March 22, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - It has now been eighteen years since the Iraq
invasion, and I'm still not done raging about it.
Nobody should be.
The reason it's so important to stay enraged
about Iraq is because it's never been addressed or
rectified in any real way whatsoever. All the
corrupt mechanisms which led to the invasion are
still in place and its consequences remain. It isn't
something that happened in the past.
The Iraq invasion feels kind of like if your dad
had stood up at the dinner table, cut off your
sister's head in front of everyone, gone right back
to eating and never suffered any consequences, and
everyone just kind of forgot about it and carried on
life like it never happened. The US-centralized
empire is full of willful amnesiacs pretending they
don't remember Iraq because it's currently
politically convenient, and we must not let them do
this.
No institutional changes were made to ensure that
the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn't be repeated.
It's one of those big, glaring problems people just
decided to pretend is resolved, like racism.
There's this weird implicit default assumption
among the political/media class that US government
agencies have earned back the trust they lost with
Iraq, despite their having made no changes
whatsoever to prevent another Iraq-like horror from
reoccurring, or even so much as apologizing. The
reason nobody responsible for the Iraq invasion
suffered any consequences for the great evil they
inflicted upon the world is because the western
empire had no intention of changing and has every
intention of repeating such evils. The lies and
killing continue unabated.
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No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to
keep the US government from deceiving Americans into
war. No new laws were made, no policies changed; no
one was even fired. And indeed, the government
did deceive Americans into war again: the Libya
and Syria interventions were both based on lies.
It's happened since, and it will happen again unless
the murderous US war machine is stopped.
Don't take life advice from people who are
miserable. Don't take career advice from people
whose careers aren't where you want to be. Don't
take creative advice from people who don't create
things. Don't take foreign policy advice from people
who supported the Iraq invasion.
How true can President Biden's
claim be that he regrets supporting the Iraq
invasion if he appointed
the guy who advised that decision as Secretary
of State?
It's absolutely insane that
every US presidential general election since the
Iraq invasion has featured a mainstream candidate
who actively supported it. The argument that the
Iraq invasion was supported by most prominent
politicians at the time is not a defense of those
politicians, it’s an indictment of mainstream
American politics. The fact that politicians who not
only supported the Iraq invasion but actively
facilitated it are still becoming US presidential
nominees proves the entire American political system
is corrupt beyond the possibility of redemption.
Nobody who supported the Iraq invasion should be
working in politics at all. They shouldn’t be able
to find employment anywhere more prominent or
influential than a cash register. This should be
true of politics, and it should be true of media as
well.
There is no valid reason for the entire US-led
world order not to have been completely dismantled
after the invasion of Iraq. A world order which can
create something as horrific as the unforgivable
Iraq invasion (or the genocide in Yemen today for
that matter) is not a world order that will lead the
world in a good direction. The facts are in. The
US-led world order must end.
So much establishment loyalism ultimately boils
down to an entirely faith-based and unquestioned
belief that the corrupt, depraved power
establishment which facilitated the Iraq war
completely evaporated as soon as George W Bush and
Tony Blair left office. There is literally no reason
to believe this besides it feeling more
psychologically comfortable to believe it.
It's essential to keep in mind that western
propaganda hasn't gotten less advanced since the
Iraq invasion, it has gotten more
advanced. The Russiagate psyop and the smear
campaigns against Assange and Corbyn make this
abundantly clear. You need to be more
critical of western narratives than with Iraq, not
less.
Manipulating public thought at mass scale is a
science. Scientific fields don't magically become
less sophisticated over time, they become more
sophisticated. Every time they run a new mass-scale
manipulation, whether it succeeds or fails, they
learn from it. And they evolve.
We must remember that the mass media can create
false narratives without even speaking them
explicitly, just by giving a certain impression.
After the Iraq invasion 70 percent of Americans
still believed Saddam was responsible for 9/11,
just because reporters and politicians kept
mentioning the two in the same breath.
Supporting the Vietnam war was dumb. Supporting
the Iraq invasion after being lied to about Vietnam
was an order of magnitude dumber. Supporting any US
war agendas after being lied to about Iraq is an
order of magnitude even dumber than that.
The debate about whether America has the moral
authority to intervene in other countries was
settled once and for all eighteen years ago. Western
mass media have spent the last eighteen years trying
to slowly spin the narrative away from facts and
reality, but the Iraq invasion invalidates them all.
Iraq should be a one-word debunk of all
pro-regime change arguments. You should be able to
just say "Iraq" and have whoever's pushing
escalations and interventionism sit the fuck down
and shut the fuck up. The fact that that isn't
enough shows how insanely propagandized we are.
America shouldn't be in the Middle East at all,
much less Iraq, and the US government is solely
responsible for every American soldier who dies
there.
When a known compulsive liar asks you to place
your faith in him on a very important matter, you
tell him to fuck off. When the western empire tells
you to trust them that an evil government needs to
be ousted, you take it with an Iraq-sized grain of
salt.
Never let anyone shout you down for openly
doubting US intelligence on foreign nations. Iraq
means they don't get to do that anymore. Ever.
I promise I will always fight to remind the world
about the Iraq invasion. I will always do everything
I can to make sure that as many people as possible
view all actions of the US-centralized power
establishment through the lens of what they did to
that country for as long as I draw breath.
I will always do everything I can to keep Iraq
from being dismissed as an anomaly of history that
could never happen again. Whenever the empire talks
about Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, North
Korea, Yemen, or any other country, I will be
talking about what they did to Iraq.
You don't get to butcher a million people and
then say "Oh yeah, but that was a whole eighteen
years ago. You can trust us now." That's not a
thing. The world has no business taking US defense
and intelligence agencies at their word about
anything ever again.
I write about imperial warmongering not just
because it is intrinsically evil, but because it is
the clearest evidence I can point to that the people
who are running things are too sociopathic to be
left in charge. The power structure which raped Iraq
should not exist. Period.
The way I see it we've got two options: find a
way to drastically change the way we think and
function as a species, or pray that the world will
be saved by the same ruling elites who destroyed
Iraq while making the poor poorer for the benefit of
the extremely wealthy.
Updated March 23, 2021: - The bio for the
author of this article has been corrected. My
apologies for the error.
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