Iraq War
Pentagon’s Media Meddling Under Investigation
The FCC is finally going to look into a Pentagon propaganda program. The investigation was announced a couple of days ago, but I didn’t hear about it until now. Why? Because, as with the original story, the media completely ignored it.
October 17, 2008 | Read More
“Railout”: Amtrak Makes a Big Haul
In its final days in existence, the (failed) 110th Congress dropped $700 billion on a (failed) bailout of Wall Street and $611 billion on defense spending and the (failed) Iraq war. Just for good measure, it threw more good money after bad when it shoveled $13 billion down that national rat-hole known as Amtrak.
October 8, 2008 | Read More
Let’s Make Friends by Making a Plan
After World War II, the U.S. instituted the Marshall Plan. Named for Secretary of State George Marshall, the plan helped to reunite a shattered Europe and successfully got the governments and economies of European countries functioning again-and, for the most part, cooperating. The plan was started in 1947 and continued for four years. The war had been catastrophic, but we helped Europe rebuild and helped those countries learn to live together again.
Don’t we need a Marshall Plan for the Middle East? The place is a nasty stew of disagreements and aggression. The Israel-Palestine conflict is simmering every day. The violent…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #93: The Iraq War and Wall Street
Regardless of success, our leaders were probably banking on the fact that past wars have been good for American business. Dustin Woodard, Mutual Fund Advisor on About.com, looked at the stock market during our last several conflicts.
World War II: The S&P 500 grew at an annualized rate of 12.1 percent per year.
Korean War: The S&P 500 annualized at 18.9 percent per year.
Vietnam War: The S&P 500 annualized at 3.91 percent per year.
Gulf War I: The S&P 500 annualized at 9.52 percent per year.
But today we’re seeing something funny happen with the S&P 500. Journalist Naomi Klein pointed out that a…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #92: A Planned Disaster - Downsizing the Army to Pump Up Corporate Profits
Rumsfeld and Cheney had planned for a long time to start a “revolution in military affairs.” To them, this meant massively reducing the size of America’s standing army and developing small, high-tech battalions which could be air-lifted to trouble spots to take care of business, either secretly or in the open. But as Colin Powell pointed out before he became Secretary of State, this special-forces approach was exactly the wrong way to invade a country like Iraq. Saddam Hussein, too, predicted that Iraq would absorb the invaders and they’d get picked off one by one.
But Rumsfeld went ahead and downsized…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #91: Halliburton in the Halls of Government
A I’ve discussed, before he got to be our vice president, Dick Cheney was V.P. at Halliburton. He was also CEO of the company for a while. Under Cheney, Halliburton doubled its political contributions to the sum of $1.2 million. Most of that money went to Republican politicians. Not coincidentally, the U.S. government awarded Halliburton several contracts to rebuild oil infrastructure in Iraq, without allowing other companies to bid for the jobs, as the government normally does.
These days, Halliburton remains big in the business of campaign contributions, and 93 percent of this money goes to Republicans. (The Fluor Corporation is…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #90: Destroying Iraq So Halliburton Can Rebuild It
There used to be pretty good government oversight of companies helping the U.S. military … all that’s out the window today.
The biggest army in Iraq isn’t comprised of U.S. troops. It’s a force of 180,000 civilian workers. These contractors, who include construction contractors like Bechtel and Parsons Delaware, as well as security forces like Blackwater, have been hired to rebuild the country. But the word “rebuilding” is a stretch. There’s an awful lot of waste-and that’s a charitable term for war profiteering.
War is big business; the corporations do very, very well when it’s raging. Consider that while GI grunts get…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #89: Saddam Hussein - Just Another American Rent-a-Thug
If we hope to understand this war and its senseless killing, we need to take a hard, cold look at how the disaster began with our own shameful foreign policy. We need to talk about our good buddy Saddam, and all the back-slapping and cigars we shared with him. He was just another one of “our guys” like Manuel “Rent-a-Colonel” Noriega.
For more than a decade, beginning in the 1970s, the United States gave him weapons and he did favors in return. He helped get American oil interests set up in the Middle East. And, beginning in 1980, he went to…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #88: Iraq - Where’s the Outrage, America?
Last year, a segment on 60 Minutes absolutely devastated me. A Marine sergeant had just been charged with eighteen counts of murder in a massacre of twenty-four Iraqi civilians in Haditha. These were unarmed, innocent people-mostly women and children down to age two. They were slaughtered without first identification. For our servicemen, it’s always a matter of kill or be killed. But how anyone could be driven to committing such a horrific massacre is beyond my wildest nightmare.
As I watched, I didn’t just contemplate the suffering of those Iraqi families, but of soldiers like the sergeant, trapped in a hell hole…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
World Boss History Reason #10: Another Illegal Invasion
The war in Iraq wasn’t the first time our country invaded a sovereign nation to take down its leader. People tend to forget that we did the same thing in Panama in 1989. And, just like when we invaded Iraq, a Bush was in the White House and a man named Dick Cheney was with him.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush and then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney sent 300 aircraft and more than 50,000 troops into Panama-to get one man. Worst of all, the Army barred the Red Cross and the press from entering Panama City for days after the invasion.…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
