Weapons and War

Believe it or not there are those who are still asking, why did we invade Iraq? Some pundits are still saying that they really don’t know. As soon as we ran into a stone wall looking for WMDs, there were those who believed there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And, of course, there was no link. In fact, they hated each other. So Bush and his coterie, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Perle decide to invade Iraq despite there being no connection between Iraq and 9/11. In fact, 15 of the 19 hi-jackers were Saudi citizens. No one mentioned attacking Saudi Arabia since we were getting huge amounts of oil from our long time ally and selling highly profitable military weapons to them.

Next the Israel Lobby was presented as the force behind the invasion of Iraq in order to make Israel more secure. It certainly was true that the Israel Lobby was very active in Congress garnering support for war but to make Israel more secure was really a bogus argument, pure unadulterated spin since Israel is very strong militarily. Spreading democracy in the Middle East was a pure fantasy that became a total disaster. So what is left? There is only one possibility and that is U.S. domination of the oil resources of that region. And directly linked to that natural resource is the build-up of a war machine as a source of power, military prowess and most important huge profits.

Many wars are fought over natural resources but the U.S. has fought a number of wars where there was no vital resource as the reason for the hostilities. Vietnam is a good example. That country had no resource that the U.S. needed for its own security. The reason given for the war was to prevent the take-over of South East Asia by the communists was just another bogus argument. That war from beginning to end was based on lies.

The only reason for the confrontations small and large that occurred during the cold war, e.g. Panama, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Yugoslavia and others, was not for natural resources but rather to justify the continuing production of military weapons to enhance our position of power in the world and to provide huge profits for the military-industrial complex. The neo-conservative war hawks, i.e. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, and Perle, were and are constantly spinning and lobbying for continuing wars for this purpose. To ignore the power of the corporations that produce military weaponry for overwhelming profit is a huge mistake, for it is these corporations, such as Haliburton, KBR, Norton, Lockheed-Martin and others that provided the rational for the invasion of Iraq.

Although the Israel lobby was pushing very hard for invasion, there are those pundits who believe that the invasion would have happened even without the help of the lobby. The neocons were determined to invade and had been for a decade.

References:

Mearsheimer and Walt. The Israel Lobby. 2007
Scheer, Robert. The Pornography of Power. 2008
Wikipedia