The Things Ya Find Out About –
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.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)
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.
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
Until then it will remain, IMO, a sad state of affairs that history will not judge in the same light as those currently in power do.
It’d be interesting to compare that to all the other air and ground operations conducted in Iraq over the preceding decade.
It’d also be interesting to find out if they destroyed any of the mythical “WMDs” during these raids, and as mentioned, the ones through out the previous decade. Could it be that hitting specific targets actually worked, as opposed to invading and occupying the entire country? Fascinating revelations.
Interestingly, this is old news, too. The same story, more or less, was reported in the WaPost and NYTimes back in 2003.
When will my compatriots wake up? Who the hell knows. I don’t have much confidence.
Oh, and new stuff coming down the pipeline, too. Look out for it.
“Oh, and new stuff coming down the pipeline, too. Look out for it.”
Oh, dear. Gord and Geoff, stoke up the denial/distraction engine.
Wow, if Amnesty’s report offended Cheney, this latest development ought to give me a full on seizure of indignation.
I am in full agreement.
[...] This is not by any means the first time that the United States has violated the airspace of another nation with their military, in January of 2005 it was reported that they had repeatedly entered Iranian airspace to test defense and locate targets (we talked about it here), in September 2002, months before the US Congress authorized any military action against Iraq, US and British forces entered Iraq airspace (we talked about it here), and, in fact, we had our own little run in with related things in Fenruary of 2004 when US police crashed through the Canadian border at Niagara Falls in a high speed chase and a Canadian woman ended up dead (we talked about it here). [...]