Three Iraq Myths That Won`t Quit ...Scott Ritter...AlterNet

Scott Ritters`s Three Myths article at AlterNet is well worth the time.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/38011/

The myth of sovereignty Imagine the president of the United States flying to Russia, China, England, France or just about any other nation on the planet, landing at an airport on supposedly sovereign territory, being driven under heavy U.S. military protection to the U.S. Embassy, and then with some five minutes notification, summoning the highest elected official of that nation to the U.S. Embassy for a meeting. It would never happen, unless of course the nation in question is Iraq, where Iraqi sovereignty continues to be hyped as a reality when in fact it is as fictitious as any fairy tale ever penned by the Brothers Grimm.

The myth of Zarqawi have said all along that the poll figures showing Americans to be overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq were illusory. Only 28 percent of Americans were against the war when we invaded Iraq. The ranks have swelled to over 60 percent not because there has been an awakening of social conscience and responsibility, but rather because things aren't going well in Iraq, and there is increasing angst in the American heartland because we seem to be losing the war in Iraq, and no one likes a loser. So when the word came that the notorious terrorist, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, was killed by American military action, the president suddenly had a "good week," and poll numbers adjusted slightly in his favor. However, the facts cannot be re-written, even by a slavish American mainstream media. Zarqawi was never anything more than a minor player in Iraq, a third-rate Jordanian criminal whose exploits were hyped up by a Bush administration anxious to prove that the insurgency that was getting the best of America in Iraq was foreign-grown and linked to the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks nonetheless.

The myth of WMD Regardless of what Sen. Rick Santorum and the lunatic neoconservative fringe want to think, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. Citing a classified Department of Defense report that claims some 500 artillery shells have been found in Iraq by U.S. forces since the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in March 2003, Santorum and his cronies in the right-wing media have been spouting nonsense about how Bush got it right all along, that there were WMD in Iraq after all. He conveniently fails to report that there is nothing "secret" about this data, it has all been reported before (by the Bush administration, nonetheless), and that the shells in question constitute old artillery munitions manufactured well prior to 1991 (the year of the first Gulf War, and a time after which the government of Saddam Hussein stated -- correctly, it turned out -- that no WMD were produced in Iraq).

Nothing really groundbreaking here, at least not for us here on DU, but given that the submissive media refuses to do anything except go along with the bullshit, treating total fabrications as of equal weight to opinions backed by credible data, acting as stenographer to the propaganda office of the regime in washington, any and all essays that reiterate the obvious are welcome.

I *HIGHLY* recommend reading Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam by Jason Burke.

He was featured in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightbares and this book goes into great detail to describe what radical Islam is really all about and how it formed and how "Al Qaeda" is merely a soundbite term used by western intelligence agencies, esp. the US gov't, to put a nice name on the entire aspect of radical Islam and treat it as a giant entity that can be fought.

:kick: