United States History Book

What is the explanation of the Iraqi invasion by the U.S.?
We know there were no weapons of mass destruction, that that was alie, or a bad guess by Haliburton and Cheney?

Popular history tells us that Britain looted India. But in reality Britain *lost* money on India, and all her possessions. What was happening was the East India Company was looting the British treasury with the help of a few paid politicians.

This is what Halliburton and KBR are doing. You know - charge the government 15 million dollars to build a cement factory, then pay an Iraqi firm $80,000 (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the factory. Entire cargo palettes of money - billions of dollars - missing. (That's not an exaggeration. They really did lose actual cargo palettes of money worth billions of dollars.)

Vice President Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton, and still owns considerable stock in it. Cheney's war has made him very rich indeed.

Granted, even before 9/11, there were good reasons for invading....

- Saddam was guilty of multiple counts of genocide - the Kurds in the north and the Shi'a in the marshes in the south.

- He used poison gas against his own people. This after he made a peace agreement with them, and they came down from the hills and back into their villages.

- If someone were to name the top man-made environmental disasters ever, the top three were all Saddam's work: The draining of the Tigris and Euphrates salt marsh ecoregion. (As an act of genocide against those living there, yet.) The dynamiting of 700 oil wells. And the deliberate dumping of 1,500,000 tons of oil into the Gulf. (For comparison, Exxon Valdez spilled 35,000 tons.) It's a wonder that Greenpeace and PETA didn't demand an invasion.

- He started the Iran–Iraq War which killed somewhere over a million people.

- He started another war, Gulf War I, invading Kuwait and prepared to invade Saudi Arabia, killing another 35,000 people. He launched missiles at Israel, hoping to bring the whole region into a much larger war.

- He supported terrorism in a big way, exporting it to several other countries (including openly sending large sums of money support suicide bombings in Israel.) He sheltered terrorists like Abu Nidal and Achille Lauro hijacker Abu Abbas.

- And of course, Saddam routinely violated the terms of the Gulf War's cease fire and the UN-imposed sanctions. This in itself could justify for the invasion.

And 9/11 presented an even bigger reason to invade...

On 9/11 the U.S. learned a lesson: When some wingnut group threatens the U.S. with destruction and commits acts of terrorism against the U.S., that's one thing. But when a government does it, you need to take them seriously. Especially when that government has a long history of exporting and harboring terrorism, and committing acts of war against you and others.

After Afghanistan there was one other country that met that criteria: Iraq.

I'm not saying that it was a good idea, and I think that the following occupation was a stupid idea and even stupider in execution. But there was plenty of legal and ethical justification to invade.

It speaks volumes about the Bush II/Cheney/Rove White House that they all but ignored the real legal and ethical justifications, and built their case on lies and deception instead, and added further obvious lies about the cost and duration. Which tells your allies to not get involved.

In the end, I think they invaded for the reason mentioned at the top: To loot the America government's treasury.