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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Fri Apr 5, 2013, 06:41 AM Apr 2013

After Iraq, the moral abyss still gapes

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-05-050413.html



After Iraq, the moral abyss still gapes
By Adil E Shamoo
Apr 5, '13

The only message American children will take away from the war in Iraq is that if you repeat a boldfaced lie enough, it will someday become accepted truth. And as a corollary, saving face is much more important than admitting a mistake, no matter how destructive the outcome.

Unfortunately for these children, manipulating the truth became the norm for the Bush administration, which invaded Iraq on what we know now (and the administration almost certainly knew then) were utterly false pretenses. Thanks to these lies, Americans, including our soldiers and civilians serving in Iraq, were convinced Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks and had weapons of mass destruction, two of the ever-evolving reasons for getting into the war. Many still believe this. Engaging in mass deception in order to justify official policy both degrades and endangers democracy. But by far, it is ordinary Iraqis who have suffered the most.

We know now beyond any doubt that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction. But as Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst with the Iraqi portfolio, wrote on March 14, "Intelligence did not drive the decision to invade Iraq - not by a long shot, despite the aggressive use by the Bush administration of cherry-picked fragments of intelligence reporting in its public sales campaign for the war." Indeed, this was a war in search of a justification from the very beginning, and any little lie would have worked.

It is very fortuitous for all those politicians, policy makers, and bureaucrats with Iraqi blood on their hands - Republicans and Democrats both - that the only courtroom they've been shuffled into is the court of public opinion, where most received light sentences.
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After Iraq, the moral abyss still gapes (Original Post) unhappycamper Apr 2013 OP
Iraq will be messed up for a very long time Victor_c3 Apr 2013 #1

Victor_c3

(3,557 posts)
1. Iraq will be messed up for a very long time
Fri Apr 5, 2013, 01:14 PM
Apr 2013

A little further into the article they quote a couple of facts/statistics that illustrate this.

28% of Iraqi children suffer from PTSD. That is completely mind boggling to me.

Then add to that the drastically increased rate of birth defects. For instance, in Fallujah alone, the birth defect rate there is higher now than it was after we dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki.

Then the article cites the brain drain. If you had an education or any decent ability to make it out of the country, you probably left. I don't know if/when some of these people will ever return.

Then there is the straight up destruction of infrastructure that has never been repaired.

Iraq is messed up bad. I don't know if/when the country will ever get back on its feet and be anything resembling a regional power again.

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