Talking Points: Lessons From Iraq

IMPORTANT LESSONS FROM IRAQ:

Preventive war. In place of the idea that wars should be started only as a last resort, our current national security doctrine is based on the theory that they should be fought to prevent future enemies from developing. They are the means to create the conditions of peace. Our Iraq experience has been the test case for this theory. We know now how well it has worked out.

Politicized intelligence. Knowing that these theories were not, by themselves, going to create mass public support for an attack on a country that had not attacked or threatened the United States, the Bush administration set about to create a false case that such an attack might be imminent. They did it, among other means, by pressuring and manipulating our existing intelligence agencies, as well as by creating substitute intelligence organs, to give them the answers they wanted.

The war on civil liberties. The preventive war doctrine paved the way for an emboldened assault on civil protections, from circumventing a congressional ban on torture of detainees to permitting warrantless wiretapping of citizens.

(By Miriam Pemberton, “Now Class, Let’s Review Iraq’s Lessons”, 6/14/08)

HIDING THE WAR COST IN BLOOD AND TREASURE

• The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars has largely been funded through borrowing, taxes have not been raised to pay for it and the costs have been diverted to the future.
• The Bush Administration has asked for (and received time and time again from Congress) Supplemental “Emergency” War Funding, allowing over $660 billion in supplemental requests. This has taken the whole picture of Iraq and Afghanistan War funding out of the overall budget consideration.
• Accounting for the Wars is misleading because the Administration is doing “cost” accounting of immediate costs and not “accrual” accounting of long termed costs and depreciation. These include healthcare for returning veterans and other associated benefits as well as depreciation of military equipment.
• The cost of the war in “blood”, that is the number of deaths and injuries, is hidden and misleading because of the force of contractors in Iraq and the lack of accounting for the death toll on Iraqi military and civilians.

WAR MOTIVES

• There have been no WMD’s found in Iraq, Freedom and Democracy are questionable and the threat from terrorism has not been quelled, indeed it may have been increased.
• Although Administration officials have consistently denied the Iraq War is a war for oil, recent no-bid oil contracts to service Iraq’s oil fields have gone to Western oil companies.
• The first military action of the Iraq invasion was an armed raid on Iraq’s offshore oil facilities, securing Iraq’s oil resources.
• There was a Working Group on Oil and Energy, a mix of pro-American expatriate Iraqi oil managers, assembled by the U.S. Department of State in late 2002 to establish the guidelines for privatization of the Iraqi oil industry once Saddam Hussein was removed and a new regime put in place in Baghdad.
• Iraq is the second largest oil supply in the world and many feel there is undiscovered oil in Iraq which could boost it’s production and supply by up to 100%

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