Since It Seems No One Else Can; Gerry Maxey Explains Why ,TWENTY YEARS AGO, America Went to War Against Iraq

In 2003, twenty years ago this month, President George W. Bush’s America invaded the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. 

Saddam Hussein was a very evil man; who had started wars against his neighbors Iran and Kuwait. 

Saddam means " the one who confronts”; and he lived up to his given name. He was evil before birth; his birth mother, feeling the Devil’s spawn within her, threw herself down a flight of stairs in order to abort Saddam. Alas, the Saddam version of ROSEMARY’S BABY survived. The Devil is  a powerful ally. 

In his youth, Saddam had been a working man. Smart and ambitious, he hated the governing elite; so he joined the Baath Socialist Party; a party which advocated the union of the Arab states. It was a party of educators, academicians and intellectuals, with one working man, Saddam. 

The ruler of Iraq was Abd al-Karim Qasim, a military man who had made his bones leading a revolution which overthrew the pro-Western government of King Faisal II (the son of the character played by Alec Guinness in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA). 

Faisal, as the revolution unfolded, ordered his loyal troops to stand down; he wanted no bloodshed. He wanted a comfortable exile in Great Britain; he was an Anglophile. 

In response, the revolutionaries ordered Faisal, the Crown Prince, the Crown Princess, Princess Nafeesa and Faisal’s aunt to the palace courtyard; and in Bolshevik style, killed them all. 

The Baath Party decided to assassinate Qasim, and Saddam got the job. 

Saddam was brave, fearless, and liked killing people. His hero was Josef Stalin. 

The Baath assassins shot Qasim; but Qasim survived; only to be executed  in a later Baathist revolution. Qasim’s  dead body was prime viewing on television, all channels, for most of the evening. 

Saddam was a very adept terrorist, a fabulous conspirator and a ruthless Stalinist imitator. 

Saddam rose to the top of the Baath party, and Iraqi state; on  July 22, 1979, he convened an assembly of all the important Baathists. 

He ordered the meeting filmed. 

The highlight of the meeting was a roll call of suspected traitors; who were arrested on the spot. 

They  were removed from the room, one by one.  Firing squads were formed, comprising of friends of the accused, a very Josef Stalin touch. 

On this 20^th anniversary of American invasion of Iraq, there is a profound intellectual  debate occurring in America’s intellectual and academic circles about why did America invade? 

That debate is best exemplified in excerpts from a NEW YORK TIMES article,   commemorating the invasion. 

This Blogger has a more prosaic and Jungian reason for the invasion; based on gossip gleaned by  his buddies, living in America’s deep state. 

First the intellectual debate- 

“There is a question about the American-led invasion of Iraq that, 20 years later, remains a matter of deep uncertainty and debate among historians, political scientists and even officials who helped set the war in motion. 

It’s not the war’s toll in American military deaths (about 4,600) or Iraqi lives (estimates generally fall around 300,000 or more killed directly by fighting). Nor the financial cost to the United States ($815 billion, not counting indirect costs like lost productivity). 

It’s not even the war’s consequences, which are broadly understood to include, at a minimum, plunging Iraq into civil war, giving rise to a new generation of jihadism and, for a time, chastening American interventionism. 

Rather, it’s question that would seem to be far simpler: Why did the United States invade at all? 

Was it really, as the George W. Bush administration claimed in the war’s run-up, to neutralize an active Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to not exist?  

Was it over, as the administration heavily implied, suspicions that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had been involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which also proved false? 

Was it to liberate Iraqis from Mr. Hussein’s rule and bring democracy to the Middle East, as the administration would later claim? 

 

Oil? Faulty intelligence? Geopolitical gain? Simple overconfidence? Popular desire for a war, any war, to reclaim national pride? Or, as in conflicts like World War I, mutual miscommunication that sent distrustful states bumbling into conflict? 

 

“I will go to my grave not knowing that. I can’t answer it,” Richard Haass, a senior State Department official at the time of the invasion, said in 2004 when asked why it had happened.  

It’s not that there’s some still-missing puzzle piece or state secret. Quite the opposite: As time has passed, journalistic investigations and insider testimonies have explored nearly every facet of the invasion. 

Rather, the challenge is determining which motives, stated or unstated, most mattered. What strategic, ideological or even bureaucratic interests brought the war’s architects together? And did the march to war — or was it a drift? — begin with Sept. 11 or, as some historians now argue, several years earlier? 

The world may never get a definitive answer. The causes of World War I remain debated over a century later, as do those of the American interventions in Vietnam and Korea. 

This speaks to an uncomfortable truth: History-changing decisions are often made through processes and rationales so convoluted that even the people involved might not know exactly how they happened. Hundreds of thousands might die, an entire country plunged into violence, without anyone able to quite say why….NEW YORK TIMES.” 

This Blogger has two reasons for the Iraqi Invasion- 

1-Jungian. To the overgrown, yet still immature children who inhabit the Washington elite, then and now; people like George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Paul Bremer, Dick Cheney and Madeleine Albright had Jungian reasons for the war. In 2003, the Washington elite had the finest military machine in History; all wrapped up, like a boxed, never opened  STAR WARS toy.  Being children, they felt compelled to unbox their toy, hence invasion. 

George W. Bush was the son of a great man, President George H.W. Bush. Charles Adams was the son of a great man,  President John Adams. Both sons were immature drunks; weak sons of proud and great men are prone to do childish things. 

2)SADDAM HUSSEIN- this Maxey theory is based on gossip, deep state gossip. The deep state was afraid that Saddam Hussein, adept terrorist that he was, had picked the Israeli lock, guarding Israeli security. 

“In April 2002, Saddam Hussein increased from $10,000 to $25,000 the money offered to families of Palestinian suicide/homicide bombers. The rules for rewarding suicide/homicide bombers are strict and insist that only someone who blows himself up with a belt of explosives gets the full payment. Payments are made on a strict scale, with different amounts for wounds, disablement, death as a "martyr" and $25,000 for a suicide bomber. Mahmoud Besharat, a representative on the West Bank who is handing out to families the money from Saddam, said, "You would have to ask President Saddam why he is being so generous. But he is a revolutionary and he wants this distinguished struggle, the intifada, to continue."…archives.” 

Saddam, with Iraq’s  oil riches, had picked the lock to Israel’s security; he had created a terrorist organization; which could not be infiltrated by the Mossad, the Israeli CIA; because it was a terrorist organization which did not exist, had no hierarchy, no organization. It was a terrorist organization which was a pay master, which paid terrorists  ONLY AFTER THEY HAD DONE TERROR, not before. 

It was a brilliant and deadly concept and Saddam was contemplating increasing the bounty to a $1,000 per Israeli killed, with a $25,000 minimum. So, if the newly created terrorist killed 100 Israelis; he would be entitled  to $100,000 in return. 

No other state, save Saddam’s Iraq, had the financial resources or will to develop and expand such an audacious scheme.  

Saddam had created a lethal NO-NAME Terrorist organization, for there were no terrorists, just ordinary  people waiting to be terrorists.

In many ways, Saddam’s bounty hunting was more of an existential threat to Israel than any atomic bomb; for who could predict who would commit terror for $100,000? Could it be the teacher? The hairdresser? The prostitute? The Policeman? The scholar? The Cancer victim? The widow? The bitter cuckolded husband? The bankrupt businessman? The oldest son of a large family? 

Saddam’s bounty hunting was a fair justification for the invasion; it was only the stupidity of the Occupation, under Paul Bremer, which turned a necessity into a catastrophic failure.