Iraq war – praag.org

Ilana Mercer: A Candidate To ‘Kick The Crap Out Of All The Politicians’

Since he announced for president, real-estate tycoon Donald Trump has distinguished himself from the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls.

Trump claims he opposed the invasion of Iraq. If this is true, it would make him better than almost all his Republican competitors, who mulishly continue to justify the most disastrous military campaign in American history (besides the War Between The States).

Decisive and to the point was Trump about liberalizing ties with Cuba: “It’s time!” he stated. The man who wrote “The Art of The Deal,” however, would rather a “deal” with Cuba favored ordinary Americans and Cubans, and would know how to “deliver the goods.”

We inhabit a world of managed, not free, trade. Trump is no rent-seeking political rat like every other Republican competing for the throne (besides Ben Carson, who is similarly motivated). Better than any self-interested politician, Trump can probably negotiate winning deals on all Treaties in Force, to the benefit of Americans.

“I’m really rich,” Trump swanked disarmingly. Being independently and stupendously wealthy means that this American individualist can continue to march to his own drumbeat; be as blunt and bold as he wants and pander to nobody.

“His fellow GOP presidential candidates,” explained Trump, are “totally controlled by their donors, by the lobbyists and by the special interests. If we have another politician, this country’s going down. … I’ve watched the politicians, I’ve dealt with them all my life. They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance.”

In the productive, non-parasitical economy, Trump has been enormously successful. Career politicians have created the hot mess that is America. The Founding Fathers wanted regular citizens to serve the public, not live off it as a vocation. Such upstanding Americans were to return to their careers after serving.

The consummate homo economicus, Trump is a rational actor in the market place. Unlike the rest of the GOP contenders who’re guided by political calculations; Trump speaks like a man to whom rational economic choices are second nature. And so he gets that the “stock market is bloated”; that the Stock Exchange is a laughing stock, and that soaring stock prices are a consequence of centrally planned, monetary stimulus.

The business mogul surprised Bill O’Reilly with the revelation that he’d “have a great relationship with Vladimir Putin.” This is a good thing. Whereas in the past, Trump was motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the U.S. was dissipating—he now seems prepared to search closer to home for the causes of America’s economic inertia.

Also to O’Reilly, Trump “promised to build a wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it. ‘The Factor’ host stated that there’s no way they will pay for it.”

Although Bill is likelier than Dana Perino to comprehend the workings of tax and trade policy, Trump opted to calm the host down: “You have to let me handle that. They will pay for the wall, and the wall will go up.” D.C. insider Perino hit the roof: “On what planet is that actually true? Do you think you can make Mexico pay for a permanent wall between Mexico and the United States?” You can do that?”

A guide to the perpetually perplexed: Trump must be thinking of taking the populist path advocated by Pat Buchanan, whose patriotism is unimpeachable: tariffs. Levying a tariff on Mexico could indeed pay for a wall. Trade tariffs are not this libertarian’s bag. But walling off the deluge of Democrats crossing the southwest border is.

Finally, Trump is annoying the right people—from the liberal media to regimist neoconservatives like Perino and Charles Krauthammer, to noise making socialist Neil Young. In particular is the MSM furious about Trump’s matter-of-fact, informed assertion as to the quality of America’s largest immigrant population.

Donald Trump: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards, and they tell us what they’re getting.”

Brooke Baldwin, CNN: “… The notion of calling Mexicans rapists, people lose their jobs over words like those. And this is a man running for the president of the United States.”

Barbie, Trump created his job. He owns it.

And The Donald has certainly apprised himself of the facts. Perhaps he is reading Ann Coulter’s data-driven “Adios America!” in which she writes: “The U.S. government admits that at least 351,000 criminal immigrants were incarcerated [by] the United States as of 2011—the vast majority of them Mexican.” (Report to Congressional Requesters, 7 and 10.)

By the General Accountability Office’s “extremely conservative figures, Mexicans alone—forget other immigrants—have murdered a minimum of 23,000 Americans in the last few decades,” as compared to the Jihadis’ 4000 for the same time-frame.

I know, stick to rape; murder doesn’t matter. Cited in “Adios” is a report from the Inter-American Children’s Institute. It seconds what the media-political-complex has submerged. “Latin America is second only to Asia in the sexual exploitation of women and children because sex abuse is ‘ingrained [in] the minds of the people.’ Women and children are ‘seen as objects instead of human beings with rights and freedoms.’” (p. 168)

Ann’s “Adios” provides a critical-mass of evidence for Trumps impolitic statement. A few of Latin America’s proud sons are:

• Ariel Castro (kidnapper, sexual sadist, operated out of Cleveland)
• Elias Acevedo (173 counts of rape, 115 of kidnapping, Castro’s neighbor)
• Ingmar Cuandique (killer of Chandra Levy)
• Matias Reyes (contributor, Central Park rape)
• Conrado Juarez and family accomplices (Baby Hope’s rape and murder)

“Adios” cites well-concealed official records to uncover a preponderance of “Hispanic child rapists,” rounded up (and often released again), in “Nebraska, Indiana, even Hawaii.” When rates of child pregnancies and births are factored-in as proxies for rape; Latin America’s rape culture on American soil becomes even scarier.

Trump is on to something elusive: the truth.

Red State’s Erick Erickson concurs (kind of). “Trump’s campaign,” he writes,” “makes a hell of a lot of sense in an age when people no longer think their vote matters, but they sure want the crap kicked out of all the politicians they blame for making their vote meaningless.”

Get cracking, Donald.

The Iraq disaster haunts America

By Eric Margolis

March 2013 the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.

In October, 2002, I wrote a cover-story about Iraq for the first issue of American Conservative magazine, entitled “The March to Folly.” My article predicted the impending invasion of Iraq would be a disaster for all concerned.

The only victor of war with Iraq War, I wrote, would be Israel, whose nuclear monopoly and regional domination would be assured. So it has come to be.

Iraq was split into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. Anger against the US reached new intensity. The titanic bill for the Iraq War was $1 trillion, all of its hidden in the ballooning US national debt. Nearly 5,000 US soldiers were killed; some 50,000 wounded, many with grave brain injuries. Iraqi casualties are uncertain, though the total is likely over one million.

Parts of Iraq are contaminated by US and British depleted uranium munitions. Diseases, wiped out under the late Saddam Hussein, have returned. Saddam’s sadistic secret police have been replaced by almost equally cruel security forces of the US-backed Baghdad regime. Once among the most advanced Arab nations, much of Iraq today is ruined. At least it no longer threatens its neighbors.

Amazingly, America’s right wing and media still hails this disaster as a victory. Many Americans still believe the Bush administration’s lies that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. Some also still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that threatened North America.

The politicians who concocted this war, namely George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, have escaped any criminal censure for misleading their people into a conflict whose goal was to grab Iraq’s vast oil reserves and crush an enemy of Israel.

Similarly, the many print and TV journalists and commentators who acted as cheer-leaders for the war and its bodyguard of lies remain prominently in public view today. So too the so-called military experts who championed the war. Instead of slinking away after the war, they simply switched their aim to Iran.

Most shockingly, the insidious role of the pro-war neoconservatives in promoting the war was never fully revealed to Americans. Yet for a time, a pro-Israel neocon cabal linked up with aggressive big oil men like Cheney and Rumsfeld to drive the US into a totally unnecessary war against former US ally, Saddam Hussein. Israel’s leader, Ariel Sharon, thundered, “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.”

The small number of American journalists, Mideast analysts, CIA and State Department experts who dared challenge Bush’s absurd claims about Iraq’s supposed nukes and “drones of death” lost their jobs and have been sidelined to this day.

This writer, for example, was one of the first to assert in public that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no means of delivery even if it did. For my pains, I was blacklisted by a major US national TV network for whom I had regularly broadcast. Other blacklistings followed.

Bush’s modern-day Crusade against Iraq discredited the mainstream media in the eyes of many younger Americans and led to their growing reliance on their internet. Polls showed that only 24% of Americans trusted media to tell them the facts. The US media, with key exceptions, had followed the old Soviet media in acting as a mouthpiece for the government instead of a tribune for the public.

The Iraq War accelerated the militarization of US society and conduct of foreign affairs, and further curtailed individual freedoms endangered by the attacks of 9/11. It left the US saddled with a crushing debt. While bridges and roads across America were crumbling, the US was spending $80 billion on “rebuilding” Iraq. Nearly all this money was stolen and never seen again.

The crushing of Iraq, a small nation of 24 million rent by rebellion and wrecked by sanctions, was shamelessly trumpeted by the US media and politicians as a titanic victory for American arms akin to World War II. The aged US Republican leader John McCain, made giddy by the jolly little war in Iraq, sang, “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

As King Pyrrhus exclaimed in 279 BC after a brutal, bloody battle, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

Blair could have stopped Iraq war

Former British prime minister Tony Blair was the only person capable of turning George W Bush against the 2003 Iraq invasion, ex-United Nations chief Kofi Annan claimed in an interview published on Saturday.

Annan argued in an interview published in the Times newspaper that Blair could have changed Bush’s mind because of the special relationship between the two nations and the two leaders.

Annan said he often had contemplated what might have happened if “Blair had said ‘George, this is where we part company. You’re on your own’,” following the failure to secure a second UN resolution.

“I really think it could have stopped the war,” added the Nobel peace laureate.

Annan was UN secretary general at the time of the crisis.

A first Security Council resolution, which offered Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations passed unanimously in November 2002.

But a second resolution proposed by the US, Britain, and Spain in 2003 that called for action to be taken against Saddam Hussain’s regime was withdrawn when it became clear it would be vetoed.

The US decided that the resolution was not needed before military action could lawfully take place, and the invasion commenced on March 20.

The invasion triggered eight years of sectarian conflict in Iraq, resulting in more than 100 000 civilian deaths.

Annan rejected suggestions that his resignation, or that of then US secretary of state Colin Powell, would have altered the course of history.

And he dismissed Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s call for Bush and Blair to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court. Both had been democratically elected, he said, and were only acting in their national interests.

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Annan was the UN Arab League envoy to Syria from February until August, but resigned after his peace plan failed to prevent further fighting between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar Assad.

The diplomat told the Times that Assad had to go, arguing that the leader had lost all legitimacy.

Annan gave the interview to mark the launch of his memoirs: Interventions – a Life in War and Peace. – Sapa