My Broken Promise

So much for that pledge that I’d sorta made — you know, to avoid the news reports for a coupla days.

I couldn’t sleep. I tried focusing on my breathing — taking slow deep breaths. Laying on my back, I tried to be aware of each part of my body and the stress within. Then, bit by bit, I focused on releasing that tension — starting at my toes, up through my ankles, calves, thighs and onward to the tippy top of my head. I tried to let my mind drift, to have it not focus on pressing issues, schedules, finances or that new blank canvas on my easel.

I really did try.

Two hours later I gave up, came downstairs and looked at my Twitter feed.

Oof!

Charles Pierce has a tremendous piece up: How Iraq Turns Into Vietnam Before Our Very Eyes
It’s long but well worth the read.

A couple of snippets:

Once upon a time, a long time and one incompetent legacy president ago, in October of 2001,  there already was something called The Future Of Iraq Project, put together by the State Department, which described in great detail what would be needed to rebuild the country after we'd smashed it -- and, yes, the Iraq adventure now looks like the ultimate exercise in Destroying The Village In Order To Save It -- and, more to the point, what might happen if we shorted the job.

and

I have a terrible feeling, based on the McClatchy report  , and the reports from the field, that many of the members of the national legislature are presently finding themselves on the Kissinger side in the war for national memory, and that Who-Lost-Iraq? sadly will become an issue in the midterm elections that are upcoming in the fall, and that it will do so before the country has been honest with itself in answering the question, “Why Iraq At All?”

Yes, yes WHY were we there at all? Al Qaeda wasn’t a presence of any kind before we invaded. The folks responsible for the nearly 3,000 dead on September 11, 2001 were in Afghanistan NOT Iraq.  Our government led by Bush/Cheney Co. made Iraq a shiny new penny, a destination and breeding ground for terrorists. We had no business being there.

This was a war for oil, plotted and schemed well in advance of 9/11. 

Newly declassified documents published at the National Security Archive prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the Bush administration planned to topple Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq as early as January, 2001, and were making strategic plans and resource allocations as early as November, 2001.

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"Of course it's about oil; we can't really deny that," said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are."

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In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just over a week into Bush's first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March, the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq's entire oil productive capacity.

Planning for a military invasion was soon under way. Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, said in 2004. "Already by February (2001), the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why (to invade Iraq), but the how and how quickly."

So, here I am at 2 AM, full of rage, Coco’s even giving me the cold shoulder — “C’mon, I gotta get my beauty sleep. Leave me ALOOOOONE!”

Maybe I’ll watch go Wings of Desire for the 50th time....