al Qaeda in Iraq small & unpopular except in Bush/McCain propaganda

John McCain demonstrated a Bush level of stupidity when he chastised Obama about supposedly not knowing there is "al Qaeda in Iraq."

There is such a thing, but McCain (and a lot of Democrats for that matter) forget to include some important details.

• The military admits they inflated al Qaeda and Zarqawi's role in the insurgency for propaganda purposes in both Iraq and the US.


• Israelis and Saudis separately studied our interrogations of foreign fighters captured in Iraq and found that most had no prior connection to al Qaeda and were motivated by our invasion, not religious fundamentalism.




• Our friends the Saudis send more foreign fighters to Iraq than any other country,and half of those guys are suicide bombers. You know, the guys who blow up markets, cars, and mosques?



• The Iraqis don't like al Qaeda. The Bushies use this to make the leap to say that they don't like all the insurgency. The reality is Iraqis recognize al Qaeda is responsible for attacks on civilians and are trying to inflame sectarian violence, and sectarian violence is one of our excuses for staying.

To the extent Iraqis themselves are fighting us, it's for a couple of reasons:

• We broke stuff when we invaded and didn't fix it.


• Unemployment is as high or higher in Iraq than it was in the US during the Great Depression. That was considered such a crisis here in the 1930s, that people wondered whether we would lurch toward communism or a fascist dictatorship.

• We ruled by decree initially and still exercise veto power over who the Iraqis pick as leaders and the actions they take. Some leaders from the Iraqi oil workers union were touring the US last year, and they were still mad about all the decrees of Bush-appointed colonial governor Paul Bremer, especially the ones forcing privatization of public assets.

  When the Iraqi government shows signs of independence, Bush pulls on their choke chain HARD. Bush told them to fire their first elected prime minister Jafari, the guy who wanted to meet Noam Chomsky, and they did.
  
  The current prime minister, Maliki has said Bush will FIRE him if he doesn't get the Hydrocarbon Law passed.
  
  

• One of the biggest reasons Iraqis aren't happy we are there is the least discussed: that Hydrocarbon Law Bush is trying to force down the throats of Iraqis gives 88% of the income from Iraqis oil to big oil companies, a deal countries like Saudi, Kuwait, or Iran would never take without a gun to their head. If we wanted to make friends there, we'd let them pass a law that no Iraqi could possibly disapprove of. The Iraqis would be happy, we'd have access to that oil, but the oil companies would have slightly lower profits. That tells you how important the Iraqis or even we are to the folks in DC.

The bottom line is as little as 1% of Iraqis feel safer because we are there and overwhelming majorities want us to leave.

How are we teaching them democracy by ignoring that?

Once upon a time, an ideological enemy we had no diplomatic relations with, tested a nuke...

At the time, we were in a war with that country's neighbor, concerned that more people might be enslaved the ideology we didn't like.

They went on to develop a nuclear arsenal that is today relatively modest by US & Russian standards, but nonetheless far more than Iran or North Korea are likely to have any time soon.

Our president, who hated the very bad ideology, did a very odd thing. He went and made friends with them even though we were still fighting in the neighboring country.

Those who wanted us to be very afraid of the very bad ideology were sure that the country with the nukes would attack us or at least infect us with the very bad ideology.

Today, we don't worry about that country nuking or even attacking us in the near future because we owe them too much money and we buy too much of the stuff they make since they seem to have become infected with our ideology even though we haven't been infected with theirs at all.

Likewise, the neighboring country we fought in so long to convince them not to adopt the very bad ideology tried it for a while and decided they'd rather be like us.

We don't get to pick those countries leaders or have troops there, but for some reason they like us anyway.

With the other bad idea, there were countries we made friends with, countries we were a little friendly with, and one or two we shunned.

The ones we became friends with changed quickly, the ones we were a little friendly with changed a little less quickly, and the ones we shunned didn't seem to change at all.

Now some of the same people who said to be afraid of the very bad ideology want us to be afraid of a different very bad ideology and say we must fight a very long war to convince them the ideology is a very bad idea and that one of those countries may get a nuclear bomb.

Which method is likely to get the quickest results? Kill a lot of people or make friends?

Sometimes in history, making friends doesn't work so well. Hitler and Stalin probably would have taken other people's land and killed a lot of people no matter what. But those countries were roughly our equals. Today, maybe two countries in the world are our peers, and the rest are fleas on our ass militarily. They might be difficult for us to invade and occupy, but they would have absolutely no chance of invading and occupying us.

Therefore, there is little danger in making friends (except to the people who wanted to steal stuff while we were fighting and invading).

Our elected leaders like to make up very simple stories that are easy for us to understand. Why don't they tell this one more often? Maybe because it has a happy ending for us--but not for the people who matter.

iran north korea iraq war wmd vietnam oil china president george w bush russia communism islamofascismjihad long war nixon nuke nuclear atom bomb corruption occupation halliburton political humor colonialism white mans burden professor smartass iraq lies peak oil propaganda corporation fascism political opinion agent provocateur war on terror muslim public opinion opinion public relations foreign policy al qaeda false flag cointelpro northwoods terrorist fairy tales worst president ever failure war criminal idiot retard closet gay fable parable humor comedy funny nazi smartass comments resistance censored news rebel

Iraq Insurgents locals NOT al Qaeda said 2003 National Intelligence Estimate

If you just relied on the Bush administration and Fox, talk radio, and even mainstream network news, you would think we are fighting primarily foreign al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

But as early as 2003, top analysts from various intelligence agencies agreed the insurgency was local and based on real grievances, including the presence of our troops and told the Bushies.

The Bushies chose to lie to us instead.

The same kind of information was why Nixon didn't want the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War published. It wasn't that they revealed our intelligence methods or war plans, but that the presence of our troops was fueling the resistance.

It's possible that some portion of the 72% of our troops who want us to leave within the year have figured this out, that they are killing people who are doing the same thing they would be doing if America was occupied. These 18 to twenty-something year olds are going to carry that with them for a long time.



KEY EXCERPTS:

Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003
Posted on Tue, Feb. 28, 2006
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

***

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

***

Maples said that while Iraqi terrorists and foreign fighters conduct some of the most spectacular attacks, disaffected Iraqi Sunnis make up the insurgency's core. "So long as Sunni Arabs are denied access to resources and lack a meaningful presence in government, they will continue to resort to violence," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That view contrasts with what the administration said as the insurgency began in the months following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and gained traction in the fall. Bush and his aides portrayed it as the work primarily of foreign terrorists crossing Iraq's borders, disenfranchised former officials of Saddam's deposed regime and criminals.

On Nov. 1, 2003, a day after the National Intelligence Estimate was distributed, Bush said in his weekly radio address: "Some of the killers behind these attacks are loyalists of the Saddam regime who seek to regain power and who resent Iraq's new freedoms. Others are foreigners who have traveled to Iraq to spread fear and chaos. ... The terrorists and the Baathists hope to weaken our will. Our will cannot be shaken."

FULL TEXT:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/13984788.htm




2003 National Intelligence Estimate insurgents iraq war wmd terrorism oil president george w bush osama bin laden real reasons occupation colonialism white mans burden professor smartass lies corporationfascism democracy political opinion agent provocateur war on terror muslim public opinion opinion public relations foreign policy al qaeda false flag terrorist worst president ever failure war criminal smartass comments resistance censored news rebel

Bush's Saudi coddling blocked loose nuke probe

Just as Bush went after Saddam on a drip of evidence of supporting of Al Qaeda while blocking the investigation of a fire hose of Saudi support, he did the same thing with nuclear proliferation. We had to invade Iraq because Saddam MIGHT make nukes that he MIGHT give or sell to terrorists or rogue nations. By contrast, Pakistan was already doing both. And Bush's protection of the Saudis blocked the investigation of their funding of the Pakistani nuke program, as BBC reporter Greg Palast points out. Palast deserves a place in American history for his reporting on the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of black voters in Florida that our media ignored. He performs an equally important service for us here.

At some point, it has to become clear that these guys have no interest in fighting terrorism, but rather in keeping it an open wound that they can use to justify their hostile takeovers (wars) of oil producing countries.

KEY EXCERPTS:

SEPTEMBER 11: WHAT YOU "OUGHT NOT TO KNOW"
DOCUMENT 199-I AND THE FBI'S WORDS TO CHILL THE SOUL

Thursday, September 9, 2004
by Greg Palast

On November 9, 2001, when you could still choke on the dust in the air near Ground Zero, BBC Television received a call in London from a top-level US intelligence agent. He was not happy. Shortly after George W. Bush took office, he told us reluctantly, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI, "were told to back off the Saudis."

We knew that. In the newsroom, we had a document already in hand, marked, "SECRET" across the top and "199-I" - meaning this was a national security matter.

The secret memo released agents to hunt down two member of the bin Laden family operating a "suspected terrorist organization" in the USA. It was dated September 13, 2001 -- two days too late for too many. What the memo indicates, corroborated by other sources, was that the agents had long wanted to question these characters ... but could not until after the attack. By that time, these bin Laden birds had flown their American nest.

Back to the high-level agent. I pressed him to tell me exactly which investigations were spiked. None of this interview dance was easy, requiring switching to untraceable phones. Ultimately, the insider said, "Khan Labs." At the time, our intelligence agencies were on the trail of Pakistan's Dr. Strangelove, A.Q. Khan, who built Pakistan's bomb and was selling its secrets to the Libyans. But once Bush and Condoleeza Rice's team took over, the source told us, agents were forced to let a hot trail go cold. Specifically, there were limits on tracing the Saudi money behind this "Islamic bomb."


FULL TEXT