patrick.net

American involvement in Iraq goes back beyond 10 years:

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait resulted significantly from decisions made by the first Bush administration. Then Americans were sold a war to "liberate" Kuwait, i.e. to return the Kuwaiti royal family to power, based in part on harrowing stories of sexual assault told by an alleged "victim" who turned out to have been in DC at the time, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. The result was continuous American military presence in the region, including bases in Saudi Arabia, which became the stated reason for the 9/11 attack. That attack, which had no direct connection to Iraq, became the basis of the American invasion of Iraq.

All of this has been reported, for example on Democracy Now! and/or PBS Frontline.

Iraq War Timeline

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/aziz/1.html

Yet, as Amy Goodman reported, even though the facts are available they are buried in an avalanche of pro-war misinformation in the commercial media, brought to you by the parent companies that have a financial interest in selling more war.

The recurring theme is the same as the beginning of the Viet Nam war, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution etc. Huge quantities of money and power flow from war, so there is a huge effort to sell the public on war. I encourage you to read Empire of Debt: since the direct election of Senators, the local patronage networks that had previously controlled the Senate, which has the sole Constitutional power to declare war, have been displaced by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower decried. The founders' safeguards against war have all been bypassed: the President can commence war unilaterally, and popularly elected Senators don't dare object to the latest "police action" or other use of force that looks an awful lot like war but isn't declared. As a result, we have a populace who cheer the military like a winning sports team, and we have war all over the world, and an empire of debt.

People will go along with or believe anything if it's phrased in the right manner, as you have shown. Ir Iraq didn't have the second largest oil reserves in the world, nobody would give a shit about them or hear of much of any good or bad that has gone on there.

it's rather predictable really. If some high level people from one of the 2 super-powers(then, as in Rumsfeld)comes around to offer whatever and do some obligatory butt-smooching, the future is not going to be very good for you. Our government has tried to destabilize Iraq, then got other countries to try and do that(Iran), and finally used a ruse to do it with our troops and every trick in the book(sanctians). Public assets to secure riches for private profits. What a crappy ROI for us, but not for the entities and people who would and have, profited in actuality.

We would have been money(and lives, along with continuing health care for the wounded)ahead to just over-pay for the f'n oil in the first place. But there's not enough arbitrage in that for the plutocrats, and for the politicians to exploit and benefit from.

There were one billion people on the planet before we started using oil and there will probably be one billion when it's gone. One hell of a party.

As sad as it is, I bet no one really cares. Americans never really cared for other small countries, especially in middle east. It's a cultural thing now, military salivates over the idea of more spending in the middle east because wars and killing yields jobs and lots and lots of money.