peapod said:
And excuse me but bush is a f***ing bastard.
Not that I'm disagreeing here Peapod, but actually I think Bush is himself a puppet and doesn't really know what's going on. That's the most charitable explanation I can put on his behaviour.
The real powers in the Excited States of America in the last four years were Rumsfeldt, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. In particular, Google on Paul Wolfowitz and read some of the stuff he's written. He's a frightening guy, a serious war hawk who thinks the USA is perfectly entitled to do whatever it wants to whoever it wants whenever it wants, just because it can. Iraq has been a target of the Bush administration from the beginning, and I suspect that the thinking among those three after 11 Sept 2001 was something like "find some way to blame this on Iraq." I'm sure you've all seen some of the same poll results I have, about the number of Americans who believe Sodamn Insane had something to do with that attack, and that he was somehow in league with Osama bin Laden. To any informed person, that lacks all credibility. Sodamn's Baathist party was a socialist, secular organization, anathema to a fundamentalist crackpot like Osama. The Iraqi government was one of the ones Osama wanted to topple and replace with a fundamentalist Islamic one; the invasion of Iraq and the completely predictable unrest there now just plays into his hands.
I'm sure most of us agree that the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do, it was done for the wrong (and mostly made up) reasons, and there was not proper planning about what to do after the regime had been knocked down. However, as somebody's pointed out here previously, what's done is done and that's the reality we have to deal with. If American and British forces pulled out now, I'm fairly sure the result would be a bloody and protracted civil war in Iraq with at least three sides: Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds. And probably a fourth side too, foreign Islamic radicals who want a fundamentalist Islamic state there. Then Turkey and Iran might be drawn in... ugh, doesn't bear thinking about on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
But it's not, and has never been, just about oil. It's about making the world safe for certain powerful private American interests, like Halliburton and Bechtel, and the only difference between a Republican and a Democratic administration in the U.S. that I can see is who they want to write them the cheques that'll tell them what their priorities ought to be, and what parts of the federal government they want to get bigger.
Not so different from here, actually, except for the theocratic nature of the present U.S. administration...
Dex