The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Monday, May 11, 2015

The Big Lie

(Crossposted from Stayin' Alive)

Jeb Bush tells Faux News that he would have invaded Iraq in 2003 had he been president, based on the intelligence available at the time.

That's what they all say. Except the "intelligence" was fake, as we all actually know. Paul Pillar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 is probably the right person to ask

The most serious problem with U.S. intelligence today is that its relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments. . . .

The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. . . .

Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war. On the issue that mattered most, the intelligence community judged that Iraq probably was several years away from developing a nuclear weapon. The October 2002 NIE also judged that Saddam was unlikely to use WMD against the United States unless his regime was placed in mortal danger.
Will the corporate media call out Bush on this Big Lie? No, because they were complicit.

6 comments:

anatta said...

How about the Senators that voted for the authorization for war? are they "complicit?" I think so.
Didn't they se the same intelligence?

I generally support Rand Paul's foreign policy...mostly but not all.
Clinton/Rice/Powers destroyed Libya with their regime change
( assassination) of Qadaffi.
They created the current terrorist state
( along with France and Britain)
I'm curious if you follow Libya?

I keep a blog of sorts of it here if you'd like to look, by my same username
Thanks for keeping this updated

anatta said...

http://www.dcjunkies.com/showthread.php?52169-Libyan-civil-war/page28

My Libya updates..by anatta

Cervantes said...

I don't follow Libya closely. The main criterion for interest here is that there are U.S. troops present and involved in some way in the combat.

The Senators didn't really see the intelligence, they saw the fictionalized version created by an ad hoc office Cheney created to fake it. So I blame them for gullibility, but not quite as much as the corporate media, whose job it is to be skeptical.

Dancewater said...

I blame all the US Senators (and anyone else) who claimed or believed that there were WMDs in Iraq.

I had a six year old notebook computer in 2002 and early 2003 and a dial-up AOL connection. I was able to figure out that there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq and that any possible chemical or biological weapons in Iraq had no way of getting to the USA. So, I easily figured out the WMD claims were LIES.

And I was not alone. I was one of tens of millions of people around the world who figured that out.

Yes, the US media did lie too. And TV "news" in the USA was pathetic in 2002 and is still pathetic today.

Dancewater said...

And I sometimes tweet at Powers for having destroyed Libya under the LIE of "responsibility to protect".

What a bunch of sorry criminals we have in DC.

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