining the march to war in Iraq, Republican congressman Walter Jones posed "a very simple question" about the administration's manipulation of intelligence: "How could the professionals see what was happening and nobody speak out?"

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, responded with an equally simple answer: "The vice president."

But the blame for Iraq does not end with Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld. Nor is it limited to the intelligence operatives who sat silent as the administration cherry-picked its case for war, or with those, like Colin Powell or Hans Blix, who, in the name of loyalty or statesmanship, did not give full throat to their misgivings. It is also shared by far too many in the Fourth Estate, most notably the New York Times' Judith Miller. But let us not forget that it lies, inescapably, with we the American people, who, in our fear and rage over the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, allowed ourselves to be suckered into the most audacious bait and switch of all time.

The first drafts of history are, by their nature, fragmentary. They arrive tragically late, and too often out of order. Back in 2006, we attempted to strip the history of the runup to the war to its bones, to reconstruct a skeleton that we thought might be key in resolving the open questions of the Bush era. As we prepare to leave Iraq, we present that timeline to you again. MotherJones.com offers a greatly expanded (if now technologically outdated) version of this timeline, one that is completely sourced to primary documents and initial news accounts. It was our hope to make this second draft of history as definitive as possible. So that we won't be fooled again.—THE EDITORS

[. . .]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline

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The Worst Mistake in U.S. History -- America Will Never Recover from Bush's Great Foreign Policy Disaster

Ten years ago, George Bush made a decision that this country will regret for a very long time.

AlterNet
Tom Dispatch / By Peter Van Buren
March 7, 2013 |

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it.

In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long time.

The Madness of King George

It’s easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere. [ http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175448/peter_van_buren_chickening_out_in_iraq ]

By then, the U.S. “reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts -- at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned -- we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.

In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.

Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or... um... grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked.

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/worst-mistake-us-history-america-will-never-recover-bushs-great-foreign-policy

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Millions went to war in Iraq, Afghanistan, leaving many with lifelong scars


Corpsman carry a wounded Marine to a Chinook 46, April 7, 2004, as the number of U.S. Marines killed in a five hour, house to house firefight in Ramadi on Tuesday climbed
| David Swanson/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT

Posted on Thursday, March 14, 2013
By Chris Adams | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Ten years after the United States went to war in Iraq, one of the most common numbers associated with the conflict is the tally of Americans killed: nearly 4,500. Add in the twin war in Afghanistan, and the tally goes to more than 6,600.

But for the men and women who served in America’s war on terrorism, the number of people affected is far larger. And for many of those people, the impact of the war will last a lifetime.

“I give presentations all over the country, and audiences are routinely shocked and surprised at the numbers,” said Paul Sullivan, a former senior analyst at the Department of Veterans Affairs who handles veteran outreach for Bergmann & Moore, a Washington-area law firm that specializes in disability issues. “Quite often they will challenge me.”

Since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, about 2.5 million members of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard and related Reserve and National Guard units have been deployed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, according to Department of Defense data. Of those, more than a third were deployed more than once.

In fact, as of last year nearly 37,000 Americans had been deployed more than five times, among them 10,000 members of guard or Reserve units. Records also show that 400,000 service members have done three or more deployments.

“When I say 2.5 million people have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, jaws drop,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the chief executive officer of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “I know which lines are going to get gasps, and that’s one of them. I don’t think they appreciate how many people have served, and particularly the number who have had repeated deployments. You’ve had an unprecedented demand on a small population. The general public has been incredibly isolated from those who served.”

For those who did serve, the effects of the war will linger for years, possibly a lifetime, according to a review of VA documents.

Already, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced more disability claims per veteran than other wars on the books, including Vietnam, Korea and World War II. While Vietnam extracted a far higher death toll – 58,000 died in that war – the total number of documented disabilities suffered by recent veterans is approaching that of the earlier conflict, according to VA documents.

As of last September, more than 1.6 million military members who’d been deployed in what’s classified as the global war on terror – in Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily – had transitioned to veteran status, VA records show. Of those, about 1 million were from active-duty service and about 675,000 from Reserve or guard deployments.

And of those, about 670,000 veterans have been awarded disability status connected to their military service. Another 100,000 have their initial claims pending, according to a November VA analysis.

Those numbers are constantly climbing – and might continue to rise for decades.

According to Linda Bilmes, a Harvard University professor who’s written extensively on the long-term costs of the wars, the ultimate bill for war costs comes due many decades later. As veterans age, their health deteriorates and their disabilities – which might have been manageable early in life – worsen.

In a paper released Thursday, Bilmes notes that the peak year for paying disability compensation to World War I veterans was 1969; the largest expenditures for World War II veterans were in the 1980s.

Today’s veterans are far more likely to put in for benefits than their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations were. Beyond that, far more soldiers in this all-volunteer military have been back for two, three, four or five tours, and the long-term impact on hearing and from traumatic brain injuries caused by improvised bombs will be felt for years.

The VA’s disability benefits are awarded to veterans who suffer physical or mental injuries during their military service. They range from $129 a month to $2,816 a month. Separate from the disability payments, veterans have access to the VA’s health system, and so far more than 860,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have taken advantage of it.

Among the most pressing – and potentially costly – disabilities is post-traumatic stress disorder, a serious mental ailment that can have a dramatic, ongoing impact on a veteran’s life. As of last year, the VA’s health system had seen more than 270,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for potential PTSD, and the agency’s disability system had awarded PTSD benefits to more than 150,000 of them, according to VA reports.

In her paper, Bilmes says the cost of providing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with disability and medical care and related services will approach $1 trillion; it might top that if the number and complexity of claims continue to exceed estimates.

“Many Americas don’t understand the full cost of war,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont who chairs the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

“But we have a moral obligation to take care of every veteran who has been injured in war. And when we do that, that is going to be a very, very expensive proposition.”

Email: [e-mail]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/14/185880/millions-went-to-war-in-iraq-afghanistan.html

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Iraq War Cost $800 Billion, And What Do We Have To Show For It?

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Posted: 03/18/2013 7:32 am EDT

VIDEO:
Iraq War 10 Years Later, Who Got It Wrong?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/18/iraq-war-costs_n_2885071.html

For the past few months, a strange thing has been happening in the central Iraq town of Fallujah. Thousands of citizens, virtually all of them Sunni Muslims, have been gathering in public squares to protest the oppressive Shiite-led government in Baghdad. Sleeping in tents and wielding Twitter feeds and YouTube accounts, the young Sunnis have attempted to take democracy, and a certain sectarian disaffection, into their own hands.

It's not quite the Iraqi Arab Spring -- although that's what it's been tentatively called by some -- but it is a reminder of the stark failure of nearly a decade of American-led warfare in that country.

When President George W. Bush announced the invasion into Iraq in March 2003, the goal was to remove a dangerous dictator and his supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction. It was also to create a functioning democracy and thereby inspire what Bush called a "global democracy revolution."

The effort was supposed to be cheap -- to require few troops and even less time. Instead, it cost the United States $800 billion at least, thousands of lives and nearly nine grueling years (see the graphic below for a further breakdown of various costs).

The toll on the people of Iraq were even greater. A decade of war left chaos and impoverishment, hundreds of thousands of citizens dead and millions more displaced, and a vicious sectarianism that still threatens to rip the country apart at the seams. The government of Nouri al-Maliki, which has reportedly interfered with independent government bureaucracies and ordered the arrest of his Sunni vice president on trumped-up terrorism charges, often rules in a manner more befitting the autocrat the U.S. invaded to remove.

"Here is a country that's being liberated," proclaimed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a few days into the invasion, even as the first signs of the chaos to come began to stir. "Here are people that are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free."

Instead, today in Fallujah, the site of two of the war's largest and most devastating military campaigns, the very best that can be said is that two years late to the party -- not 10 years early -- the Arab Spring has arrived. But the government the people are rising up against is the very one the U.S. installed.

What does it mean to say that the war in Iraq was a wasted effort? Last month, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction filed a final report that found $8 billion of U.S. development aid had been "wasted outright," in the words of Wired magazine.

But nearly eight times as much money -- $60 billion -- was spent rebuilding the country on the whole, with very little to show for it.

And more than 10 times that amount -- $800 billion -- was spent on the mission overall, a boondoggle that left more than 4,000 American service members dead, 32,000 more wounded, and an authoritarian government in place that is little better -- and possibly, owing to its closer ties to Iran, worse -- than the one that was taken out.

Was any of that money wasted? Was any of it not?


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/18/iraq-war-costs_n_2885071.html

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Iraq 10 Years Later: The Deadly Consequences of Spin


President Bush announcing the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. Paul Morse/White House

Those who questioned the case for war have won the fight over history. But that won’t bring back the tens of thousands of lives lost.

(with imbedded links)

By David Corn
| Mon Mar. 18, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

One night, more than a decade ago, I was a guest on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show along with Bill Kristol, the godfather (or son-of-the-godfather) of the neoconservative movement. The subject: What to do about Iraq? The Bush administration had begun pounding the drums for war, claiming, as Vice President Dick Cheney had put it, that there was "no doubt" tyrant Saddam Hussein was "amassing" weapons of mass destruction "to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." As one of the few political analysts on television to question the rush to war, I noted that WMD inspections in Iraq could be useful in preventing Saddam from reaching the "finish line" in developing nuclear weapons. Kristol responded by exclaiming, "He's past that finish line! He's past the finish line!"

Saddam wasn't—as it turned out, he wasn't even in the race. He possessed no WMD nor any significant program to develop them. And his repressive regime had no meaningful connections with Al Qaeda. Yet in those dreadful months before the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, the cheerleaders for war inhabited a place of privilege within the media. They could say anything—and get away with it. Kristol could declare—as he did the day before our exchange—that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East," face little challenge, and gain plenty of debate-shaping attention.

There was at that time a sort of madness within the political-media world. With the nation still under the shadow of 9/11, prominent journalists had jettisoned the most crucial of traits in our profession: skepticism. At one point, I debated David Brooks, then of the Weekly Standard, over the necessity of launching a war against Iraq. He summed up his support for the endeavor by asking: Don't you believe the people of Iraq desire democracy just as much as we do?

In those dreadful months before the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, the cheerleaders for war inhabited a place of privilege within the media.

I was surprised by his naiveté. I was no expert on Iraq, but it was obvious to me that invading and possibly occupying a nation half a globe away could end up rather messy, and that a universal craving for democracy might not trump all else. It seemed to me that Brooks was relying on fairy tale analysis, projecting simplistic assumptions onto an extremely complicated situation. (Sunni, Shiite—how many advocates for war knew the difference?) Yet this was all Brooks needed to champion a war that would cost the lives of nearly 4,500 US troops, injure 32,000 service members, and add $3 trillion to the national credit card—and leave millions of Iraqi civilians displaced and more than 100,000 dead.

A more disheartening moment came when I was talking to a friend who was working for a major newspaper and whom you can now often spot on television. Weeks before the invasion, he acknowledged to me that he wasn't sure what to make of the Bush administration's case for war. But he was in favor of invading. Why? Because Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, was for it. My friend—an influential voice in the media then and now—had handed Friedman his proxy, and Friedman was all for the war because he believed it would ignite progressive change throughout the Arab/Muslim world.

Friedman, though, had adopted a curious stance. He noted he was "troubled" by how Bush was justifying the war by claiming Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda and observed, "You don't take the country to war on the wings of a lie." Yet he was willing to let people he considered liars mount a war—one that would require deft handling and an abundance of judgment to succeed. (The lack of sufficient planning for the post-invasion period was in itself one of the greatest blunders in US history.)

After the invasion, Friedman, now all in, displayed less nuance. In a May 2003 interview with Charlie Rose, he claimed the invasion was a legitimate response to 9/11 (never mind that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack):

What we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world…and burst that [terrorism] bubble. We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand…Well, suck on this.'

My friend, a smart fellow, was willing to suspend his own critical skills and defer to an influential columnist. That was a common sentiment: The Iraq matter was tough to sort out, and deference ought to be paid to government officials and self-proclaimed experts. There was also a widely shared sense that no one wanted to be caught on the wrong side later on, should a future act of nuclear terrorism be linked to Baghdad. So tying oneself to the mast with Tom Friedman—or accepting Bush and Cheney's assertions—was safe. If the ship went down, there'd be plenty of cover. You'd be wrong but you'd be in fine company.

Besides, the mass-murdering Saddam was easy to despise, and in Washington there have always been plenty of folks in politics and the media who eagerly await the right war in order to display the kind of toughness that is often associated with leadership. Democrats, in particular, recalled that votes against the first Iraq war—a war generally deemed a success—were subsequently used as political ammunition against them. It was no coincidence that leading Democratic presidential wannabes—John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt—voted in October 2002 for the legislation that handed Bush the authority to launch the invasion.

This tide of war was hard to fight. Most members of Congress had caved during the congressional debate. A few senators and representatives who felt railroaded by the Bush-Cheney crowd—including some Republicans, such as House Majority Leader Dick Armey—nonetheless voted for the measure, against what they later said was their better judgment.

Yet through it all—as Michael Isikoff and I later noted in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War—there was plenty of information inside the national security agencies—chunks of it uncovered by the few reporters who were doing their jobs—that raised questions about the Bush-Cheney march to war. The Washington bureau of the Knight Ridder newspapers produced a stream of prescient and accurate stories that challenged the Bush-Cheney narrative.

There were other outbreaks of good journalism and challenging commentary. On September 1, 2002, Chris Matthews wrote, "I hate this war that's coming in Iraq. I don't think we'll be proud of it. Oppose this war because it will create a millennium of hatred and the suicidal terrorism that comes with it. You talk about Bush trying to avenge his father. What about the tens of millions of Arab sons who will want to finish a fight we start next spring in Baghdad?" And after the administration began citing a New York Times story (based on information leaked by the administration) that reported Saddam had obtained aluminum tubes to be used to process bomb-grade uranium, the Washington Post published a well-reported article noting that the government's own experts had questioned this conclusion.

Yet the Post story was buried on page A18 of the paper. It did little to counter White House fear-mongering—such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's hyperbolic statement, referring to those same tubes, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

In fact, the overall tone of coverage at many news organizations often overwhelmed the facts reported by those same organizations. When Secretary of State Colin Powell made his now infamous February 5, 2003, appearance at the United Nations to present the White House's case for war, he was widely lauded on the front pages and network news shows for a bravura performance. Yet buried on the inside of the Post the next day were several stories examining the key allegations in Powell's speech. Inches into each of them were quotes from experts and intelligence officials disputing Powell's assertions.

The theatrics triumphed. In an unfortunate column, even the great Mary McGrory noted, "I can only say that [Powell] persuaded me." (She did qualify, later, that Powell "made the case against Saddam Hussein, but not the case for war.")

In June 2004, Michael Getler, the Washington Post ombudsman, succinctly summarized the problem: "Too many Post stories that did challenge the official administration view appeared inside the paper rather than on the front page." He provided a sampling:

"Observers: Evidence for War Lacking; Report Against Iraq Holds Little That's New," by Dana Priest and Joby Warrick, Sept 13, 2002;
"Unwanted Debate on Iraq-Al Qaeda Links Revived" by Karen DeYoung, Sept. 27, 2002;
"U.N. Finds No Proof of Nuclear Program; IAEA Unable to Verify U.S. Claims," by Colum Lynch, Jan 29, 2003;
"Bin Laden-Hussein Link Hazy," by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, Feb. 13, 2003;
"U.S. Increases Estimated Cost Of War in Iraq; Military Expenses Alone Projected at Up To $95 Billion," by Mike Allen, Feb. 26, 2003;
"U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms," by Walter Pincus, March 16, 2003;
"Legality of War Is A Matter Of Debate;
Many Scholars Doubt Assertion by Bush," by Peter Slevin, March 18, 2003;
"Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq," by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, March 18, 2003.

That last article, which was published on the eve of the invasion, is particularly noteworthy. It began:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0318-04.htm

As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved— by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports.

This story appeared on page A13 of the newspaper.

As I've asked multiple times, how the hell can a newspaper report that the president is leading the nation to war on the basis of charges "that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved" and not splash that story on the front page under a banner headline? The Post deserves no more blame than other major outlets—don't forget the New York Times and Judith Miller—but the decision to bury this particular story embodies what went wrong.

The Iraq War was a systemic failure. The leaders of the nation used misinformation and disinformation to whip up support for it. Intelligence analysts who knew better were prohibited from speaking out. Members of the legislative branch abandoned their responsibility to vet the misleading claims effectively. (When the administration sent a flawed national intelligence estimate to Congress on Iraq's WMD program, only a few lawmakers bothered to read it.) And too many reporters and editors, in the wake of 9/11 and the initial US military success in Afghanistan, were reluctant to confront Bush, Cheney, and their lieutenants. This allowed the loud voices for war within the media-commentariat complex to ring out largely unchecked.

Those voices echoed for months and years after the invasion. I vividly recall encountering Christopher Hitchens exiting the Fox News studio on an August day in 2003. He was kind enough to tell me, "Don't worry about this war. Wolfowitz has the rats on the run. It will all be over soon." The next day the UN compound in Baghdad was destroyed by a suicide bomb attack.

It took too much time for the swindle to sink in. A year after the invasion, with no WMD in sight, Bush joked about the missing weapons at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents' Association black-tie dinner—that is, made fun of the reason he sent American soldiers to their deaths and unleashed chaos in Iraq. A crowd of thousands of journalists laughed along with him.

Much of what happened during the Iraq War flimflam is now known and recognized. But those who perpetrated and abetted what Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff in those days, now calls a "hoax," generally paid little, if any, price for their mistakes or misdeeds.

Bush and Cheney won reelection, after their political allies swift-boated then-Sen. John Kerry. Powell has become a wise man courted by politicians and the media. Rice retains a measure of star power and was the only Bush-Cheney alum handed a major role at the GOP convention last summer. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was tossed overboard in 2006—someone had to take a fall for the lousy prosecution of the post-invasion war—but his memoir sold well, as did Bush's and Cheney's. None of the three expressed any regrets.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary enthralled with the nutty conspiracy theory that Saddam was the puppet master behind Al Qaeda, was rewarded with a plum: the presidency of the World Bank. (He is now a "scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute.) Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy back then, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Neocon commentators, including Kristol, were able to continue unimpeded on their saber-rattling ways, moving on to Iran and Syria. And you know the pinnacle Brooks has reached; he's left the Standard behind to be a Times opinion-page neighbor of Friedman.

The months preceding the invasion of Iraq were a lonely time in Washington for journalists questioning the justifications for the war, wondering aloud why the Bush-Cheney crowd would not give the WMD inspections under way a chance, and suggesting that there might be alternatives. It was impossible to ensure a serious and somber debate about going to war and the alternatives. Yet though they got the war they craved, the Iraq War crowd has lost the battle over the history.

The war was no self-financing cakewalk, and it is now widely regarded as a mistake, costly in blood and treasure, that was sold to the American public with falsehoods. The invasion did not usher in a progressive era in the Middle East.

(Suck on that, Mr. Friedman.) Iraq remains a mess. The Iraq War boosters have moved on to other enterprises and contentions, yet, 10 years later, they have had their assertions measured against reality, and they have been proven wrong and misguided. None of that, though, will bring back the Americans and Iraqis who lost their lives. For when it counted most, the spin worked.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/iraq-war-spin-bush-david-corn

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Photos: Tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq

Posted Mar 13, 2013

The American-lead invasion of Iraq to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein began on March 19, 2003.
The United States completed withdrawing its military personnel from Iraq in December 2011.
These images chronicle the stories of U.S. Armed Forces, the insurgency and Iraqi civilians over the better part of a decade.

Editor’s note: Some of the following photographs contain graphic content.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2013/03/13/photos-10th-anniversary-us-invasion-of-iraq-2003/5925/

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Top REPUBLICAN Leaders Say Iraq War Was Really about Oil

Posted on March 19, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Forget What Liberals Say … Listen to What Republican Leaders Themselves Say

Many rank and file Republicans assume that only liberals claim the Iraq war was for oil.

In reality, the top Republican leaders say the same thing.

For example, U.S. Secretary of Defense – and former 12-year Republican Senator – Chuck Hagel said of the Iraq war in 2007:

People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.

4 Star General John Abizaid – the former commander of CENTCOM with responsibility for Iraq – said

Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan – a long-time Republican – said in 2007:

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil

President George W. Bush said in 2005 that keeping Iraqi oil away from the bad guys was a key motive for the Iraq war:

‘If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks,” Bush said. ”They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions.”

John McCain said in 2008:

My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will — that will then prevent us — that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.

Sarah Palin said in 2008:

Better to start that drilling [for oil within the U.S.] today than wait and continue relying on foreign sources of energy. We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum – author of the infamous “Axis of Evil” claim in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address – writes in Newsweek this week:

In 2002, Chalabi [the Iraqi politician and oil minister who the Bush Administration favored to lead Iraq after the war] joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.

Key war architect – and Under Secretary of State – John Bolton said:

The critical oil and natural gas producing region that we fought so many wars to try and protectour economy from the adverse impact of losing that supply or having it available only at very high prices.

A high-level National Security Council officer strongly implied that Cheney and the U.S. oil chiefs planned the Iraq war before 9/11 in order to get control of its oil.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2008/07/did-cheney-and-the-oil-bigs-plan-the-iraq-war-before-911.html

Much more ...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/03/top-republican-leaders-say-iraq-war-was-really-for-oil.html