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Weekend Edition March 29-31. 2013

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The Death Of The Chicano

Left

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Agency Of Fear

DAVE LINDORFF Yoj Have The Right To Remain Silent, But ...

VICTORIA BRITTAIN Guantanamo Widow

RALPH NADER

How Big Corporations Are

Unpatriotic

NICKALEXANDROV Honduran Cops, The Latest U.S. -Backed Killers

PAUL IMISON

The Myth Of The Aztec Tiger

LOUIS PROYECT Weathered Underground

ALEXANDER KELLY

Apple Wants Your Money Or

Your Life

JOSEPH RICHARDSON Once, When The Conservatives Were Vanquished

YVES ENGLER

Canada's Secretive Role In

Iraq

MEDEA BENJAMIN Egyptian Female Cartoonist Pokes Fun At Fundamentalists

DEEPAK TRIPATHI Cyprus And The Eurozone

Crisis

CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI JP Morgan And Payday Loans

RON JACOBS

Mo Yan And The Use Of

Satire

JOE GIAMBRONE

Who Sells P.lore Guns: The

NRA Or Hollywood?

SHAM US COOKE

How Obama Chose War

Over Peace In Syria

BARBARA NIMR1AZZ Think What A Leader Like Chavez Could Do In The Arab World

BENJAMIN J. GEORGE Howard Zinn In Chicago

GEORGE WUERTHNER

Wntuo ri n a c .fin Tho RrinLr

Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch

BLIND FAITH IN DRONES — Tom Barry on the proliferation of drones, from the CIA to the military to the drug warriors; BIG BANG THEORY IN NORTH KOREA: Peter Lee on how the latest nuclear weapons tests might change the power dynamics on the Korean peninsula; AFGHANISTAN: THE GARDEN OF EMPIRES: Julien Mercille on opium, guns and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan; TALES OF A HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITER: John Eskow gives an inside look at the decline of the American movie industry. Plus JEFFREY ST. CLAIR on Designer Protests and Vanity Arrests; KRISTIN KOLB on "Girls," MIKE WHITNEY on Chavez's economic legacy; RON JACOBS on Capitalism and Crime Fiction and LEE BALLINGER on Prison Music.

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WEEKEND EDITION MARCH 22-24. 2013

Clearing the Propaganda Cloud

The USA Attacked Iraq Because Saddam had W$D

by BART GRUZALSKI

Ten years ago the. US launched its indiscriminate "shock and awe" attack on Bagdad. Much of the. country opposed the war, the so-called justifications for the war were full of holes and non- sequiturs, and today we see the war as a calamity. Seymour Hersh asks "How could a small group of hard-line conservatives around President Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a few neoconservatives so quickly throw us over the. cliff?" The answer is that it wasn't just this clique of Republicans and neoconservatives. It was also several prominent Democrat leaders who had many months to find out what many of us learned prior to the attack: Saddam had no WMD and the case that Secretary of State Colin Powell made before the United Nations was based on falsehood and propaganda. While we can rightly condemn George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Republicans and neoconservatives of leading the. LTS into a tragic and immoral war on the basis of lies, there is no reason to be any more forgiving of the leading Democrats who supported this illegal and unjustifiable invasion: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid. Without their support, the war would not have gone forward.

The public evidence ovenvhelmingly validated that there were no WMD. It is reasonable to believe that the cabal of Republicans and leading Democrats who supported the invasion also knew this. Each of them had bright and informed staffs who also had to know that the WMD justification was a lie.

Why, then, did the US decide to invade. Iraq and remove. Saddam Hussein from power?

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NORMAN BALL

The Healthcare Delivery Con

FRANKLIN LAMB Is Kuwait Trying To Scapegoat The

Palestinians?

CESAR CHELALA What Killed Neruda?

MISSY BEATTIE One Issue Only

BINOY KAMPMARK

Cyber Battles, Phoney Wars

CHARLES R. LARSON Adventures Down The Alimentary Canal

March 28, 2013

ELLEN BROWN

The Confiscation Scheme

Planned For US And UK

Depositors

PATRICK BOND .AND KHADIJASHARIFE If You Carve Africa, Africa Hay Carve You

NORMAN SOLOMON How Corporate Power Seized The Internet

RICH GIBSON Detroit And The International War Of The

Rich On The Poor

SASHA ROSS

Why France Won't Intervene

In The Central African

Republic

JORDAN FLAHERTY World Social Forum Opens In Tunisia

WIN SLOW T.WHEELER Slimy Double-Talk About The F-35

ALYSSA ROHRICHT DOMAAndThe Supremes

ROBERT WEISSMAN The Beginning Of The End OfToo-Big-To-Fail?

DAVID SWAN SON Why I'm Attending The Dedication Of The Bush Lie Bury

March 27, 2013

M. G. PIETY

The Rhetoric Of Entitlement

VIJAY PRASHAD China Finds Its Place

STEVE BREYMAN The Mildly Distinctive, Mostly Mainstream Foreign Policy Of Rand Paul

NORMAN POLLACK Where Democracy Ends, Fascism Begins

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It is always useful to follow the money. Who thought they would benefit financially from this illegal invasion?

A lot has been written about the oil companies who had their eye. on Iraqi oil even before 9/11. Yet there are much larger financial stakeholders: the. US government, it:s 1%, and top politicians in both parties.

The centrality and value of the dollar as essential to the economic security of the US, hence, at lease from the point of few of top politicians and the 1%, essential to the security of the US. The value of the dollar requires that the dollar remain the currency most used in international transactions and remain one of the world's dominant reserve currencies.

Suddenly this comfortable status quo was being threatened. Saddam Hussein was about to begin selling oil using the EU currency, not the. US dollar. This would have weakened the. value, of the dollar and undermined the. US economy. That is the. unpublicized reason for the. elimination of Saddam Hussein.

Ron Paul has made public this rationale but it has been given scant attention. "Saddam Hussein demanded Euros for his oil. His arrogance was a threat to the. dollar; his lack of any military might was never a threat. ..There was no public talk of removing Saddam Hussein because of his attack on the integrity of the dollar as a reserve currency by selling oil in Euros. Many believe this was the real reason for our obsession with Iraq. I doubt it was the only reason, but it may well have played a significant role, in our motivation to wage war."

A year after the war began, Sohan Sharma, Sue Tracy, & Surinder Kumar also claimed that the unprovoked "shock and awe" attack on Iraq was to serve several economic purposes, the first of which was to "safeguard the U.S. economy by re- denominating Iraqi oil in U.S. dollars, instead of the euro, to try to lock the world back into dollar oil trading so the. U.S. would remain the. dominant world power- militarily and economically." If OPEC began being sold in Euros, estimates were that the value of the dollar would fall between 20% and 40%.

A 20-4096 collapse of the dollar would have put the US economy into a tailspin. The price, of fuel would immediately shoot up, as would the price of other imports. The dollar would no longer be the reserve currency of the. world or the. currency of international trade. As Ron Paul also pointed out, the health of our economy depends on the international centrality of the dollar. This is what supports not only the economy, but our military and our ability to fight foreign wars. Threatening all of this— economy and military-was a significant reason for those concerned about the. economy and our military dominance in the world to take. action.

This threat to the dollar would explain Hillary Clinton's insisting that Iraq was such a dire threat to U.S. national security that it required her, "in the best interests of our nation," to vote to authorize the invasion. If you equate the. security of the US economy or the funding of US military with the national security, as Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats likely did, that would explain their support for the. invasion.

Those who defended the Iraq invasion never mentioned in public that the invasion was necessary to defend the dollar. To do so would have created a public backlash as well as public scrutiny of why the. dollar was so vulnerable. To explain this vulnerability to the. public, the explanation would have eventually revealed that we were a nation that cannot pay its debts. The political cost of a crashing economy, lack of funds for our ever- expanding military, and an alarmed public would have been an unbearable political burden for those in power. Without any mention of the threat to the. dollar, those who supported the war publicly justified it as a way of preventing Saddam Hussein from using or developing WMD. The. war in Iraq was to be. portrayed as a justifiable preventive war.

In 2003, Noam Chomsky identified three necessary conditions for a preventive war:

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1. The target country must be virtually defenseless.

2. The war must be worth the trouble

3. There must be a way to portray the target country as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

"Iraq qualified on all counts," Chomsky concluded, and he was right:

1. Iraq was weakened by sanctions, in fact had no WMDs, and so was virtually defenseless.

2. Protecting the dollar and the. US economy were, seen as worth the trouble of an invasion.

3. The US did portray Saddam Hussein as an ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our very survival.

And so, ten years ago, , the US launched a war that would kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, kill over four thousand five hundred US troops, cost over $4 trillion dollars, create thousands of US Vets so wounded physically and psychologically that many are committing suicide, and escalate the. hatred of the US throughout the. Muslim world.

The result was that the US did protect the fragile Almighty Dollar from Saddam Hussein's W$D. Since the war accomplished what it was aimed to accomplish, none of the Republicans responsible for this illegal and immoral war were even prosecuted. The prominent Democrats who supported it-Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry and Harry Reid— have, been rewarded with posts of political respect and power. It is important to "follow the money" and understand why this horribly immoral and illegal invasion occurred. We need to be fully informed as citizens, and seeing beyond the propaganda fog of the aims of the Iraq war is a step in that important direction.

Barf Gruzalski a professor emeritus of philosophy from. Northeastern University. He co-edited Value Conflicts in Health Care Delivery and published On The Buddha, as well as On Gandhi.

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