The Iraq War at 20

After that start-off by Two-Party Opera, let's add a few more thoughts. March 20 is the official start, but, I'm jumping the gun a day with Brian's prodding, and it may still have been March 19 in DC when "go was the word" anyway.

First, like World War I and II are really part of a thread, so are the original Gulf War and the Iraq War. Connection? House of Bush.

Actually, there's three parts to that thread, arguably. The first being the Carter-era Iran hostage crisis. 

According to former Texas House speaker Barnes, Poppy Bush was not part of that, it seems. Rather, in a big twist? John Connally was.

The Gulf War? Before my blogging time. Before there really was a civilian internet. But, I remember the controversy over depleted uranium tank shells. I remember Poppy Bush later being attacked from his right for stopping the war early. 

And, of course, connecting it to the Iraq War? I remember the sanctions and their punishment on Iraq. I remember Madeleine Albright, as Clinton's Secretary of State, writing off the many thousands of deaths they caused.

The Iraq War itself? We know the only "Mission Accomplished" by Shrub Bush was Turd Blossom Rove's politicizing the war run-up in the 2002 midterms, then again in the 2004 general, as the cowardly Dems warhawked with John Kerry. This was when and why I became a Green.

We know how Obama flip-flopped on the "surge."

And, we know that Lying Glenn Greenwald supported the war, in the preface to the book that made him famous. And lied about it to the point of attacking others who pointed out his lies. Then doubled down on his lying.

Part of why I became a Green? A decade after the invasion, and 8 years after Glennwald supported the invasion in his first big book, a BlueAnon wanker at Daily Kos was STILL regurgitating his lies.

And, 20 years later? Iraq is still a hellhole; Sadrites not under Iran's thumb battle other Shi'ites who are. Sunnis are semi-marginalized. Kurds want still more autonomy and may still push for an independent nation. ISIS lurks at their edges, still.

And, BlueAnon never learned. Dear Leader, with Shillary as his Secretary of State, pushed to bomb Libya, figuring that it too would succumb to shock and awe, then easily be rebuilt. Actual result? North Africa's strongest economy wrecked, and replaced by open slave markets. And, people smart enough in other fields to know better, like Massimo Pigliucci, or Juan Cole, or Bernie Sanders, signed off. (Bernie also voted for the first, and all subsequent, "support the troops" resolutions in Iraq.)

And, BlueAnon still hasn't learned. Even Pope Francis talked about NATO "barking" at Russia, but Warmonger Joe won't listen to him or the Goldilocks Three Bears and start peace talks. And, even within BlueAnon, showing Dem tribalism on war, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including the Fraud, er the Squad, supports the warmongering.

Don't forget that all these wars were started by, or abetted by, lies.

Gulf War? We're still not sure what Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein; I believe it was indeed the claim that the Bush Administration had no big problems with him taking Kuwait. I also wrote an op-ed column about that. We know, during the run-up to war, about the incubator babies who weren't real, and the Emir of Kuwait hiring Western PR flak.

Iraq War? The lies about the aluminum artillery tubes by Powell et al. Tenet going Hearst reporter to Shrub Bush's William Randolph Hearst in 1898 Cuba. Condi Rice's "smoking gun - mushroom cloud."

Libya? The lies about how easy this would be. The lies about our real intent. The lies, post-Iraq, about how regime change could be done without boots on the ground.

Russia-Ukraine? The lies that we never promised "not one inch further eastward" on NATO expansion, when we did; even Gorby lied about that later in life, just because he hated Putin that much. The lies behind the Minsk Agreements. And more. That's even as Warmonger Joe still opposes real peace talks.

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Sidebar, and not noted immediately? Our media's responsibility. Via Jeff St. Clair, the New York Slimes' 20th anniversary piece "somehow" never mentions the name of Judith Miller.

And, directly related to that, at Counterpunch, Jeff has a good piece about the selling of the war.

Sidebar: Here's my story about meeting a guy in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, with a VERY interesting conspiracy theory on how the Gulf War started.

Me, Poppy Bush, the Gulf War, a conspiracy theory and a vacation trip to Tsarskoe Selo

Betcha didn't know I visited the Romanov summer palace, did you?

Well, per Paul Harvey, with the death of George H.W. Bush, here's the rest of the story.

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It was the late summer of 1998. I was the editor of my first own weekly newspaper. (Not in that I owned it, but I was the managing editor of a paper for my first time.)

I was living in southeastern New Mexico at the time. I got a bit of time off around Labor Day, including the holiday itself, and took a vacation.

No, not to St. Petersburg, Russia, sadly. But, I did visit Tsarskoe Selo. While there, I heard some very interesting claims about the Gulf War. Let this column I wrote after my return tell the details.

The old mining community of Mogollon, practically a ghost town, may seem innocent enough to the average hiker or other tourist.

Like many abandoned mining towns, some of its buildings have been reclaimed in recent years, mainly by people who are considered to be, or consider themselves to be, outside the normal bounds of society. In short, you may see men and women who appear to be hippies, or the children of hippies, living in old houses, general stores, and so forth, not only in Mogollon, but in Jerome, Arizona (another place I visited during a short Labor Day vacation) and elsewhere across the west.

But there is one difference in Mogollon, an old mining town about 70 miles northwest of Silver City, located in some of the most rugged country in our state.

It begins with the first, and only, business in the dozen or so buildings in Mogollon.

This business, located in one of the first buildings on your right as you enter Mogollon, immediately stands out due to its name: “The Tsarskoe Selo.”

To those unfamiliar with history, this was the name of a summer palace of the Russian Tsars (hence the name), just outside St. Petersburg, Russia.

Inside is a store selling collectibles one would never expect to see in the middle of nowhere, and possibly not even in a city as big as Albuquerque.

Owner Dan Ostler specializes is selling Faberge products. By this, I don’t mean cosmetics such as Brut cologne.

Ostler sells the high-dollar ceramic eggs, porcelains, and other collectibles made in Tsarist Russia by the French-founded company of Faberge. These are the fine items that you hear announcements about their traveling display in museums in Dallas, Phoenix, or Los Angeles, and nowhere lower on the American cities’ status pole.

Right there, as Ostler showed me some of the sample eggs he had (starting at $70 a pop, and rapidly moving upward). I realized that I was in a world just a little bit different than what I had expected when I opened the door to his shop asking directions to the famous Catwalk (at Glenwood, just south).

The next thing that caught my eye was one of several business cards of his that he had on his counter. The only readable things on the card were his name, in Roman letters, and a telephone number, in our normal Arabic numerals. The rest of the card, though, was also Middle Eastern, written in the Arabic language.

As I was interested enough to want to talk, and he seemed to welcome a little conversation, I stayed around beyond asking directions, and heard more than I was prepared for.

I first learned the “why” behind the Arabic business card. Dan Ostler said he is a former CIA agent with more than a decade of time spent in the Middle East. He then showed me some of the other business cards he had, noting that with connections such as this, he could run a high-dollar business such as his from his small shop and his modemed computer in the backwoods of western New Mexico.

As he showed me some of the cards he had been given by friends, perhaps ex-CIA contacts in some cases, I realized that he truly was a connected person.

The business cards included one from an Army Lt. Col. who is also a United Nations weapons inspector, and a reported “Friend of Bill” from Mt. Ida, Arkansas.

Ostler asked if I knew where Mt. Ida was, and I said, “I believe that’s near Mena,” which earned my first kudos from him.

Mena, if you did not read or hear about the exposé series last year by the San Jose Mercury News, is where the CIA has, for over a decade, reportedly flown in on its own airline, Air America, or at least turned a blind eye to CIA-connected smugglers such as Nicaraguan contras flying in, massive amounts of cocaine stemming from Columbia. By the way, this began in Reagan’s presidency, and so is not just tar on Clinton’s hands.

We talked more about the CIA in this regard, and Ostler soon revealed himself to be a man who definitely did not run the CIA up the flagpole and salute it every morning. He confirmed, from what he had heard and knew during his years in the agency,  that the CIA had been involved, or at least connected with drug smuggling, for at least 15 years before Nicaragua. The latest issue of the magazine The Progressive confirms this, noting that the CIA, in the name of supporting anti-Communist governments, helped smuggle heroin out of Pakistan in the 1960s and Laos in the 1970s. (CIA top brass, both past and present, of course refused to comment to the magazine for that article.)

He also told me what sounded like a conspiracy theory, but one that is halfway believable, for how the Gulf War got started.

Supposedly a well-connected older-money New Englander, a month or two before Iraq invaded Kuwait, gave undercover Iraqi defense officials a special tour of some of Kuwait’s defense installations?

Why? According to Ostler, Kuwait was at this time one of the biggest producers of pirated computer software, music recordings, and so forth, and so some of this businessman’s friends decided there was a simple way to teach Kuwait a lesson. This also, according to Ostler, is why Bush’s State Department never came clean to Congress and the public what they may have known in advance about Iraqi intentions.

I did an Internet search for the gentleman in question, but other than finding someone with a name to match in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, electronic telephone directory, could find no further information. To me, that doesn’t mean Ostler’s story is not true; rather, it may testify to the low radar profile of the man in question, whose name I have obviously omitted from this story.

In any case, for anybody traveling in the Silver City area, consider a trip to Mogollon. You might find a whole lot more than you expected, as well as some nice Christmas or anniversary gifts for special loved ones. (Ostler also sells Lionel trains, and ceramic displays for under the tree.)

===

I went back there in 2010. Tsarskoe Selo was still there (and remains listed today on some business information websites and even Yelp), but, sadly, unoccupied. I did a teh Google, well, actually, a DuckDuckGo for the site plus Ostler's name. Got an email address on one hit. No idea if it's live as of the time I write this piece or not, but we'll find out, won't we?

Update: I forgot to mention in that original column that ceramic displays for "under the tree" weren't the only type of such art. Ostler also sold authentic Hummel.

The not-so-good Gulf War

A good story on Salon notes that Bush 41 kind of set us up for Bush 43, even though he opposed trying to occupy Iraq.

1. His Hitlerization of Saddam Hussein.
2. His cut-and-run with the Kurds (mentioned) and the Shi'ites (not mentioned).

Those are just two biggies. There's many other bits and pieces of fallout, including how easy it made war look and more.

There's still two other big questions that overhang that war.

1. Just what did April Glaspie tell Hussein shortly before we invaded Kuwait? Short of her telling us either on her deathbed or posthumously, we may never know.
2. Why couldn't the Saudis et al defend themselves? In light of Osama bin Laden, I think our tentative answer is that most Arab Gulf states are afraid their own armed forces might start an Islamist civil war.

Saddam did NOT try to kill old man Bush

So, let’s go back to suspecting Kuwaiti lies. (See the bottom of the post for possible Kuwaiti motives to set up something like this as an alleged Iraqi assassination attempt, and the ruling al-Sabahs’ past history of lying related to Iraq. Or for the possibility it wasn’t just Kuwait behind this.)

Michael Isikoff, over at Newsweek reports what some of us have known for years:
Saddam Hussein did not try to kill George H.W. Bush in 1993.

Don’t believe me? It’s in the same just-released, albeit only halfway so, Pentagon report that puts Nail No. 942 in the coffin of lies claiming Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. As Isikoff says:

The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies.

But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence.

“It was surprising,” said one source familiar with the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the Iraqis did document, “you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot].”

Isikoff does caveat that the absence of evidence for something is not evidence of its nonexistence.

Those of us who have read alternative accounts of the event from near the time it happened have long suspected the al-Sabah ruling sheikhs of Kuwait made the story up. I mean, the whole thing smelled suspicious from the start. Whiskey smugglers arrested. Their sentences later commuted. And on and on.

And, no, I’m not alone there, either, as Raw Story reports, per a 1993 Boston Globe article:

A classified US intelligence analysis has concluded that Kuwait may have “cooked the books” on an alleged plot to assassinate former President Bush while he was in Kuwait last month. [...] At least one administration official has expressed the fear that President Clinton, under heavy criticism for his indecision over issues like Bosnia, may be tempted to hit at Iraq to prove his willingness to undertake resolute action. The report notes that some of the evidence definitely points to Iraqi involvement. The explosive devices captured by the Kuwaitis, for example, match those used by Iraqi intelligence in other terrorist operations. But the report says it was unable to corroborate the Kuwaiti assertion that the plot was aimed at Bush.

It would have been easy for Kuwait to use captured Iraqi ordinance from the Gulf War to set this whole thing up.

But, why?

Perhaps they were worried Clinton would pull out of the Gulf.

And, there’s nothing to say they were acting alone. Certainly, other Arab sheikhdoms and monarchies, still worried about Hussein two years after the Gulf War, could have been in on the deal.

On the other hand, perhaps the al-Sabahs expected more than just a pinprick missile strike by Clinton. Maybe they thought they could get another invasion of Iraq.

Remember as well that this is the same al-Sabahs who hired a Big Five American PR company to produced false advertising propaganda about newborn babies being snatched by Iraqi troops from Kuwait hospital incubators, who had representatives of this same PR firm lie before Congress (without any criminal sanctions ever being sought) and who otherwise brooked no ethical scruples to make sure we got into the Gulf War in the first place.

This is the same al-Sabahs who provoked Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in the first place by slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields.