Another Bush Iraq War lie disproven

Why President Obama is continuing President Bush’s Iraq War is a mystery. The whole mess was a lie from beginning to … well, when will it end?

One of the lies the Bush regime and its Neocon propagandists used to excuse the war was that Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, a pilot lost over Iraq in 1991 during the first President Bush’s Iraq War I, had been held captive ever since by Saddam. Here’s what Secretary of Defense Donald “RummyDummy” Rumsfeld said in March 2002, as the Bush regime was gearing up its propaganda offensive to invade Iraq:

The Bush administration voiced deep skepticism today over a reported offer from Iraq to discuss the status of an American pilot who was shot down there in 1991.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that Iraq’s supposed offer to discuss Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher had been reported only through news media outlets and not through formal channels between the countries.

”I don’t believe very much that the regime of Saddam Hussein puts out,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “They’re masters at propaganda.”

Actually, of course, Saddam was an amateur at propaganda. The professionals were Bush and the Neocons.

Speicher located

Lt. Cmdr. Speicher’s remains just were found:

WASHINGTON — Navy officials announced early Sunday that Marines in the western Iraqi province of Anbar had found remains that have been positively identified as those of an American fighter pilot shot down in the opening hours of the first Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The Navy pilot, Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, was the only American missing in action from that war. Efforts to determine what happened to him after his F/A-18 Hornet was shot down by an Iraqi warplane on Jan. 17, 1991, had continued despite false rumors and scant information.

Conflicting reports from Iraq had, over the years, fueled speculation that the pilot, promoted to captain from lieutenant commander in the years he was missing, might have been taken into captivity either after parachuting from his jet or after a crash landing.

But the evidence in Iraq suggests he did not survive and was buried by Bedouins shortly after he was shot down.

Wasted lives

Of course, the First Iraq War, like the Second Iraq War, never should have been fought. Speicher’s life was wasted, along with all the thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the Bush Crime Family’s obsession with Iraq and Saddam, whom they once — let us remember — supported with foreign aid.

Here’s Bush flunky Rumsfeld meeting Saddam in 1984 to give him American military equipment for Saddam’s war against Iran. At least back then, under Reagan — Bush I was vice president — America wasn’t so stupid as to put its own ground forces into the Middle East in long, bankrupting wars.

Remember the Vietnam MIAs?

And one more thing, fellow Americans, the Bush family used Speicher’s unfortunate fate — his supposedly being missing in action and held captive by Saddam — as a propaganda tool. But what did the Bushes ever do to get back the American MIA’s from Vietnam who still could be over there?

For you youngsters out there, Vietnam was the war that young W., the future President Bush II, avoided when his daddy got him into the Texas Air National Guard, in which he heroically kept the Viet Cong from invading Galveston, at least when he wasn’t going AWOL and getting drunk.

Karl Rove no “genius”

I’ve written before about how I never was impressed with the “genius” of Karl Rove, who barely got Bush elected two times, lost the Senate for Republicans in 2000 and lost Congress in 2006. Rove also is supposed to be a walking, jabbering Wikipedia about political history.

Tom Brokaw’s new book about the 1960s, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties,” has this comment by Rove:

It’s funny, you look back at 1968 and think everybody was against the war — and two of the candidates were not (Nixon and Alabama Gov. George Wallace). And they got nearly 60 percent of the vote.”

Except that the third candidate, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, was vice president under President LBJ, and was carrying the pro-war torch for him in the election. The anti-war candidates were Bobby Kennedy, who was shot, and Clean Gene McCarthy, who was outmaneuvered at the Democratic Convention. The convention violence is the backdrop to the movie “Medium Cool.”

Doesn’t Rove remember the anti-war, anti-LBJ, anti HHH riots at the convention that were suppressed by Mayor Daley’s cops? And who can forget HHH’s logorrhea backing the war. The guy never stopped talking. At the 1980 Democratic Convention, Jimmy Carter, in a classic Freudian slip, called HHH “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.”

The 1968 denial of the nomination to McCarthy led to the party’s reforms before and during the 1972 convention that brought about the control of the party by the Far Left, and the suppression of the “hard hats” and other blue-collar Democrats, permanently shifting the party way to the left. Those frozen out of the party became the Reagan Democrats.

It’s also surprising that Brokaw would include this quote by Rove. Surely, as a longtime journalist, he must have remembered what happened in 1968? Maybe this explains it. Brokaw says:

Yes, I smoked a little pot. I even inhaled.

As they say, if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.

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Democrats demand surcharge for war — forgetting that LBJ’s war surcharge smashed the economy

American voters elected Democratic majorities in Congress for one overwhelming reason: to end the Iraq War. Democrats have not done so. So much for “the will of the people” and “democracy.”

Now, Democrats have dug into their dark past for a really bad idea: a war surtax:

The plan, unveiled by Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., John Murtha, D-Pa., and Jim McGovern, D-Mass., would require low- and middle-income taxpayers to add 2 percent to their tax bill. Wealthier people would pay an additional 12 to 15 percent, Obey said.

It’s true that the war is being paid for on borrowed funds, meaning today’s little children will be paying for this war long into the future. That’s shameful.

But a tax increase would be even worse. In the late 1960s, Democratic President LBJ — whose initials stood for “Lying Bull(expletive deleted) Johnson” — and a Democratic Congress imposed a 10% surtax to pay for another really bad war, the one in Vietnam. The late, great economist Jude Wanniski explained what happened next:

The U.S. economy began to sour in 1967 because of the LBJ war surtax, which was a progression on top of a progression. The Dow Jones hit 1000 in midday trading in January 1966 and then began its long decline in real terms — taking the real wages of workers down with it as one error after another was made. Nixon campaigned on ending the war and the surtax. When elected, he was persuaded by Chairman Paul McCracken of his Council of Economic Advisors and Herb Stein, a member of the CEA, to defer elimination of the surtax in order to narrow the budget deficit. He was also encouraged to raise the capital gains tax, with Stein the culprit along with Peter Flanigan, who ran Nixon’s council on international economic policy. The stock market fell and the economy followed. (I seem to recall the number of IPOs dropped from 300 in 1968 to one or two in 1969.)

That’s what would happen again if a surtax were imposed. Bush has been so wrong on the war, but at least he has been right in opposing tax increases.

But the Democrats likely will give us a surtax next year under President Hillary.

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Military opposing Iran war

The U.S. Constitution clearly gives Congress, and only Congress, the power to “declare war.” Yet since the last declaration of war, in World War II, we have had continual undeclared and therefore unconstitutional wars: Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Finally, its forces broken in Iraq, the U.S. military is standing up to Bush on starting yet another undeclared and unconstitutional war, this time against Iran. All American military officers take oaths to follow the U.S. Constitution, not to blindly follow a dictatorial president. Now, some of them finally are taking those oaths seriously.

Glen Greenwald has the details:

There have been some equally extraordinary reports about what appears to be the virtual refusal of senior military officials to permit a war with Iran. Several months ago, it was reported that the CENTCOM Commander, Admiral William Fallon, blocked what had appeared to be the successful efforts by Dick Cheney and administration neocons to send a third aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf and “vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM”….

This is what you get when you have a Rush Limbaugh Nation — a country filled with war cheerleaders whose insatiable appetite for new military conflicts is matched only by their steadfast refusal to volunteer to fight.

Unfortunately, of the presidential candidates in the two major parties, only Republican Ron Paul and Democrats Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Bill Richardson are against an unconstitutional war with Iran.

Even the top supposedly anti-war Democrats — Hillary, Obama, and Edwards — are OK on a war with Iran. None has served in the military. And they care as much for our troops’ welfare as they do for the U.S. Constitution — that is, not at all.

The same is true for the top Republican candidates — Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson, and Huckabee — although at least McCain did serve in the military.

Congress remains supine, unable to stop the Iraq war, let alone a new war with Iran, even though Democrats were given a majority by voters specifically to stop this war madness. Aren’t we supposed to be a democracy, where the government enacts the people’s wishes while following the Constitution?

L.A. Times and O.C. Register op-ed sections trade places on Iraq War

Over the weekend, the O.C. Register’s libertarian (small goverment) op-ed section traded places with the leftist (big government) op-ed section of the L.A. Times. Their two main op-eds were commenting on President Bush’s comparison of leaving Iraq to the U.S. departure from South Vietnam in the early 1970s.

The Register ran an op-ed by Mark Steyn, who wrote:

Well, it had a “few negative repercussions” for America’s allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the North. And it had a “negative repercussion” for former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum….So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other people.

Stein himself is a Canadian chickenhawk, who never has served in the armed forces of any country.

He doesn’t note that U.S. forces fought in Vietnam, in strength, from 1965-1972 — double that of any other U.S. war. The war cost 58,000 U.S. troops killed and, in effect, bankrupted the U.S. economy, leading to the inflation and “malaise” economy of the 1970s. Wasn’t that enough?

If Steyn would have had is way, we’d still be fighting there, although he, of course, would have avoided service.

The North Vietnamese takeover of the South led to tyranny, putting South Vietnamese officials in cages, and the boat people’s exodus, many of them to Orange County, where they have been a wonderful addition to our community. But Vietnam now has a quasi-capitalist economy and mostly has religious freedom, although the communist party still runs a dictatorship.

As to Cambodia, Prince Sihanouk’s government was stable and fighting off the Khmer Rouge until it was destabilized by Nixon’s bombing of the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia and his invasion of Cambodia. Destabilized, Sihanouk’s regime fell to the Khmer Rouge, and the bloodbath ensued.

In contrast to Steyn’s chickenhawk propaganda, the L.A. Times ran an op-ed by Andrew Bacevich, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose son was just killed fighting in Iraq. He writes:

In unconventional wars, body counts don’t really count. In the Vietnam War, superior American firepower enabled U.S. forces to prevail in most tactical engagements. We killed plenty of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But killing didn’t produce victory — the exertions of U.S. troops all too frequently proved to be counterproductive.

So too in Iraq — although Bush insists on pretending otherwise. His speech had him sounding like President Lyndon Johnson, bragging that, in each month since January, U.S. troops in Iraq have “killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 Al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists.” If Bush thinks that by racking up big body counts the so-called surge will reverse the course of the war, he is deceiving himself. The real question is not how many bad guys we are killing, but how many our continued presence in Iraq is creating.

There’s no substitute for legitimacy. Wars like Vietnam and Iraq aren’t won militarily; at best, they are settled politically. But political solutions imply the existence of legitimate political institutions, able to govern effectively and to command the loyalty of the population.

In the Republic of Vietnam, created by the United States after the partition of French Indochina, such institutions did not exist. Despite an enormous U.S. investment in nation-building, they never did. In the end, South Vietnam proved to be a fiction.

So too with Iraq, conjured up by the British after World War I out of remnants of the Ottoman Empire. As a courtesy, we might pretend that Iraq qualifies as a “nation-state,” much as we pretend that members of Division I varsity football programs are “scholar-athletes.” In fact, given its deep sectarian and tribal divisions, Iraq makes South Vietnam look good by comparison….

Sometimes people can manage their own affairs. Does the U.S. need to attend to that mess? Perhaps not.

Here the experience of Vietnam following the U.S. defeat is instructive. Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together. Although not a utopia, Vietnam has become a stable and increasingly prosperous nation. It is a responsible member of the international community. In Hanoi, the communists remain in power. From an American point of view, who cares?

Bush did not even allude to the condition of Vietnam today. Yet the question poses itself: Is it not possible that the people of the Middle East might be better qualified to determine their future than a cadre of American soldiers, spooks and do-gooders? The answer to that question just might be yes.

I would add that Bush himself, another chickenhawk, avoided service in the Vietnam War. Nor have his daughters served in Iraq. The same is true of chickenhawk Dick Cheney and his daughters. (I oppose sending women into combat, but Bush and Cheney do not. So they’re hypocrites for not sending their daughters.)

88 women have have been killed so far in Iraq. Two more were killed just last week.

What kinds of men are these — Steyn, Bush, and Cheney — who send young women to die, when they won’t serve themselves?

As to the Register, they need to dump the unlibertarian chickenhawk Steyn for the wise, and saddened, Bacevich.

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V.C. in O.C.

In 1979 I was in the U.S. Army studying Russian up at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey when the Sino-Vietnamese War began. I was too young to have served in the U.S.-Vietnam War. But several of the older students at DLI had served in Vietnam. To a man, they cheered on the commie Chinese against the commie Viets. They had bad memories of North Vietnamese, who won the war after 58,000 Americans and at least 2 million Vietnamese were killed.

But times change.

Make sure you read Martin Wisckol’s piece today on the visit to Orange County by North Vietnamese — excuse me, just Vietnamese (without the “North”; I have to break that old Cold War habit) — President Nguyen Minh Triet:

But while Vietnamese-American demonstrators filled the streets outside the Dana Point’s St. Regis resort, it was also Vietnamese Americans who were filling the dining room with Nguyen – Vietnamese Americans eager to do business with Vietnam….One official on hand said Nguyen was returning home with $11 billion in business commitments.

Since junking socialism over the past 20 years, Vietnam’s economy has prospered and now is one of the hottest in Asia.

That long-ago war of 1979 played into the transition from socialism to capitalism of both China and Vietnam. The Vietnamese more than held their own against the numerically superior Chinese. Hanoi had a modern, Soviet-equipped, battle-victorious army, while China depended on the old “human wave” techniques from the Korean War — meaning get a lot of your guys killed, in this war up to 26,000 Chinese, although the number is disputed.

China’s military also had been badly damaged by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was sort of like the 1960s here in America, but without the acid rock music. Vietnam also had satellite photos supplied by the Soviets, so they could track the movements of Chinese troops. China had no similar intelligence advantage.

The result of the war for China was that it showed the old socialist system couldn’t supply the goods to the Chinese Army, let alone consumers. So Deng’s capitalist reforms were given a strong impetus.

For Vietnam, the war confirmed that socialism worked, adding to the euphoria from the 1975 victory over America. But the 1980s were not kind to socialism, as the Soviet Union’s decrepit regime began tottering under the weight of seven decades of socialist incompetence and inefficiency. In 1986, Vietnam began some capitalist reforms. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself blew up. Hanoi’s patron was gone. It couldn’t get cheap military hardware anymore from Moscow, but had to buy it on the world market.

Meanwhile, China’s capitalist reforms have turned it into an economic powerhouse, which also benefited its military. Vietnam has seen this and has accelerated its capitalist reforms, as shown by President Nguyen’s visit to Orange County.

How would things have turned out differently if the U.S. had never become involved in Vietnam, letting the commies take over the whole place much earlier than 1975? The Hanoi regime might have given up socialism earlier for the reasons given above: to strengthen themselves against their ancient Chinese opponents. But the war would not have killed all those Americans and Vietnamese. And it would not have traumatized both countries in other ways. The Vietnamese boat people might have come here sooner.

We’ll be saying something similar in 30 years about another lost war, that in Iraq.

Americans should realize that our greatest weapons are not our mighty military forces, but our ideas of liberty and free markets.

That’s what Independence Day is about, too.