What do we know now about why we went to war in Iraq? On the next Your Call, we'll have a conversation with Charles Duelfer, the principal author of the Iraq Survey Group's final report. He is out with the new book Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq. What is the truth? Send us an email at feedback@yourcallradio.org or join us live at 11 am. And what difference does the truth make to our current debate about the future of US policy in Iraq? It's Your Call, with Rose Aguilar and you.
Guest:
Charles Duelfer, the principal author of the Iraq Survey Group's final report and author of the new book Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.
Click to Listen: Looking back, why did we enter Iraq?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Your Call 060209 Looking back, why did we enter Iraq?
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RE today's Your Call radio show: "Looking back, why did we enter Iraq? [06.02.09]", with Charles Duelfer, author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.
To Rose Aguilar
KALW, "Your Call" radio show host
San Francisco
Hi Rose,
I waited to long to call into today's show, but I was pleased to hear you start to more closely question/challenge your guest toward the very end of the show, but when a guest gets as ridiculous as this guest was, I would hope that you would start politely challenging them much sooner. (You know what?: *right*-wing radio hosts don't hesitate to challenge *any* guest they think might suddenly be riding off the rails or wrong.)
What is "the truth"? We certainly didn't get it today...
Your guest, Charles Duelfer's, book title made for the 'title' of a promising guest, but, as it turns out, the book title is *propaganda*, designed to deceptively draw us in, as it, at first, did for me with regard to today's show:
What today's guest (re the Iraq war) was doing is what the centrist "liberals" do on shows like the PBS Newshour and the Charlie Rose show: provide a corporate media style, liberal, patriotic, 'limited hangout', PR cover story for U.S. wars, invasions and other military interventions. This is where -- expressed by calm, reasonable-sounding, soft-spoken, audiogenic people "of authority" like your professor guest -- the imperialist, militarist policies of the U.S. govt are all turned into only "noble intention mistakes" (or, if you will, only "mistakes of noble intentions"). Your guest functions as part of, what one leftist friend of mine calls, the corporate media 'head-fixing' industry -- in your Duelfer's case, an embedded academic PR hack (or *fool*) -- in the U.S.. And I guess that "the Iraq Study Group" has about as much probitive and analystical validity as the Bush's "9-11 Commission", or "the Warren Commission" (and its "magic bullet theory") before that.
Whenever it has become undeniably obvious to the rest of the world -- and even to most Americans -- the U.S. has gotten itself into a military quagmire and debacle (whether large, or small like the U.S. debacle in Lebanon), then out come *the liberal war apologists* spouting that "noble intention mistakes" cover stories to 'explain' -- in a patriotic way -- what went wrong. This media tactic is *at least* as old as the Vietnam War.
I mean, the U.S. govt not only has to explain such obvious military debacles and quagmires to the rest of the world (which usually isn't fooled at all) but, especially, domestically, to the U.S. govt's own citizens. THIS (AFTER-THE-FACT PUBLIC RELATIONS) IS HOW PART OF THE U.S. CORPORATE MEDIA SYSTEM WORKS.
[word limit reached: to be continued...]
Take care,
Joseph Anderson
from Berkeley
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[continued...]
RE today's Your Call radio show: "Looking back, why did we enter Iraq? [06.02.09]", with Charles Duelfer, author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.
Whenever any guest might say something as vapidly patriotic as:
"We [the U.S.] behave more responsibly than most countries."
Well, compared to *whom*!!???
I wonder what, for example, the genocide victims of the U.S. Indian Wars here, or the genocide victims of the Filipinos in the U.S.'s first imperialist-colonial wars abroad at the turn of the 20th century would have to say about that; or the Vietnamese victims of the nearly indiscriminate use of U.S. napalm and genetically altering defoliants might have said about that; not to mention that the U.S. has threatened use of nuclear weapons in *every* major war since WWII; or what the victims of U.S. overthrows of democratic govts all over the world (and often for U.S. corporations, anywhere from oil, to mining, to fruit industries) in favor of genocidal or semi-genocidal dictators; or what the indiscriminate phosphorus victims in Fallujah would have to say; or what the victims of the U.S.'s more or less unequivocal support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians have to say; or the U.S. shippping even *more* weapons to Israel in Israel's 2006 invasion and onslaught on Lebanon; or the U.S. kidnapping of the democratically elected president of Haiti and the attempted political genocide against his party and followers; or WHAT ABOUT THE *40%* OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN AFGHANISTAN CAUSED BY *U.S.* BOMBING (manned, missiles and drones)!!; or the fact that the U.S.'s 3rd World *friends* are allowed, and even maintained as, brutal dictators, but the U.S. demands that its 3rd World "enemies"/adversaries be "democratic"; etc., etc., etc... Anyone with a brain, unlike that liberal war apologist, or liberal 'embedded academic' (he *knows* what he's doing), could go on and on and on.
Duelfer's saying that reminds me of Israel calling its military, "the most moral military *in the world*"! I guest, by Israel's claim, that means the U.S. military *isn't*.
[word limit reached: continued...]
Take care,
Joseph Anderson
from Berkeley
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[continued...]
RE today's Your Call radio show: "Looking back, why did we enter Iraq? [06.02.09]", with Charles Duelfer, author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.
Or what about your guest's other patriotic flag-waiving crap like:
"American have a desire to want to fix things."
So *that* explains U.S. military invterventions all over the world since just before the turn of the 20th century??? *That's* what he tells his students!!???: well, I guess that -- given his *real* purpose and role in the American political system -- he's 'perfect' for that.
But, after those of us with a *brain* hear that, we're, out of morbid curiousity, 'trapped' into hearing just how bad this person is really going to get -- like passing by a 3-car pile-up on the highway on the other side of the road. But, if, instead of being on Your Call radio, he had been on corporate TV media/radio, we would have just switched it off, like any busy and sensible person does with all the other blather of the corporate mainstream media (unless *maybe* its a person of some actual political significance in expressing such blather -- like the President or the secretary of state, but unless they're announcing actual *policy*, I don't even listen to *them* blather on).
And is this a political science professor who hasn't even heard of Chalmers Johnson -- a longtime UC Berkeley political science professor (now emeritus), who also has his own institute on East Asian affairs. Duelfer hasn't even heard of one of the major academic figures in political science? --Or so Duelfer *claims*...!
[word limit reached: to be continued...]
Take care,
Joseph Anderson
from Berkeley
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[continued...]
RE today's Your Call radio show: "Looking back, why did we enter Iraq? [06.02.09]", with Charles Duelfer, author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.
"We [the U.S.] were terribly wrong about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction."
Scott Ritter and other UN weapons officials have already spoken to this issue. But, *NO*, the Bush's govt wasn't merely "terribly wrong"; it was *purposely* wrong: i.e., it *LIED*!! Bush's govt even used *phony* photos, as paraded by the likes of Colin Powell at the UN.
Duelfer -- of course -- never even raised the issue of the Zionist neocons in the Bush administration and says, in response to a caller who does, "I can't really judge..."
Well, I *bet* Duelfer "can't really judge" -- for reasons we all know why -- if he's going to keep his job -- at least *comfortably* -- at whatever university he's at.
But even Duelfer said that Saddam offered the U.S. access to Iraqi oil under good terms -- so the war in Iraq can't *only* be about oil, and any *professor* with a brain knows it's *not* because -- one of those 'tooth fairy' stories -- the U.S. just has a burning desire to bring "freedom and democracy" to the swarthy peoples of the world.
Then Duelfer spouts about Saddam's "weapons development" that:
"one day, technically, was going to allow Saddam to attack the U.S.".
Saddam was going to attack the U.S.??? Oh pul-lease...! ...And this from a country that had strangulating sanctions on it (certainly with regard to any war materials, weapons and technology -- which he had been getting from the *West*, including the *U.S.*!), and a country that was being bombed almost every week by the U.S. and UK.
Meanwhile, Kim Jong-Il is over in North Korea shouting "HEY GUYS [ to the U.S. govt]!!: *I* HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS!! AND I'M GOING TO BURY THE WEST COAST OF THE U.S. IN 'A LAKE OF FIRE' IF YOU COME AFTER *ME*...!!"
And finally, of course, Saddam was *baited* into attacking Kuwait: now that he had no more use for the weapons that the U.S. was supplying him to kill other *brown*-skin people, the U.S wanted to destroy the bulk of his major weapons.
I gotta stop: this should be more than enough about that liberal *idiot* (and I don't use such words lightly) Charles Duelfer.
Take care,
Joseph Anderson
from Berkeley
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Send Charles "Limited Hangout" Duelfer back to the corporate media radio/TV broadcast networks (including NPR's Talk of the Nation, etc., the PBS Newshour, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS's Frontline), and maybe even "60 Minutes", where he belongs -- and where he will, no doubt, usually appear.
Take care,
Joseph Anderson
from Berkeley
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