Iraq

David Corn, the editor of The Nation answers that question with a list of follow up questions:

• Who claimed there were stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq?
• Who said there was a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq?
• Who said the intelligence left "no doubt" that Iraq posed a direct WMD threat to the United States?
• Who said Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs?
• Who said "we found the weapons of mass destruction"?
• Who said "we know" where the WMDs are in Iraq?
• Who said Saddam Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda?
• Who said the United States would be greeted as liberators?
• Who said the reconstruction of Iraq would not burden US taxpayers and that it could be self-financed via Iraqi oil revenues?
• Who said that it would not require hundreds of thousands of US troops to secure Iraq after an invasion?
• Who said--after the invasion--that there was no insurgency in Iraq?
• Who said the post-invasion looting was no big deal?
• Who said that 140,000 Iraqi security forces were trained--when the more accurate number was probably less than one-tenth of that?
• Who said the insurgency was in its "last throes" when military commanders said it could take years to quash the insurgency?

Who was that again?

The World Tribunal on Iraq issued a high profile condemnation of the war on Iraq:

The Bush and Blair administrations blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq of the last 27 months has led to the destruction and devastation of the Iraqi state and society. Law and order have broken down completely, resulting in a pervasive lack of human security; the physical infrastructure is in shambles; the health care delivery system is a mess; the education system has ceased to function; there is massive environmental and ecological devastation; and, the cultural and archeological heritage of the Iraqi people has been desecrated.

The press release claims that this decision was reached by a "jury". The word "jury" is dishonest; this so called jury had reached its conclusion long the WTI conference convened.

In this flash animation, the fatalities from Operation Iraqi Freedom are mapped out by time and space. The animation runs 10 frames a second. Each frame represents 1 day. Each black dot and tick represents a single fatality.

Link: Iraqi War Fatalities

In "Private Warriors," FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith travels throughout Kuwait and Iraq to give viewers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at companies like Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, and its civilian army. KBR has 50,000 employees in Iraq and Kuwait that run U.S. military supply lines and operate U.S. military bases. KBR is also the largest contractor in Iraq, providing the Army with $11.84 billion dollars in services since 2002.

Link: Watch Private Warriors Online

"You have to keep telling yourself, “That’s billions with a B,” and even then the concept blurs. But the Cost of War site (costofwar.com) run by the Massachusetts-based nonprofit and officially nonpartisan (but liberal) National Priorities Project crunches the numbers for you simply and effectively. As I write, the NPP calculates that we’ve spent almost $179 billion in Iraq. That could have paid for some 23.7 million American preschoolers to attend a year of Head Start. It might have funded global AIDS programs for 17 years. Not that it would have, of course. Security is security. But compare the budget for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Safeguards division: $100 million a year to try to track down and monitor people trying to build nuclear weapons on the sneak. We spend $100 million on the Iraq war every couple of days. Are we safer for that?"

-Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, The Empire’s New Clothes

Found Via Flicker Via David Weinberger.

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first" - Mark Twain