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On Five Years in Iraq
Ron Paul
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Five years ago last week, the US military's "shock and
awe" campaign lit up the Baghdad sky. Five years later, with
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly four thousand Americans
dead, we should pause and reflect on just what has been gained
and what has been lost.
From the beginning, the march to war was paved with false assumptions
and lies. Senior administration officials claimed repeatedly that
Iraq was somehow responsible for the attacks of September 11,
2001. They claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
They manipulated the fear of the American people after 9/11 to
further a war agenda that they had been planning years before
that attack. The mainstream media was complicit in this war propaganda.
Nearly ten years ago, long before 9/11, I requested the time
in opposition to the fateful Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, where
I then stated on the Floor of the House of Representatives, "I
see this piece of legislation as essentially being a declaration
of virtual war. It is giving the President tremendous powers to
pursue war efforts against a sovereign Nation." Less than
five years later we were invading Iraq.
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Five years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, untold hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis are dead; some two million Iraqis have
fled the country as refugees; and the Iraqi Christian community
– one of the oldest in the world – has been decimated
more completely than even under the Ottoman occupation or the
rule of Saddam Hussein.
On the US side, nearly four thousand Americans have lost their
lives fighting in Iraq and many thousands more are horribly wounded.
Our own senior military officers warn that our military is nearly
broken by the strain of the Iraq occupation. The Veterans Administration
is overwhelmed by the volume of disability claims from Iraq war
veterans.
A study by Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz concludes that
the cost of the war in Iraq could be at least $3 trillion. The
economic consequences of our enormous expenditure in Iraq are
beginning to make themselves known as we fall into recession and
possibly worse.
Iraq war supporters claim that the "surge" of additional
US troops into Iraq has been a resounding success. I am not so
confident. Under the "surge" policy the United States
military has trained and equipped with deadly weapons those Iraqi
militia members against whom they were fighting just months ago.
I fear by arming and equipping opposing militias we are just setting
the stage for a more tragic and dangerous explosion of violence,
possibly aimed at US troops in Iraq. There is no indication that
the Iraqi government has made any political progress whatsoever.
The sooner we withdraw the better. The invasion and continued
US occupation has strengthened both Iran and Al-Qaeda in the region.
Continuing down the road of a failed policy will only cost more
money we do not have and more lives that should not be sacrificed.
Interventionism has produced one disaster after another. It is
time we return to a non-interventionist foreign policy that emphasizes
peaceful trade and travel and no entangling alliances. We can
begin by withdrawing from Iraq immediately.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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