Saturday, October 01, 2005

Letter to Democrats on Iraq War Truth & Lies

I'm faxing this to every Democrat in the Senate. While it might be a little harsh for some, at least parts of it apply to all of them.




October 1, 2005

Democratic Senators
United States Senate
Washington, DC

Senator,

Why do you support the war in Iraq?

One way you can help end it is by telling the public the real reasons we are there and don’t insult our intelligence by saying one god damn word about these things that are proven bullshit:


  • Weapons of Mass Destruction

  • Saddam didn’t have the dreaded WMD’s and even if he did, he would not be stupid enough to use them against us or give them to someone who did and risk the complete destruction of Iraq with a fraction of our thousands of nukes. Saddam was evil but not stupid. You are old enough to have lived through the Cold War, and should have known this without anyone telling you.

    The Downing Street Minutes indicate the Bush people knew that threat was a lie anyway.

  • Terrorism

  • Likewise, even President Bush was forced to admit on at least two occasions, including the 2004 presidential debates that Saddam had NOTHING to do with 9/11. As the Joint Congressional Inquiry found, the 9/11 terrorists were funded and given logistical support by our allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who far from being punished, seem to have profited from the attacks with closer ties to us.


  • Spreading Democracy


  • While the pro-democracy argument is an after-thought at best, opinions of the Iraqis themselves show that it too is a lie. The Bush appointed CPA polled Iraqi’s in the Spring of 2004 and found that 86% wanted us to leave after the January 2004 elections at the latest.



    A third of the current Iraqis legislators have signed a letter asking us to withdraw, and one of our favorite whipping boys over there, Muqtada al Sadr, was able to collect a million signatures on a petition asking us to leave. That’s democracy, and you and Bush are ignoring it.

    General Garner was fired for calling for early elections, and the résumés of the Bush foreign policy team and our other current relationships with brutal dictators in Central Asia and the Arab world, including shipping prisoners to them to be tortured, shows that they do not care about human rights or anything of the kind at all.

    If we truly wanted to spread democracy in the Middle East, we could do it far more cheaply in tax dollars and lives by ending our support of dictatorships in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, and especially Saudi Arabia.

    Additionally, the Bush administration has removed the democratically elected president of Haiti, and backed a coup and recall against the elected president of Venezuela, proving that business interests trump the pro-democracy rhetoric. The president’s political ally Pat Robertson has even called for Chavez’s assassination. Chavez’s only sin is wanting to use his country’s oil wealth to actually help the poor and middle class there, and his only threat to us is to provide discounted fuel to hospitals and the poor, or, god forbid, send doctors to help the uninsured, something our government and the public college I work for hasn’t seen fit to do.


I don’t think you got elected to the Senate because you were so stupid and gullible as to believe these arguments.

Most of you have been completely silent about the real reasons, and the few that have discussed them have done so pretty obliquely.

The reasons that I have pieced together from reading PNAC documents, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jay Garner’s comments on his time running Iraq, and the State Department documents leaked to journalist Greg Palast:


  • Gain secure access to Iraq’s oil as the world’s supply begins to decline

  • Military bases to influence, intimidate, and invade other oil-producing countries in the region

  • Prevent Iraq & OPEC countries from trading oil in Euros instead of dollars

  • Privatization of Iraq’s oil & contracts to pump it to Americans rather than French & Russian oil companies

    The BBC has already done a lot of work on the oil motive for you. You can see a timeline of the meetings and relevant documents at
    http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html

  • Put money in the pockets of contractors as is also done through the Third World debt scam

  • Eliminate a perceived threat to Israel


Some of these are at least arguably in our national interest—others amount to criminal corruption. Tell us which it was, or which swayed you, so we can decide if it was worth it, and be in on these decisions that affect all of our lives, and don’t insult my intelligence by calling it “conspiracy theories.”

I am ashamed and embarrassed that I find out more about what my government is doing by going to the BBC website or reading foreign newspapers than I can from the one I can buy at the corner—or from YOU.

Frankly, if our elected officials refuse to talk publicly about the real issues driving our policy but instead have the real debate behind closed doors, we don't have a democracy, and you sit in a senate of corporations that Mussolini would envy.






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