The Petraeus Report

I was not at all interested in the Petraeus Report. We have reached a point at which many seem to think that our being in Iraq- rather, our right to be in Iraq- is a given. That is the point from which we start: we are in Iraq...how do we do this thing right, now, and attain that elusive victory? This is exactly what was said in Vietnam.
We have no right to be in Iraq. This war was based on deliberate lies from people like Cheney and Wolfowitz and Chalabi, who turned the head of a rather straight-forward and simple President.

This war is illegal and it is immoral. To those who state that Iraq would be in chaos if we left, the answer is that it has been in chaos ever since we arrived. Since we had no right and no justification to do what we did, why are we now so solicitous of the welfare of the Iraqi people? There are 600,000 dispossessed within the country and 2 million refugees in neighboring countries. Were we ever solicitous of their welfare? We only care about our own image. We do not want to appear to have failed again as we failed in Vietnam. At no time did we ever stop and think about the welfare of the Iraqi people.
If someone is so foolish as to state that we did indeed have the welfare of the Iraqi people in mind when we liberated them from a " really, really bad guy", I reply that that is arrant nonsense. Our government helped to create Saddam Hussein. We armed him with weapons, rockets and probably chemicals when he was at war with Iran.
The iconography of Saddam Hussein as the patron saint of Weapons of Mass Destruction was conceived by the US government, sketched by that same government, and painted by the hands of that government. Furthermore, how can it be said that we had the welfare of Iraq in mind when we deliberately erased the organs of Law and Order, delivering the people of that country into criminality and anarchy? How can anyone say something so stupid?

If you say that we have learned from our mistakes and we are trying to make it right, the only thing we have learned, apparently, is to contimue to commit illegal acts, but to do so in the manner of truly professional criminals. It has been 40 years and more...two score and five...since John F. Kennedy began the national commitment to Vietnam. This project was similarly based on the assumption that our way of life was superior to that of everybody else. It was a commitment to the Church of American Superiority. Atque Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus: and outside the church there is no salvation! And if someone demurs from entering that unholy fane, Compel them to enter!

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