It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein’s major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon’s goal was clear: Destroy Iraq’s ability to resist. This was war.The more information that comes to light about the US drive to invade and occupy Iraq, the more pieces of a puzzle that point to significant duplicity on the part of George W. I’m a war president and we found the weapons of mass destruction Bush and members of his administration. That duplicity continues on a regular basis with Cheney claiming that the (already supposedly broken backed) insurgency is in its final throes, and Bush touting “progress” and “a safer America” at every opportunity; all in the face of a rising insurgency that is a hairs breadth away from a civil war; while the people who put Bush and Cheney back in the Whitehouse shrug their collective shoulders and (at least seemingly) prefer to believe ‘the war is going according to plan’ statements.But there was a catch: The war hadn’t started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002–a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before “shock and awe” officially began.
(emphasis mine)
Report after report continues to show that torture and abuse are far more wide spread than the “a few bad apples” rhetoric tells them yet mainstream America, for the most part, buys into, or defends everything that has, continues, and probably will happen on the basis that anything is worth it in the name of the war on terror.
Possibly, at some point, the American people will stand up and they will demand answers to some of these questions, and they will not be satisfied with the current stock answers of:
- we don’t do that
- freedom
- we didn’t do that
- a safer America
- war on terror
- a safer world
- weapons of mass destruction
- gods gift to mankind
- they hate us and what we stand for
- progress
It’d be interesting to compare that to all the other air and ground operations conducted in Iraq over the preceding decade.