From the Commander in Chief guy on why the Iraq war is the greatest thing America has ever done:
The men and women who crossed into Iraq five years ago removed a tyrant, liberated a country, and rescued millions from unspeakable horrors.
Unspeakable horrors. Horrors like hundreds of thousands dead, pools of raw sewage so large they can be seen from outer space, ethnic cleansing, 4 million internal and external refugees driven from their homes, US government trained death squads, a sectarian civil war, the flight of professionals (doctors, lawyers, scientists, university professionals) out of Iraq, suicide bombers, unsafe water to drink, violence and intimidation against women by fundamentalist religious extremists, massacres of civilians by Iraqi insurgents, sectarian militias, Iraqi government security forces and by the US military, torture, wrongful imprisonment of thousands of men, women and children, rape, the use of chemical and incendiary weapons against civilian populations, shortages of electricity, shortages of health care, rampant disease, corrupt government officials, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, these horrors were what came after the US invaded Iraq based on lies, lies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and lies that Saddam Hussein’s regime (which, make no mistake, was evil and tyrannical) had ties to Al Qaeda. As for liberating Iraq, that is also a complete falsehood. You cannot liberate a country when you continue to occupy it five years later with over 150,000 US troops and an untold number of private mercenaries paid for with American tax dollars. Their continued presence on Iraqi soil is refutation enough that anything approaching liberation has occurred. Yes we did remove Saddam Hussein from power, but at what cost to the Iraqi people?
In truth, the “cure” in this case of an American invasion and brutal occupations has proven worse than the disease. We have destabilized the Middle East, created terrorists where none existed before, destroyed our own economy and increased the risk of future terrorist attacks both abroad and here in the United States. Far worse, we have ruined the lives of a generation of Iraqis, by fighting a war that should never have been fought, all because of the arrogance, greed and stupidity of one man, George W. Bush. Of course, this self styled combination of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln will never admit the terrible war crimes for which he is responsible, directly and indirectly, as the result of his illegal, war of aggression in violation of International law. He will never admit the strategic error of invading a country which bore no responsibility for the September 11th attacks. He will never confess that his policies of torture and abuse have dragged our country into the moral gutter.
Indeed, only once, in a moment of rare candor, has he confessed the real reason we went into Iraq, a reason that had nothing to do with removing Saddam Hussein or the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Remember this statement by Bush whenever you read or hear him speak his many lies about the glorious war in Iraq, for its the only time he ever spoke even a small sliver of the truth about his motivation for initiating this horrible and destructive conflict:
”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. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition.”
Or as Alan Greenspan put it more succinctly and without any of the deception inherent in Bush’s factually challenged assertion that he had to invade to keep Al Qaeda from getting Iraq’s oil first:
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
