The question of political manipulation of intelligence data is really heating up. Despite some claims that the President's speech claiming that Iraq had purchased Nigerian uranium was vetted by the intelligence community before its delivery, it is increasingly obvious that the Bush Administration was well aware that the claim was false.
According to the BBC, the CIA warned that the documents was likely a forgery ten full months before the President's public claim. This contention was made by a CIA official who noted that a report into the documents from U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson had been forwarded to the White House in March of 2002.
This is on the heels of claims that the White House made false claims of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda, which were confirmed by both Iraqi and al-Qaeda prisoners, and that the President ordered that plans for an invasion of Iraq be updated immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The whole thing smells a bit fishy, especially considering that no traces of WMD have been found since the end of the war. This has, of course, led to claims by the U.S. and Great Britain that the weapons were destroyed before or during the war. The problem with that idea is that there is, again, no evidence that weapons were destroyed, and that one of the reasons given for the invasion was to: get rid of Iraq's WMDs. If they were being detroyed, why invade?
It certainly wasn't to build democracy, or to save the world from Saddam. That leaves three possibilities: a wag-the-dog style political game, oil, or an ego-driven Presidential need to defeat Saddam. None of the reasons are worth the life of a single American soldier, much less the thousands or Iraqis killed in the conlict.
Our beloved President is on a tour of Africa, one in which he will not visit Nelson Mandela because of Mandela's opposition to our adventure in Iraq. this is supposed to punish Mr. Mandela, but I'm not sure how. Visiting the hero of the Apartheid movement is likened to visiting the Queen of England. In other words, a pleasant social visit that brings the visitor prestige. In his eternal arrogance, the 43rd President of these United States has decided to punish one of the world's great men.
That's not the real problem, though. The real problem is this line in a speech President Bush made in Senegal:
"By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free."
Is the President of the United States really implying that God made slavery happen to awaken Americans to the evil of slavery? Or is he saying that it took the slavery imposed on Africans by Europeans to show us the error of the aristocratic South? Either way, he's saying that God used the suffering of millions to make some sort of point.
I don't freakin' think so. Slavery had nothing to do with God, despite the Biblical justifications produced by some fairly twisted pro-slavery ministers. Slavery was about economics. Africans were a convenient target to become slaves because at the time they were seen as "lower" than Europeans due to skin color, level of industrialization, technology, etc...
The President is trying to color slavery with a piece of pseudo-religious garbage that everyone should find offensive. This is just the kind of thing that makes the South look like some sort of racist backwater, and makes our nation look like a pack of imbecils.
I just finished my 3rd class, this one on the Vietnam War, as a graduate student in Military History at SHSU, and it was just a little bit too timely a topic. Dr. James Olson, who taught the class had some valuable insights, which I received mostly in the form of email responses to the eleven writing assignments. What I noticed, and he later confirmed, was the frightening similarities between the two wars.
I'm not talking about the obvious here. That would be the easy way out. what's the obvious?
1. We had overwhelmingly superior firepower in both conflicts. Any time we decisvely engage the enemy, that firepower makes it no contest.
2. The use of our firepower was largely counterproductive. In Vietnam the indiscriminate use of artillery and air power killed 400,000 civilians in the South. Iraq II didn't reach that level, but he cavalier dismissal of civilian casualties still had a detrimental effect, especially after all of the talk about "smart" weapons. just like in Vietnam, if you attack a bogus target, you kill innocent people.
3. We didn't enjoy the popular support of the people in South Vietnam, and we don't in Iraq. Both groups see us as invaders. We did little of the "hearts-and-minds" stuff in Vietnam (except in the I Corps area of the Marine Coprs), and we do little of it in Iraq.
4. We tried to fight the last war. In Vietnam, we expected another Korean War, with horrific results in terms of misunderstanding the political, cultural, and military environment. There is no reason to expect Korean and Vietnamese peasants to be the same type of people.
That's just the obvious stuff. It doesn't really represent the problem. The real problem is in the assumptions of our political and military leaders.
1. In both Vietnam and Iraq, we looked for a military solution to a perceived problem. In Vietnam, JFK wanted to save face after his Bay of Pigs debacle, and our hysteria of the threat of international Communism led us into some pretty big policy mistakes. Thank you Senator Joe McCarthy and Congressman Nixon (ok, so Nixon did really catch a Communist) for playing to our fears. LBJ didn't want to look weak on Communism and South Vietnam couldn't protect itself, so American boys went to fight a war that Asian boys didn't even want. With Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush used our anti-terrorist, anti-Islam hystria to finish a previous war. Glad to kow we can still be led around by our fears.
2. We tried to build "democracy" in South Vietnam by supporting a guy who wanted to found his own dynasty in the China/Vietnam style based on the Mandarin system, knowing full well that he didn't support popular government, and that if he did, he'd lose to Ho Chi Minh. In Iraq, we're claiming to want to build democracy, but are deposing localy elected leaders for our own flunkies. If we want to promote "democracy" in Iraq, we have to accept that some of the people elected are not going to be friendly.
Vietnam was pretty depressing. Just read the government documents about My La to get the picture.