Was it really a mistake?
For me and you and most observers yes. But for Bush and Cheney? I don't think it was. Quite the opposite, it was pre-meditated, long before he fiddled 2000. Quite calauclated and quite deliberate. The war was an excuse and background music for other agendas
1: They've got their hands on the oil wells, and I believe I'm correct in saying Haliburton benefited more than any contractor to date?
2: The debts to the energy companies that Bush owed them for financing his election camapign have been re-paid, and he will doubtless take some non Exec pay off now
3: He's settled the family feud that Saddam half started when trying to assassinate his father and wife in Kuwait in 1996. I say half, as there are many tangled issues as to how Saddam got to Kuwait in the first place, and Bush 41, was famously tripped up in one of the live Presidential debates when Ross Perot (of all nutters) challenged him some of the detail
4: He's succeeded in ensuring that the American arms industry won't go for lack of market opportunities for the foreseeable future. His other big corporate sector sponsor
5: He's been able to introduce punitive legislation that turns the USA into a quasi police state not so far removed from the Soviet Union that they so used to criticise. America had always wanted something akin to the Patriot Act, but never dare introduce it formally (even though they'd been doing it informally for years). Now they had the excuse and my God they've taken it.
6: He's sewn the seeds of regional discontent that will eventually provide an opportunity to expand the remit into other countries when Iraq runs dry, or provide Israel with the springboard they want (although their last adventure into Lebanon might hav eforced a re-think)
7: He's also sewn the seeds to destabalise the Far East, an aspiration highlighted in the PNAC masterplan as they identified it as the region of the world most likely to threaten Amercian hegenomy, and in particular economic supremacy in the future decades.
8: Whether by accident or design he seems to have managed to propogate, or at least rewaken a dormant sense of christian self righteousness that he's plugged into with the objective of presenting 'head clothers' as the enemy of civilisation that I suspect won't easily be expunged from the national pysche now
9: He's also ensured a budget commitment to the intelligence services, and defence industry that will be difficult to reverse.
Do you really think that a few thousand working class youngsters from the slum districts of the rust belt being killed in the pursuit Texan driven oil aspirations are seen as anything other than a price worth paying? I think he'll view this as having got it right, and on the cheap to boot
Faced with 2,800 dead Americans or a secure oil pipeline running through Afghanistan which do you really think the likes of Bush, Cheney, and Rice et al would go for given their backgrounds?
I to would also like to invite Suny Bay to say he was wrong we were right.
Afterall if the Bush Whitehouse can admit it, than surely his more distant European disciples who were equally duped by Dubya must feel more comfortable with it now? In fact do they not feel a sense of outrage for having been made to look so foolish, lied to and generally humiliated for having been strung along?.
I'm waiting for the logical extention of their admission. The next questions that must surely follow are along the lines of did you really know? when did you know? why didn't you move to stop it? Why when Colin Powell turned up at the UN on Feb 9th with artists impressions of what a mobile chemical weapons laboratory might look like if you could ever find one. Or when hazy aerial photographs of a lower resolution than Adlai Stevenson had produced 40 years earlier, that showed nothing more than a roof being put on a factory, did you not start to have doubts? Why did you lie for so long? and only come clean after you wouldn't have to face an election again?
Now history has no shortage of genocidal murderers, and some have amassed quite staggering body counts. Bush might not be in that league (although I can't begin to imagine the indirect count for his actions) but he deserves to take his place on the lower reaches of this ignominious list, and possibly in its middle strata given the brazen hypocracy involved.
God Bless America -
The land of the brave, and the home of the free
