Planet Basu – Rant, Whine and Demand a Special Prosecutor

There she goes again. In War, lies and oil contracts, you can just feel the desperation… the Liberal angst. The war is still overwhelmingly popular and George Bush’s approval ratings are still around 70%. We Liberals are flailing. What can we grab on to? Well… how about the same old lies, distortions, rhetorical manipulation and facts without context and perspective that we usually use? But, let’s crank it up a notch. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures. Here we go… the same old crap… but LOUDER.

It’s about the Oiiiilllll!!!

It’s about cozy deals for Republican insiders and campaign contributors!!!

Every day, another chip seems to crumble off the Bush administration's case for having waged an unprecedented pre-emptive war on a sovereign country. And every falling piece of facade reveals an uglier view of how the decision was made.

Keep repeating the lies Rekha. Yep… “unprecedented pre-emptive war”. Keep saying it over and over again. And Rekha… if you want to talk about ugly, why do you never mention the tens of thousands of mass graves (some with children buried alive…), the children’s prison… the torture chambers? Is it just me, or are you just a tad bit selective on your concept of ugliness?

There is growing evidence that a massive fraud was perpetrated on Americans and the world, one that our two-party system and checks and balances failed to prevent.

Good God… how did this get past the Editorial Board??? We’ve got to DO SOMETHING NOW!!! The very soul of the Republic is at stake! Our political system has failed!!!

The thing that gets me about paleo-Liberals like Rekha is that, whenever things don’t go their way, they blame the system. Rekha, the United States has survived larger crises than this. Actually Rekha… this doesn’t look like a crisis to most Americans. It looks like victory. It looks like our country got fed up with doing essentially nothing to thwart Islamic terrorism for nearly 25 years. It looks like we took the first logical step to deal with radical Islam. We did it with minimal loss of life. We did it for the security of the United States.

Now we have the CIA investigating whether a secret U.S. intelligence report miscalculated the Iraqi weapons threat that was used to justify the bombing campaign. Last week, a senior intelligence official was on the defensive, denying he'd tried to "tweak" intelligence data or that a Defense Department unit formed after Sept. 11, 2001, was primed to look for evidence to support a foregone conclusion to go to war. Much the same scene is playing out in Britain, where a joint committee of Parliament is looking into similar charges against the government of Tony Blair.

Okay… let’s take this at face value. Let’s assume the CIA investigation indicates that the United States intelligence community miscalculated the Iraqi “weapons threat”. How does this amount to fraud? And… and intelligence official denied a press accusation… Hey, that’s fraud!!! Hey, Tony Blair is under pressure from ultra-liberal factions in the Labour Party… now THAT proves it’s FRAUD!!!

U.S. administration attempts to link Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11, or al-Qaida, now appear to have been propaganda manufactured to pave the way for war.

Where’s your evidence on this Rekha? There has been more and more evidence that has shown a connection between Saddam Hussein and international terrorism. We've found terrorists and terrorist training camps.

Nearly three months after U.S. and British forces began bombing Iraq in what President Bush called his obligation to defend the American people against weapons of mass destruction aimed at us, none has yet turned up. Not a single agent of chemical or germ warfare to indicate Americans were at imminent risk.

Rekha, Iraq is a country the size of California. It’s got a lot of sand. It also has neighbors that would love to baby-sit these weapons. There’s evidence that before the war began, Iraq moved some of it arsenal to Syria. There’s also evidence that Saddam himself was deluded, convinced by sycophantic underlings that he had more chemical and biological weapons than he truly did.

I will let Robert Kagen from the (arch conservative) Washington Post respond to this in an article published today:

“ The absurdity of this charge is mind-boggling. Yes, neither the CIA nor the U.N. inspectors have ever known exactly how many weapons Hussein had or how many he was building. But that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and the ability to produce more? That has never been in doubt.”

Rekha… read this article and deal with the points it raises. Do the work. Oh … you’re in Iowa, writing for Iowans. You just need to sit at your computer, pound the keys and screech, piss and moan. Sorry… I forgot.

Yet on that pretext, our president insisted we couldn't afford to wait one more hot second for Iraqis to comply with what now appear to have been impossible demands to produce nonexistent weapons. We turned a country upside-down, devastating cities, killing thousands of people, ours and theirs, with no viable plan for what happened afterward.

Those poor Baathist thugs... they tried again and again in good faith to show us they had nothing to hide. We rushed to war. We only gave them 12 years. It’s not like the UN Resolution (you know Rekha… the UN… the crowning achievement of humanity that you adore and idolize so…) set a deadline of 120 days or anything… It was impossible for them. Saddam Hussein and his henchmen were all victims. They just wanted to get along and build a better Iraq for the Iraqi people.

And we “turned their country upside down”. Oh God… the devastation… the “THOUSANDS of DEATHS”. Kudos to you Rekha for not saying (but implying by not using the word casualties) that these were CIVILIAN deaths. Well, that was to be expected after we carpet-bombed all of their major cities.

“No viable plan”… Not a perfect plan maybe. You Liberals don't have a BM without a perfect plan. However we are dealing with the situation as it evolves. And, by all accounts (except for the liberal media) we are doing pretty darned well.

Like I’ve written many times before, it couldn’t be that you WANT the United States to fail…??? It could not possibly be that the creation of a liberal, representative, constitutional democracy in Iraq would be your worst nightmare?

More and more, it appears, to control Iraq in order to exploit its oil and business opportunities.

Repeat the lie again, Rekha.

Remember the administration's insistence that Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people? Then why was Halliburton, the company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney, given a no-bid contract to operate the oil facilities and distribute Iraq's oil? This turns out to be a far more extensive contract than was originally disclosed to put out oil-field fires.

No one is talking about taking oil revenues. In fact, a trust fund (at the request of the United States) has been set up to ensure that this does not happen and that Iraqis keep their oil wealth.

To answer your question, because the Iraqi oil infrastructure was in chaos, neglected by Saddam in favor of building palaces and other goodies for him and his inner circle. The Iraqi people cannot benefit from their oil wealth until there is a working oil infrastructure. Why Halliburton…? Because it is arguably the best and most efficient company on the face of the planet to do the job quickly. Yep, it’s an American company and it’s going to make money. Should we have given the contract to a French company…?

And why has scandal-ridden WorldCom been given the contract for Iraqi wireless phone service? And how is this setup - cutting the Iraqis out of everything from distributing their own oil to running their own interim government - any less exploitive than traditional colonialism?

So let me get this straight… you’re constructing a “no win” situation for the US. If we don’t get the infrastructure up quickly, we don’t care about the Iraqi people... they're languishing without drinking water and electricity. If we don’t let the Iraqis do it themselves, we're colonialists? Neat rhetorical trick Rekha. Judging our intentions by what we are doing in this difficult, interim period is, at best, misleading. And you know it. And you use it.

It may be tough as Americans to accept we've been lied to, asked to fork out billions of hard-earned tax dollars and had our families put in harm's way to boost economic prospects for a handful of wealthy corporations. But sooner or later, all of us are going to wake up to that growing likelihood. And then maybe, finally, we'll see some outrage.

Yes, it has nothing to do with Islamic Fascism and global terrorism… If we just wanted to make money in Iraq, we could have just done what the French and Russians did… make cozy deals with a murderous bastard and rake in the cash. Your myopia on this topic is astounding Rekha. Your hatred of the Bush Administration denudes you of any perspective. Perspective, objectivity and honesty are they only currency that a journalist has. Rekha, you appear to be broke.

Yes, Saddam was a dictator, but one we once helped to sustain. If that were justification enough for us to invade, then why haven't we gone after North Korea's Kim Jong Il or countless other bad guys?

Where is Saddam anyway, or for that matter Osama bin Laden? Does anyone care about the growing chaos in Afghanistan?

Rekha, you’re SO original… Once again, The Liberal canon on Iraq...

Verse 1 – It’s about OIIIIIIL. Yeah, right…
Verse 2 – The US created Saddam Hussein. Bullshit, the French and Russians supported Saddam Hussein. THEY sold him his weapons. THEY profited from oil revenues in the UN “Oil for Palaces” program.
Verse 3 – Why don’t we go after North Korea? Maybe because they already HAVE nuclear weapons… and, because comrade brother Kim is not directly related to Islamic Terrorism… and it’s a different part of the world? Should US foreign policy be based on one metric only?
Verse 4 – Where’s Saddam? Where’s Osama? Most likely - dead and dead. In any event, they’re out of commission.
Verse 5 – Although we’re arch-colonialists, we can’t even subdue a two-bit country like Afghanistan. Growing chaos… oh no. Girls going to school. Kids flying kites.

There's also a dark cloud hovering over members of Congress, including the Democrats, who apparently were so concerned with winning re-election that they'd go along with a popular president's unjustified war scheme rather than risk unpopularity and put a stop to it. Now not just President Bush but some Democratic candidates for president need to answer for it.

Oh… the poor Democrats… they WANTED to stop the war. But they were worried about re-election. Could it possibly be that the war was popular because the American people believed it was justified? Could it be that the system was WORKING because the Democrats either actually supported the war or knew that the overwhelming majority of the American people did?

So where do we go? Apparently not to the courts, the highest of which already showed its lack of political independence by giving Bush the presidency.

Jiminy Christmas Rekha, this column has turned into even more of a liberal laundry list than most. The Supreme Court stole the election. They “gave him the presidency”… Do you ever think, or do a bit of research before writing one of these things?

We need a special prosecutor, an independent investigation, public congressional hearings.

That's right... when all else fails… go back to Watergate. All I can say is, lots of luck Rekha. Not gonna happen.

“And we need more Americans clamoring for truth and justice in the way Americans have shown they can.”

Rekha, no offense… but you wouldn’t know real truth or justice if it bit you. And besides… in your postmodern worldview, aren’t things like truth and justice only subjective constructs used by power groups to advance their own agendas?