Con Games Con-spiracies

April 15th, 2008 at 11:58am reckless G 277

Several times in the past few weeks, Michael Conniff has publicly accused me of being a conspiracy theorist on his show Con Games. I cringe every time I hear that, mainly because I have spent the last several years trying to distance myself from the conspiracy theories of 9/11, in order to preserve what shred of credibility I have left in this community.

The accusation stems from my call-in statement regarding the Iraq war. My assertion is that the Bush administration, or more accurately the Neocon cabal involved in among other things, the Project for a New American Century (or as Aaron from Eagle calls it; PeeNAC), never intended to go into Iraq, kick out Saddam, neatly set up a democratic system of government, and leave. I contend that their intention all along was to get their foot in the door, and make certain that things went so horribly wrong that we’d have an excuse to stay indefinitely. There is a trail of evidence five miles long on this one.

For instance, when asked why President GHW Bush didn’t go to Baghdad and take care of Saddam in the first Gulf War, Dick Cheney said something to the effect of: It would have been a quagmire. Why then when they decided to invade, was the advice of Generals and Pentagon war planners ignored so blatantly? In fact there were SO many errors made that it would be quite a coincidence if it wasn’t intentional. The extent to which the invasion and occupation have been mismanaged is actually quite absurd. Michael Conniff expects us to believe the Pentagon and executive branch are a bunch of bumbling buffoons who don’t know how to execute major military operations. Keep in mind these are the exact same people who brilliantly carried out Gulf War 1. Now suddenly they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Huh.

If the plan was to get in and get out, why is there a multi-billion dollar U.S. Embassy of gigantic proportions being built in Iraq? Was that just an afterthought? Surely there must have been plans drawn up before the invasion. How is it that there are more contractors in Iraq than military personnel? I guess that just happened by accident too? So these foreign workers and companies just all suddenly showed up in the middle of a war. Huh.

No bid contracts for Halliburton, Iraq’s utilities being handled by foreign contractors, laws being enacted to allow oil profits to flow out of the country, all kinds of shenanigans that divvy up Iraq’s resources and business dealings among foreign corporations. Just follow the money and it’s clear this was no war for democracy, it was a war for profit.

As long as we occupy Iraq there will be big money flowing into the hands of private investors. If our military were to pull out, there would be no one to protect the foreign contractors that enable the war profiteering to flourish. And, there would be no more money from Congress going straight into the hands of Halliburton et al. The well would run dry.

One more posit; with our troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve got Iran right where we want them. Keeping the troops there long enough to start something with Iran may also have been part of the plan. If an attack on Iran is in the works, then it makes strategic sense to keep our troops nearby until the plan can be executed.

Michael is loathe to believe the Iraq war went exactly as planned because he believes that first of all, the government is too stupid to pull it off, and second, in his words “That’s just not how it works.” Tell that to Franklin D. Roosevelt [er rather; Dwight D. Eisenhower] who warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. This is EXACTLY what he was talking about; the marriage of weapons manufacturers and military support agencies (ie Halliburton’s KBR), with Pentagon and White House policies and plans. So was he a conspiracy theorist?

Examples of past conspiracies involving government agencies abound. Here’s another one; the CIA operation removing Iran’s democratically elected president and replacement with the Shah. This is a well known conspiracy, not a theory but a fact. And another; Iran-contra, certainly a conspiracy that involved the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Even more examples of US government conspiracies can be found in the recent history of South and Central American countries.

If as Michael claims, our government is too stupid to pull off a conspiracy, how did they manage these obvious and well-known conspiracies? After all of the evidence that government conspiracies do in fact take place quite frequently, we’re supposed to believe that the planning and execution of the Iraq war was just an ideological blunder? That there was no intention of war profiteering? That Eisenhower’s warning was just a case of crackpot paranoia?

It’s the stupidity, ignorance, and gullibility of the American people that our government counts on to allow them to get away with conspiracies. They lie to us to get us on board; WMD, mushroom cloud, al Qaeda connections, because if they came right out and said; “We’re going into Iraq to enrich Halliburton and sell off Iraq’s assets to the highest bidder, using your tax money” we would of course balk. The success of conspiracies relies on secrecy, which is why they are so hard to prove. But eventually, the truth comes out, as it did in Iran-contra and other instances. Someday, the Iraq war conspiracy will be a well established fact.

Until then, I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to being labeled a conspiracy “theorist.”

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