US Would Like to Forget It Invaded a Sovereign Country Recently
by John Lawrence
The hypocrisy is appalling. The US invaded Iraq, a sovereign country, in 2003. Joe Biden voted for that war. Many children and civilians were killed as a result. The rationale for the invasion was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't and George W Bush knew it. The invasion and consequent death and destruction in Iraq was based on a lie. The Guardian reported:
"Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.
"Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”
"The president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad. The White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement. Reporters do not appear to have asked about it. The country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line. Neither of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy."
The Iraq war and the war in Ukraine are similar in that a sovereign country was invaded on false pretenses. The difference is that Iraq was no threat to the US. Ukraine is within what Russia would consider its "sphere of influence," much like Cuba is within the US' sphere of influence. The invasion of Cuba by the US turned out not to be too successful. However, Cuba has been punished by the US for going on 70 years because it had the impertinence to ally itself with the Soviet Union. By the same token Russia considered it a threat if Ukraine allied itself with NATO. The war could have been prevented if NATO had given any credence to Russia's concerns in pre-war negotiations.
"While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used. Worst of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region.
"The Iraq war wasn’t the only law- or country-breaking military intervention launched by the US and its allies in recent decades. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya form a tragic pattern. But the Iraq war was the largest, loudest and proudest of America’s violent debacles, the most unwarranted, and the least possible to ignore. Or so it would seem. Biden’s statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by US leaders to forget the war and move on."
Today Fareed Zakaria said, "America's unipolar status has corrupted the country's foreign policy elites." American foreign policy too often consists of making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort to try to understand the other side, never giving any credence or credibility to it. Fareed's column in the Washington Post is "America’s foreign policy has lost all flexibility." America's foreign policy is sclerotic, the policy of an aging empire. Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on.
Updated March 20, 2023 at 5:33 p.m. EDT|Published March 20, 2023 at 9:01 a.m. EDT, from the Washington Post
A Chinese state-owned coal-fired power plant under construction in 2017 in Huainan, Anhui province, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change.
The report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to surpass its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.
Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.
Human activities have already transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, the IPCC said, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems. Yet global emissions continue to rise, and current carbon-cutting efforts are wildly insufficient to ward off climate catastrophe.
Monday’s assessment synthesizes years of studies on the causes and consequences of rising temperatures, leading U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to demand that developed countries such as the United States eliminate carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade earlier than the rest of the world.
With few nations on track to fulfill their climate commitments and with the developing world already suffering disproportionately from climate disasters, he said, rich countries have a responsibility to act faster than their low-income counterparts.
The IPCC report shows humanity has reached a “critical moment in history,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said. The world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing.
Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” Guterres announced on Monday an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate.
Emerging economies including China and India — which plan to reach net zero in 2060 and 2070, respectively — must hasten their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said.
Both the U.N. chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“This report offers hope, and it provides a warning,” Lee told reporters Monday. “The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”
A stark scientific outlook
Already, the IPCC’s synthesis report shows, humanity has fundamentally and irreversibly transformed the Earth system. Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities have increased global average temperatures by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn’t been this high since archaic humans carved the first stone tools.
These changes have caused irrevocable damage to communities and ecosystems, evidence shows: Fish populations are dwindling, farms are less productive, infectious diseases have multiplied, and weather disasters are escalating to unheard-of extremes. The risks from this relatively low level of warming are turning out to be greater than scientists anticipated — not because of any flaw in their research, but because human-built infrastructure, social networks and economic systems have proved exceptionally vulnerable to even small amounts of climate change, the report said.
The suffering is worst in the world’s poorest countries and low-lying island nations, which are home to roughly 1 billion people yet account for less than 1 percent of humanity’s total planet-warming pollution, the report says. But as climate disruption increases with rising temperatures, not even the wealthiest and most well-protected places will be immune.
Homes in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province were inundated in August. (Zahid Hussain/AP)
In 2018, the IPCC found that a 1.5C world would be overwhelmingly safer than one that is 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the preindustrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees.
Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal. Unless nations adopt new environmental policies — and follow through on the ones already in place — global average temperatures could warm by 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the synthesis report says. In that scenario, a child born today would live to see several feet of sea level rise, the extinction of hundreds of species and the migration of millions of people from places where they can no longer survive.
“We are not doing enough, and the poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, Senegal’s top climate official and the chair for a group of least-developed countries that negotiate together at the United Nations.
She pointed to the damage wrought by Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting and most energetic tropical storm on record, which has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more after bombarding southern Africa and Madagascar for more than a month. The report shows that higher temperatures make storms more powerful and sea level rise makes flooding from these storms more intense. Meanwhile, the report says, the death toll from these kinds of disasters is 15 times as high in vulnerable nations as it is in wealthier parts of the world.
If the world stays on its current warming track, the IPCC says, global flood damage will be as much as four times as high as it will be if people limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.
“The world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Sarr said.
A person carrying an umbrella passes a newspaper vendor on March 20, 2003 in Washington, D.C
(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
by Brett Wilkins, March 20, 2023
"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," said one prominent critic.
As the world this week mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, journalism experts weighed in on the corporate media's complicity in amplifying the Bush administration's lies, including ones about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons upon which the war was waged.
"Twenty years ago, this country's mainstream media—with one notable exception—bought into phony Bush administration claims about Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis," Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote Sunday.
That "one notable exception" was a group of journalists at the Washington, D.C. bureau of Knight Ridder—which was acquired by McClatchy in 2006—who published dozens of articles in several of the company's papers debunking and criticizing the Bush administration's dubious claims about Iraq and its WMDs. Their efforts were the subject of the 2017 Rob Reiner film Shock and Awe, starring Woody Harrelson.
"The war—along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of Bush administration officials—also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of ISIS, and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis," Abcarian noted.
She continued:
That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases: "WMD," "the axis of evil," "regime change," "yellowcake uranium," "the coalition of the willing," and a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative journalism organization, Bush and top administration officials—including then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Rice—"made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
Those lies were dutifully repeated by most U.S. corporate mainstream media in what the center called "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."
"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," David Corn, the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones, asserted Monday.
Far from paying a price for amplifying the Bush administration's Iraq lies, many of the media hawks who acted more like lapdogs than watchdogs 20 years ago are today ensconced in prestigious and well-paying positions in media, public policy, and academia.
In a where-are-they-now piece for The Real News Network, media critic Adam Johnson highlighted how the careers of several media and media-related government professionals "blossomed" after their lie-laden selling of the Iraq War:
David Frum—Bush's lead writer who coined the term "Axis of Evil" to refer to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—is "a well-paid and influential columnist for The Atlantic and a mainstay of cable TV."
Jeffrey Goldberg, then a New Yorker reporter who pushed conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and al-Qaeda to Iraq, is now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, an erstwhile Iraq War hawk, rebranded himself as a critic of the invasion and occupation, and is a multimillionaire morning show host on that same network.
Fareed Zakaria hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
Anne Applebaum, a member of the Post's editorial board at the time who called evidence of Iraq's nonexistent WMDs "irrefutable," now writes for The Atlantic and is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
"The almost uniform success of all the Iraq War cheerleaders provides the greatest lesson about what really helps one get ahead in public life: It's not being right, doing the right thing, or challenging power, but going with prevailing winds and mocking anyone who dares to do the opposite," wrote Johnson.
Other journalists not on Johnson's list include MSNBC's Chris Matthews—who infamously proclaimed "we're all neocons now" as U.S. forces toppled Hussein's statue while conquering Baghdad—and "woman of mass destruction"Judith Miller, who although forced to resign from The New York Times in disgrace over her regurgitated Bush administration lies about Iraq's WMDs remained an influential media figure over the following years.
In an interview with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—which is hosting a discussion Wednesday about the media's role in war and peace—Middle East expert Assal Rad noted:
Rather than challenging the narrative of the state, calling for evidence, or even humanizing the would-be victims of the war, the Iraqi people, reporters such as Thomas Friedman with significant platforms like The New York Times most often parroted the talking points of U.S. officials. There was little critical journalism to question the existence of WMDs and little reflection on important issues, such as the U.S. role in supporting Saddam Hussein in the 1980s against Iran, international law, or the humanity of Iraqis.
While there was some contrition from outlets including the Times as the Iraq occupation continued for years and not the "five days or five weeks or five months" promised by Rumsfeld, journalist Jon Schwarz of The Intercept noted that media lies and distortions about the war continue to this day.
"Perhaps the most telling instance of the media's acquiescence was a year after the Iraq invasion," said Rad, "when President Bush's joke at the White House Correspondents' dinner about finding no weapons of mass destruction was met with uproarious laughter from an audience of journalists."
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The City Finally Gets It Regarding the Homeless Situation
by John Lawrence
San Diego has spent millions on the homeless problem and the result is that it's only getting worse. More people each month are becoming unhoused than are becoming housed. On March 16, the San Diego Union reported:
"With downtown homeless encampments in his district surging in recent months, San Diego City Councilmember Stephen Whitburn on Thursday announced he will propose an ordinance banning tents and makeshift structures on public property.
“We’ve heard too many stories of people camping on our streets who have been randomly attacked, stabbed to death or even set on fire,” Whitburn said. “These encampments are unsafe. They are also a danger to our neighborhoods.”
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria joined Whitburn in the announcement and said he supports the proposal and would urge the full City Council to approve it."
The idea is that the city would provide safe places off the city public streets and sidewalks for homeless people to stay combined with an ordinance that would not allow them to pitch their tents on public sidewalks and other public areas. I have long advocated here and here and here that the city make safe camping areas and safe parking areas available in addition to shelters so that homeless people could pitch their tents there making the public sidewalks safe for ordinary citizens and businesses. In addition these safe outdoors areas would have rest portable rest rooms and other amenities which would make the areas more palatable and hygeinic. Shelters are expensive to build. Making available city owned vacant lots are not. Most homeless these days have their own tents and most have bicycles, cell phones and a few other self provided amenities. They just need a safe place to be, and that the city can provide at very little expense. The city is finally coming around to that conclusion! It makes the lives of the homeless marginally better, and makes the streets a whole lot better for pedestrians and businesses not to mention more attractive to tourists, one of San Diego's major industries.
"[Mayor] Gloria said the new local ordinance would get tough on people who refuse to accept help or move their tents, but still would take a compassionate and progressive enforcement approach. People camping in public places, including canyons and sidewalks, would be offered a shelter bed and only cited or arrested after multiple contacts with law enforcement.
"Gloria and Whitburn also said the city is planning to open another safe parking lot in the near future and is looking for a location for its first safe campground."[!]
Finally! Here's what I wrote on November 20, 2022:
"Recently Governor Newsom held up state homeless funds because cities were not getting the job done. Here's a solution: provide campgrounds and safe parking areas in addition to shelters and affordable housing units. In other words to all of the above present so-called solutions add safe campgrounds and parking areas. The beauty of this plan is that it would add minimum cost to all the other solutions. So while they are pursuing the more costly solutions, it would at least get the homeless off the public streets where they are interfering with pedestrian thoroughfares and businesses in general, and would provide them with an an enhanced version of their present living accommodations which are mainly in tents. It would also be more safe and sanitary. They would still be mainly in tents until more robust and expensive solutions can be found but at least they could be provided with portable toilets, showers and dumpster facilities as well as security. In addition social services could be more readily provided than the present solution of finding them on the public streets to offer them. What is wrong with these politicians? They could solve the homeless "problem" tomorrow at little or no expense as far as getting the homeless off public streets which is at least half the problem. The city owns a lot of vacant lots suitable for rural campsites and safe parking areas for those with vehicles. Portable rest room facilities could make the lot of the homeless and ordinary citizens immeasurably better if they would only use them.
So here is my solution, and then I'll tell you why it will never be implemented. Set aside land for free campgrounds just as a city sets aside land for parks. These should be open to all people not just the "homeless" at some snapshot in time. The financial savings from not building lumber and concrete housing would be immense. These campgrounds should have basic services like rest room facilities and showers. Also trash collection and security. The homeless can provide their own tents as they already have which are strewn all over public sidewalks. This solution accomplishes two very important goals: 1) it provides a marginally better lifestyle for the homeless with much better sanitary conditions and 2) it gets the homeless off the streets and sidewalks letting the general public feel safe in using them again. The money saved in police and hospital resources would probably more than pay for the minimal services provided. In addition social worker services in terms of mental health, drug counseling and job search might be provided as they say they want to provide today.
I'm looking forward to safe and hygienic public city streets in San Diego, and as an Uber driver, not having to apologize to tourists about the homeless problem!
More on housing: Newsom also said he will provide 1,200 tiny homes to jurisdictions across the state — including 500 in Los Angeles, 150 in San Diego County, 200 in San Jose and 350 in Sacramento — to be used as a temporary housing option for people immediately leaving the streets. He has tapped the National Guard to help deliver the units.
One of the great things that Biden has done is to take the tax issue away from Republicans. Remember when George H R Bush said, "Read my lips. No new taxes." The conventional wisdom at that time was that if taxes were raised, they would be raised on everyone from Joe Six Pack to Warren Buffet. It was also conventional wisdom that tax cuts would apply to everyone from the very rich to the very poor. The American public was not sophisticated enough to know that Republican tax cuts, although they would apply to everyone, were much more favorable to the rich than they were to the poor. Now Joe Biden has completely altered that narrative. In Joe Biden's world tax increases apply only to the rich and tax cuts apply only to the poor. What a major paradigm shift! Biden has repeated his mantra so many times that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 that now that scenario is starting to take hold in the American mind.
It's about time. The American public is starting to wake up to the reality that the very rich pay taxes at a lower rate than a nurse or a teacher or a fireman. If you're a hedge fund manager, you can take advantage of the 'carried interest' loophole to pay less than your fair share. As economic inequality has soared in the era of easy money, the very rich could take advantage of all sorts of games to make themselves even richer while most working people are living paycheck to paycheck. One way to restore some measure of equality is to increase taxes on the rich while cutting them on the poor. This idea was unheard of even a few years ago. Republicans rue the day when it was heard of thanks to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders among others. Another way to restore some semblance of equality would be to tax wealth in addition to taxing income. People with assets, say, more than $50 million should pay a tax on their wealth while middle class and poor should be given help to start creating wealth for themselves. That would probably be something to do with home ownership since this is the way most middle class people have been able to create wealth for themselves.
However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people of modest means to create wealth through home ownership because real estate prices have gone through the roof. It has become increasingly difficult for young people to come up with a down payment for a house, much less to make their monthly mortgage payments. The net result is that more and more people are forced into the situation of never owning property and being life time renters. This is the plan as private equity and hedge fund managers have accessed easy low interest money to buy up real estate and then rent it out so that the typical middle income young family is now renting a home from a hedge fund. NBC News reports: "The lack of supply of single-family homes has pushed up housing prices in many markets across the country — but would-be homebuyers find they are being outbid not just by other home seekers, but also by hedge funds." Hedge funds like the Blackstone group come in with all cash offers which are more attractive to sellers than the terms that average Joes and Janes can come up with. The Real Deal reports:
"Blackstone Group is planning to buy about 5,800 apartment units in San Diego for more than $1 billion.
"The New York-based private equity and investment firm has agreed to purchase 66 complexes across the city from the Conrad Prebys Foundation, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. It also plans to make $100 million in improvements to the properties.
"With the deal, Blackstone will own 6,700 units in the Southern California city. It already owns $4.5 billion of assets in the city, including the Legoland theme park and the historic Hotel del Coronado.
"“We look forward to ensuring that these properties continue to provide the community with a high-quality rental option at a good value,” Blackstone Real Estate’s global co-head, Kathleen McCarthy told the Union-Tribune.""
According to the San Diego Union, "The deal makes Blackstone one of the biggest real estate holders in San Diego County." The writing on the wall is that, if you want to own a home, you have to move out of San Diego where the median home price is $855,000. For instance the median home price in Indianapolis is $229,900.
Dennis Kucinich makes the Comparison. How soon we forget about the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. Now the warmakers are at it again using Ukraine as a proxy. Read Kucinich's analysis and weep.
IRAQ PLUS 20 - Lies as Weapons of Mass Destruction
Lies and the Spreading of Fake Information - Photo by Kentoh
Twenty years ago this month, America was led into a $5 trillion war. It cost the lives of more than a million Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers. The Iraq War was based on the transparent lies of leaders whose judgment was hijacked by neoconservative ideologues. The neocons see America as the center of the universe, from which we must rule the world and seize its resources. When that is one’s starting point, diplomacy is archaic.
Events after 9/11 were deliberately twisted by the mad martinets of the Project for the New American Century, those monomaniacal specimens locked in the amber of a Post WWII, unipolar era.
It was those same neocons who impressed upon us their preconceived but instrumental narrative that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (who had nothing to do with 9/11) was the great evil in the world, requiring he and his nation be destroyed.
Once accomplished, the neocons leapt over the wreckage they have created. On to the next conjured enemy. Empire, always empire: Bleed Russia, using the brave Ukrainians as a pawn, then pivot to China, war in no less than three years!
The western media, with few exceptions (Pentagon Papers and Watergate), have been dutiful spear-carriers for the U.S. government. Those who raised questions about the perilous path in Iraq 20 years ago were condemned as useful idiots, censored and cancelled. It is happening again, this time with the lock-step march toward war with China. Ukraine is being sold out. It has never been about freedom. It has been about controlling an energy market.
Post-hoc analysis of war is always painful. “If I only knew then what I know now, I would not have supported the war,” is a favorite apologia of some of the more stalwart supporters of invading Iraq. I was a member of the United States Congress from 1997-2013. Over a period of a dozen years, I delivered at least 341 speeches on the floor of the House in opposition to the Iraq war, which I saw as a criminal misuse of power. I knew then and I know now.
Just as we ignored diplomacy in Iraq, America has refused diplomacy that could have prevented bloodshed in Ukraine, choosing instead to pursue a geopolitical fantasy of deposing Putin with the help of Europe.
The U.S. is escalating with Russia at this writing, as a U.S. drone and a Russian fighter jet collided above the Black Sea. The U.S. has been practicing missile launches in the direction of St. Petersburg, sending B-52s over the Baltics towards Russia. Simultaneously the U.S. ratchets up aggression against China, as we threaten to make Taiwan our next Ukraine.
Iraq stands as an important tale of U.S. government arrogance, deception and depravity and the increased danger when there is a media buy-in. The cavalcade of Iraq chaos recited in the timeline below, demonstrates that the perils of prevarication are extreme and the consequences earth shattering.
Please tell me it can’t happen again…!
Twenty years ago, America descended into war, pronouncement by pronouncement. Read the words below, and the certainty with which those who took us to war expressed themselves as they led us blindly into a maelstrom of deceit and mass murder rocking the cradle of civilization. Tell me it can’t happen again.
In the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as intelligence agencies stumbled and dissembled in often chaotic private briefings with members of Congress, I heard rumors around Capitol Hill that Iraq was going to be made to pay the price for the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Iraq? What did Iraq have to do with 9/11? Nothing. But it had everything to do with dying embers of a unipolar world.
Through the following year, the highest U.S. administrative officials made concerted efforts to conflate Iraq with 9/11 and to make claims that were unsubstantiated or and even rejected by intelligence agencies.
This timeline and quotes are by no means complete. But they are characteristic of the much-publicized accusations made against Iraq that led to the March 19, 2003 United States attack on that nation and its people.
Read this and weep, not just for the Iraqi people, but for our own children and grandchildren:
1/29/02: [States such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea] “and their terrorist allies constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world, by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger.” --President Bush, State of the Union address.
2/2/02: “His [Saddam Hussein’s] regime has had high-level contacts with al Qaeda going back a decade and has provided training to al Qaeda terrorists.” -- Vice President Cheney, Speech to Air National Guard Senior Leadership.
3/17/02: “We know they [Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Press Conference with Crown Prince of Bahrain.
3/19/02: “…and we know they are pursuing nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Press Briefing with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon in Israel.
3/24/02: “He [Hussein] is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time…” -- Vice President Cheney, CNN Late Edition.
3/24/02: “The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons… is I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it.” -- Vice President Cheney on CBS’ Face the Nation.
5/19/02: “We know he’s got chemicals and biological (sic) and we know he’s working on nuclear.” -- Vice President Cheney, NBC’s Meet the Press.
8/26/02: “We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He is amassing them to use against our friends, our enemies and against us.” -- Vice President Cheney to the VFW 103rd Convention.
9/8/02: “We know he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon… The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” -- President Bush’s National Security Adviser, Dr. Condoleeza Rice. CNN with Wolf Blitzer.
9/8/02: “…he [Saddam Hussein] has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon, that there are efforts under way inside Iraq to significantly expand his capability.” -- Vice President Cheney, NBC Meet the Press.
9/8/02: “He is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, NBC Meet the Press.
9/12/02: “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence.” -- President Bush to UN General Assembly.
9/16/02: “Iraq continues to defy us and the world, we will move deliberately, yet decisively, to hold Iraq to account….” -- President Bush, speech in Iowa.
9/19/02: No “terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.” -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Statement to Congress.
9/28/02: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Queda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” --President Bush, Weekly Radio Address to the Nation.
10/2/02: “The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so.” -- President Bush from the White House.
10/5/02: “In defiance of the United Nations, Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons.” -- President Bush speech.
Early on October 2, 2002, President Bush, surrounded by leaders of both political parties, including Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, a future presidential candidate, announced White House-prepared legislation to be brought to Congress entitled “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.” (Also known as the Iraq War resolution.)
When I first read the text of the Iraq War Resolution, I was incredulous.
So, this was the factual narrative the White House intended to pursue to attempt to persuade Congress to authorize a military attack on Iraq?
I immediately went to work, dissecting the claims made in the war resolution, quickly reviewing massive notebooks I had prepared since 9/11, jammed with internal congressional reports, private notes written after intelligence briefings, media accounts, and even reports from Iraq arms inspectors. I saw no evidence from the National Intelligence Estimate, the Central Intelligence Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency that Iraq posed the kind of threat the Bush Administration was projecting.
The truth was, no matter what the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders said, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda’s role. Iraq did not have the intention to attack the United States. Iraq, with a military budget about 1% of the U.S. Pentagon expenditures, did not have the capability to attack our nation. Most significantly, it was fairly easy to determine that there was absolutely no proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and, as such, was not preparing to use them against our nation.
I wrote a report on my congressional letterhead categorically discounting the Iraq Resolution’s cause of war, and, on October 2, 2002, I went to the floor of the House of Representatives and, through the next week, personally placed my analysis in the hands of about 250 members of the House, of both the Democrat and Republican parties, with a request that it be read before the vote.
Despite my efforts and that of several of my colleagues in the House, the legislation passed the House on October 10, 2002, by a vote of 296-133. Most significantly, an overwhelming number of Democrats voted against going to war in Iraq, 126 nays to 81 yeas. Fully 60% of House Democrats rejected the war. Only six Republicans, including Ron Paul voted “no.” Bernie Sanders, Independent, also voted “no.”
House Democratic Whip, Nancy Pelosi voted “no,” having issued a statement that included these telling lines: “Because I do not believe we have exhausted all diplomatic remedies, I cannot support the Administration’s resolution regarding the use of force in Iraq.”
Late that evening, the US Senate approved the Iraq War Resolution by a vote of 77-23, with all Republicans voting “yes.” Noteworthy Democratic votes for the Iraq War Resolution included Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Harkin and Kerry, all of whom were past or future presidential candidates. Those senators voting “no” included Feingold and Wellstone as well as one-time presidential candidates Graham and Ted Kennedy, with whom I worked closely during the run-up to the vote.
On October 16, 2002, flanked by Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, President Bush signed the resolution into law, with then senator and future president, Joe Biden, standing close by.
Thus as the United States began preparing to use the full might of its military against Iraq, a horrific realization settled into my heart that the lives of millions of innocent Iraqis were being put at risk, based on fiction promoted by the White House, proliferated by the media and swallowed whole by most congressional leaders. America’s sons and daughters were going to be sent abroad to kill or be killed in pursuit of a mission that was not supported by intelligence agencies and despite easily ascertainable facts and common sense.
After Congress passed the Iraq War Resolution, the Administration accelerated its effort to cement public approval and international participation in the coming war, focusing on a narrative that Iraq was obtaining uranium for enrichment, preliminary to the building of a nuclear weapon.
10/30/02: “…but the danger is so great, with respect to Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and perhaps terrorists getting hold of such weapons that …. the President is prepared to act with likeminded nations.” -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, interview with Ellen Ratner, Talk Radio News.
11/20/02: “Today the world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq. A dictator who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people must not be allowed to produce or posses those weapons. We will not permit Saddam Hussein to blackmail and/or terrorize nations which love freedom.” -- President Bush to Prague Atlantic Student Summit.
1/20/03: “The [Iraqi] report also failed to deal with issues which have arisen since 1998, including attempts to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it.” --President Bush, letter to Vice President Cheney and the Senate.
1/28/03: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.….Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production…. [Saddam Hussein]…could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own…” -- President Bush, State of the Union Address.
2/5/03: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence… Most US experts think [these tubes] are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium…” -- Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations.
2/5/03: “But the risk of doing nothing, the risk of the security of this country being jeopardized at the hands of a madman with weapons of mass destruction far exceeds the risk of any action we may be forced to take.” -- President Bush to the National Economic Council at the White house.
2/6/03: “All the world has now seen the footage of an Iraqi Mirage aircraft with a fuel tank modified to spray biological agents over wide areas… A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland.” --President Bush, Statement from the White House.
3/6/03: “With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.” -- President Bush, Statement in National Press Conference.
3/16/03: “We believe he [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Meet the Press.
3/18/03: “Reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone with neither (A) protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq…” -- President Bush letter to Congress.
3/21/03: “I directed U.S. Armed Forces, operating with other coalition forces, to commence combat operations on March 19, 2003.” -- President Bush, in a letter to Congress.
Next Week - Part Two: The Consequences of the Iraq War and the Lessons Learned
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Should we Have a Second Pentagon ... Devoted to Peace?
by John Lawrence
So we have a Pentagon of War. We should have an equally funded Pentagon of Peace, a huge 5-sided building where all they do is plan and seek to implement various peace scenarios. Unimaginable? That's because the human race has so little imagination, and the result is ... continuous warfare since the dawn of civilization and before including the wiping out of another species, the Neanderthals, by our species, homo sapiens. The history of the human race is one of war with some technological progress in the interstices. Let's face it. Human beings especially of the masculine variety get off on war. Most warmongers are completely bored by peace. They can't wait to get back into action and cover themselves in glory on the battlefield, to prove their mettle, to prove their masculinity. Right now the US spends close to a trillion dollars a year on war, the weapons of war and planning for war. We spend a pittance on peace, the implementation of peace and planning for peace. As a result the human race has been heading for some time to Mutually Assured Destruction. We will probably get there whether or not it happens by means of a nuclear holocaust or whether it happens by neglect of the things that need to be done to forestall climate change.
The war in Ukraine and the looming Cold (and maybe even Hot) War between the two sides that are lining up represents at least a dithering while the planet heats up and eventually burns becoming a Venus like uninhabitable hellscape. So we have the US and Europe on one side and Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea on the other. Of the not quite aligned nations, most of Africa is siding with the Chinese. Why? Because the Chinese have put great energy into developing African infrastructure with their Belt and Road initiative. The US on the other hand has put great energy into building military bases all around the world. "There are roughly 750 US foreign military bases; they are spread across 80 nations! After the U.S is the UK, but they only have 145 bases. Russia has about 3 dozen bases, and China just five. This implies that the U.S has three times as many bases as all other countries combined." So this goes to show the relative priorities of the various countries. The priorities of peace vs the priorities of war. Helping improve the economies of other people directly is something that the Pentagon of Peace should be about. Sad to say China did that first, but there's always hope. As my Dad used to say, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Sure China's goal was to make friends and influence people with its Belt and Road initiative. What's the US doing in the meantime ... building military bases.
The Peace Pentagon should have a budget equal to the War Pentagon's budget - roughly a trillion dollars. I'm not saying do away with the Department of War and become defenseless. No, keep a robust defense but counterbalance it with a robust Department of Peace. So if possible peace initiatives will carry the day, but, if worse comes to worse, well there's always the fantastic array of weapons of war that the US already possesses. The war capabilities are enormous. The peace capabilities are meager. There's a difference between pursuing our interests by becoming friends with other people and pursuing our interests by guarding ourselves from other people. One of the ways to avoid war is to recognize the legitimate interests of other countries as stated by them. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided if NATO and the US had acknowledged Russia's stated security interest in Ukraine's not becoming a member of NATO. But that interest was totally discarded by the West - not even put on the table, not even some sort of compromise which would have recognized that stated interest. I'm not saying if that interest was legitimate or not - only that that was the stated interest on the Russian side that was completely ignored and never even negotiated. The result of that non-negotiation and non-compromise was the mess in Ukraine right now - a grinding war of attrition in which only Ukraine civilian lives and only Ukraine real estate are being destroyed. Ukraine would like nothing better than to have advanced weapons such as F-16 fighter jets which would allow them to spread the war into Russian territory, and then you have World War III. That seems to be where we are heading.
Throughout history men have gone to war to cover themselves in glory and prove their masculinity. In World War I, many young British men were gung ho for going to war. They intended to cover themselves in glory and be home before Christmas. Instead many of them died face down in muddy trenches or were impaled on barbed wire. According to historycrunch.com: "...one of the main reasons for the excitement of the war was that many viewed it as an adventure. They read stories about soldiers bravely marching into battle and dying heroically on the battlefields for their countries. For many of these young soldiers, they viewed the Great War as their opportunity to play a role in the ‘glory of war’ and follow in the path of earlier soldiers in earlier European conflicts. To them, war seemed adventurous and a show of bravery that many claimed they ‘did not want to miss’." It was forever so but in general only the victors were able to cover themselves in glory.
War, I would contend, is primarily a masculine pursuit. It represents an attempt by men to prove their manhood. Even some American Indian tribes cultivated a warrior tradition. Their women would have nothing to do with men until they had proved themselves in war. According to Wikipedia: "What evolved among the Plains Native Americans from the 17th to the late 19th century was warfare as both a means of livelihood and a sport. Young men gained both prestige and plunder by fighting as warriors, and this individualistic style of warfare ensured that success in individual combat and capturing trophies of war were highly esteemed." Not for nothing were they called Braves. Martina Sprague in her book The Glory of War: The Way to Historical Immortality writes: "What motivates men to go to war? The answer is the desire for recognition and the opportunity to gain eternal fame. War is perhaps the most common way in which a man can become a hero. We tend to romanticize war. War is portrayed as a daring adventure for a sacred cause, where the soldier will ultimately reach the highest level of self-actualization. As demonstrated by the great military figures in history, the promise of honor and heroism can help a man conquer the world."
Covering oneself in glory, proving one's masculinity, becoming a hero, these are ultimately traps which cause the perpetuation of war. Some men become addicted to war, the excitement of war. If one war ends, they will seek out the next one. Life is never so dull as life without war. It is the ultimate football game because the stakes - life or death - are so high. Witness the volunteers from other countries who are putting their lives on the line in Ukraine. The problem is that the pursuit of peace is never as exciting as the pursuit of war. Until peacemaking becomes as noble and glorious a pursuit as war, there is no hope for the human race to live peaceably and cooperatively side by side with each other. Until they give out as many medals and honors for peace heroes as they do for war heroes, the human race will go down fighting and ultimately extinguish each other.
I'm afraid that the war in Ukraine is only the latest example of people preoccupied with the excitement of war. Sure it was a clumsy and ignoble thing for Russia to do to so overtly invade Ukraine. They should have taken a page out of the CIA's book and been more subtle and covert about it. For example, the CIA undermined the democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile because he was a socialist and a Marxist ushering in the regime of Augusto Pinochet and his reign of terror. "According to the Chilean government, the number of executions and forced disappearances was at least 3,095 [under Pinochet]. Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation focusing on South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in late November 1975, his 60th birthday." I'm afraid that Zelensky is following the same playbook of promoting the war based on 'glory for Ukraine' and his David and Goliath symbolism. His insatiable lust for American artillery shells and other advanced weaponry is duly granted by President Biden and the European allies with the goal of "winning the war." No one except the Chinese seem the least interested in creating a peaceful solution to the war. Instead the war will only be escalated when Ukraine gets F-15 fighter jets. Then they will be able to hit Russian targets in Russia escalating the war even further. Until now tragically it's only Ukrainian civilian lives and property that are being destroyed.
It seems like revenge, hatred for Russia and glory for Ukraine are the ultimate factors at work here not a search for compromise which both sides can live with. Does Russia have any legitimate national security interests in Ukraine's not becoming a member of NATO? Did the US have any legitimate national security interests in Chile nor becoming a socialist and Marxist state? There are always many reasons for war, but few for peace. Meanwhile, a lack of cooperation among the world's nations is hastening the day in which global warming will put an end to human civilization unless we can wake up and see that peace and cooperation are more glorious than war.
"Let's Go Fly a Kite" is a song from the1964 film, Mary Poppins, sung by George Banks when he realizes his family is more important than his job. Now the planet earth's survivability trumps even that concern so "let's go plant some trees" should be our new motto. China designated March 12 as National Tree Planting Day in 1979. The National People's Congress, China's top legislature, launched a nationwide voluntary tree-planting campaign in 1981, stipulating that every able-bodied citizen above 11 should plant three to five trees each year. Why not join China in a good natured spirit of saving earth by planting more trees? God in heaven, should this even be controversial? The narrative is that China and the US are big rivals and the best we can do is "compete" with each other. No one in a position of power is suggesting, God forbid, that we should cooperate with each other not even to save the planet from the ravages of global warming that we're already starting to experience. It just goes to show the sickness and the sorriness of the human race when peoples and countries cannot cooperate not even to prevent Mutually Assured Destruction which is the outcome for the human species and many other species if we don't get a handle on global warming. Instead we have global warmongering.
During his speech at the Forum’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Davos, Xie Zhenhua said: ‘China's forest cover and forest stock volume have been growing in the last 30 years, and China accounts for more than 25% of the world's new green areas. China responds actively to contribute to the 1t.org initiative from the World Economic Forum, and I am announcing here that China aims to plant and conserve 70 billion trees within 10 years to green our planet, combat climate change, and increase forest carbon sinks.’
In support of this bold contribution, Chairman Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum said:
‘We appreciate China’s effort in supporting the 1t.org initiative of the World Economic Forum and relevant UN initiatives, we highly appreciate China’s practices upholding relative international commitment such as the Paris Agreement and Biodiversity target through Nature-Based Solutions.’
If the 1.4 billion people of China each plant 3 trees a year, that's 4.2 billion tree planted per year or 42 billion trees planted per decade. If the 332 million people of the US took the same pledge to each plant 3 trees a year, that's approximately another billion trees per year or 10 billion trees per decade. Trees are a carbon sink. They extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is the natural way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, consequently, the harmful effects of global warming. So why isn't there an effort in the US to emulate China in this regard? Shouldn't there be a shared interest here? What if the entire 8 billion people populating planet Earth committed to planting 3 trees a year. A single mature tree can absorb 22 lbs. of carbon a year, and makes enough clean oxygen for 4 people to breathe fresh air. A previous special report by IPCC stated that tree-planting could sequester around 1.1–1.6 GT of CO2 per year. A GT is one billion tons. Approximately 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every year. Clearly, a lot of trees need to be planted to balance carbon dioxide emissions and sequester 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, but every tree helps. We can reduce the tonnage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere one tree at a time.
So let's join China this March 12 and declare a worldwide national tree planting day or just a global tree planting day in the spirit of cooperation among nations to create peace and save our planet from Mutually Assured Destruction which is the path we are on.
Industry Knew—and Hid—Dangers of Gas Stoves Over 50 Years Ago
"What? They knew? Next you're going to tell me that ExxonMobil knew about climate change and that the tobacco companies knew cigarettes caused cancer," one Democratic senator sarcastically said.
Newly uncovered documents published last week by DeSmog reveal that the leading gas industry trade group knew over 50 years ago that cooking with gas stoves could harm human health and tried to cover up the evidence.
The DeSmogrevelations regarding the American Gas Associationn (AGA) came as the gas industry is pushing back against climate and public health advocates' efforts to ban new gas stoves amid mounting scientific evidence that the appliances threaten the warming planet and people's health.
Rrcent studies—which, among other things, showed that nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ultrafine particles produced by gas stoves cause a range of health problems, including 1 in 8 U.S. cases of childhood asthma—sparked fast and furious backlash from the gas industry and its congressional boosters.
"It's less widely known that the gas industry has long sponsored its own research into the problem of indoor air pollution from gas stoves," wrote DeSmog's Rebecca John. "Now, newly discovered documents reveal that the American Gas Association was studying the health and indoor pollution risks from gas stoves as far back as the early 1970s—that they knew much more, at a far earlier date, than has been previously documented."
According to John:
More than 50 years ago, in 1972, AGA authored a draft report highlighting indoor air pollution concerns similar to those being raised by health experts and regulators today. In particular, this draft report examined what to do about problems related to the emission of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides (collectively referred to as NOx) from domestic gas appliances. This draft, recently discovered in the U.S. National Archives, would eventually become an official report published by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council (NIPCC), a long-forgotten government advisory council composed of the nation's most powerful industrialists.
However, an entire section detailing those concerns, entitled "Indoor Air Quality Control," vanished from the final report. With it went all the important evidence that the gas industry was not only conducting research into what the NIPCC called the "NOx problem" but also that it was actively testing technological solutions "for the purposes of limiting the levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides in household air."
"Instead," John wrote, "the final report argued gas' sole drawback was its limited availability, 'not its environmental impact.' It also lobbied for a massive expansion of U.S. domestic gas reserves and the rapid rollout of gas-based infrastructure, under the banner of replacing coal with gas to stem air pollution."
Reacting to the DeSmog report, U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) sardonically tweeted: "What? They knew? Next you're going to tell me that ExxonMobil knew about climate change and that the tobacco companies knew cigarettes caused cancer."
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The War in Ukraine is More About Winning Than About Creating a Peaceful Solution
by John Lawrence
Biden talks about winning. Zelensky talks about winning. Putin talks about winning. Both sides are more interested in winning than in creating a peaceful solution that both sides can live with. That's their mindsets and orientations, unfortunately. It doesn't help for either side to demonize the other or characterize them as war criminals. So far there have been a total of approximately 8000 civilian deaths since the February 2022 Russian invasion. In contrast are the Vietnam war results: "Around 2 million civilians were killed in the territories of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It is suspected that over 1.2 million of these deaths were murders." The war in Iraq, the invasion of which was based on a lie, resulted in the following: "No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 275,000 and 306,000 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019."
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was considered the architect of the Vietnam War, said in an interview: "[General Curtis} LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." McNamara characterized himself as a war criminal, but of course was never prosecuted as such. Only the losers of wars are prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara's son, Craig McNamara was a critic of his father's role in promoting the Vietnam war.
"[Craig} McNamara enrolled at Stanford University in 1969. McNamara took part in antiwar demonstrations at Stanford. Often joining him on the podium to denounce the war were two other students at Stanford, namely Susan Haldeman and Peter Ehrlichman, who were respectively the daughter of H.R Haldeman and son of John Ehrlichman. H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were respectively the presidential chief of staff and domestic affairs adviser under Richard Nixon, being known as Nixon's "Berlin Wall", owing to their German surnames and ability to grant or deny access to the president. [Craig] McNamara recalled: "Pretty much all the time at Stanford was occupied with anti-Vietnam and Cambodia demonstrations...I remember the rage settling in on me, and the frustration that we all felt because we couldn't stop the war""
After the war, Robert McNamara was fired as Defense Secretary and became President of the World bank which resulted in another family clash with his son. "In 1971, [Craig McNamara] moved to Chile whose President, Salvador Allende, was a Marxist in order to see Marxism in action. In 1984, McNamara stated that he moved to Chile because: "I felt an enormous sense of frustration with my family, with my country. I felt there was nothing I could do to change my father, so I left the country"."
"In 1973, [Craig] McNamara visited the United States where over the course of a dinner, he became caught up in an argument with Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post newspaper and his father over Chile. The younger McNamara insisted that the Nixon administration was trying to overthrow Allende because he was a Marxist while both the elder McNamara and Graham insisted that there was no such policy on the part of the United States. Later on in 1975, the "destabilization campaign" waged by the Nixon administration came to public light. [Craig] McNamara stated: "That's why I'm still cautious about my father to this very day-that's the flip side. If they [Graham and Robert McNamara] didn't know what was going on in Chile factually, they must have known it intuitively. But they wouldn't say so".
"Shortly before he was due to return to Chile, the Allende government was overthrown in a military coup d'etat led by General Augusto Pinochet on 11 September 1973. The Pinochet government vowed to "exterminate Marxism" in Chile, earning a reputation as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America."
Putting all this in perspective purported war criminal Putin's civilian death total in Ukraine pales in comparison with (self-characterized) war criminal Robert McNamara's civilian death total in Vietnam or even the civilian death total in the Iraq war perpetrated by President George W Bush. Not to mention the approximately 200,000 civilian deaths as a result of atomic bombs dropped on Japan or the 25,000 civilians killed in the fire bombing of Dresden.
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy regardless of the number of civilian deaths. One civilian death is one too many. However, the longer the war goes on with both sides determined to win rather than determined to find a just peace that both sides can live with, the longer will be the destruction of civilian lives and real estate.The concept of winning in and of itself is the problem.
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