Charles Pierce| Iraq: The Bush Gang's Excellent Adventure

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/20036-iraq-the-bush-gangs-excellent-adventure

I don't know why people are acting shocked - SHOCKED! - by one particular revelation from Peter Baker's new book about the Avignon Presidency.



This is no surprise. Paul O'Neill told us years ago that Iraq was on the schedule from about thirty seconds after the Supreme Court handed the presidency to C-Plus Augustus. Donald Rumsfeld, that old bag of sins, said pretty much the same thing on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. And he said it again at the same time that they were launching their excellent adventure. And wasn't this essentially the same guiding principle that lay behind the remark that should have decent people spitting on Thomas Friedman to this day?

We spent nearly a decade as a nation, and we lost 5000 of our fellow citizens, and, as a nation, we killed somewhere north of 100,000 Iraqis, because we were led through a period of national trauma by a claque of plutocratic sociopaths with the collective emotional maturity of a junior-high nose tackle. One day, historians are going to drink heavily.


Dahr Jamail: Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq With Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers

http://www.nationofchange.org/ten-years-later-us-has-left-iraq-mass-displacement-epidemic-birth-defects-cancers-1382627146

In part two of our interview, Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail discusses how the U.S. invasion of Iraq has left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Noting the birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Jamail says: "They’re extremely hard to bear witness to. But it’s something that we all need to pay attention to ... What this has generated is, from 2004 up to this day, we are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear bombs were dropped on at the end of World War II." Jamail has also reported on the refugee crisis of more than one million displaced Iraqis still inside the country, who are struggling to survive without government aid, a majority of them living in Baghdad.