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Iraq

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    The End of a War for Who? Sarah Lazare January 2, 2012

    Eric Ruin (justseeds.org)Eric Ruin (justseeds.org)On the day I heard that President Obama had officially declared the Iraq war over, I was at the Danville Veterans’ Administration hospital (VA) with my partner S, an Iraq War veteran. S is six months into a disability application, a request for benefits and compensation for disabilities sustained during military service, which will likely take another year to process.

    We found ourselves navigating through a maze of yellowed walkways and drab interiors, shuttled from admissions offices to mental health clinics. While we were not the only ones moving through that system, we were perhaps moving faster than the others. Many veterans of previous wars—the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, World War II—lined the route, being pushed in wheelchairs, walking on canes, some perhaps visiting for the day with their families, some completely alone. S was one of the only young people I saw in this wing of the VA, and based on the way people looked at us, they clearly knew that he was a “hero” of the war that President Obama had just declared “completed.”

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    The Shi'a Rise Up Rami El-Amine June 1, 2004

    "What is striking is how much has changed in a week. No one can talk about the Sunni Triangle anymore. No one can seriously talk about Sunni-Shia fragmentation or civil war. The occupation cannot talk about small bands of resistance. Now it is a popular rebellion and it has spread."
    -- Wamid Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University

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    The Battle for Iraqi Oil Hiba Dawood and David Enders June 10, 2007
      The battle for access to Iraq’s oil by multinational companies backed up by a US military occupation is just beginning to brew. Foreign oil companies are counting on a new oil law that would replace the former state-run oil company and open Iraq’s oil fields to direct exploitation by foreign companies. Iraq’s powerful oil workers unions and a variety of other groups from Shias to Kurds are against this new law that the Bush administration is hoping to force on the Iraqi people.
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    So Much for the Success of the Surge Rami El-Amine June 01, 2008

    The relative decline in violence in Iraq that Bush, McCain and other supporters of the war have attributed to the “surge” appears to have begun increasing again. Al Qaeda and others in the Sunni resistance began stepping up their attacks at the beginning of the year and Moqtada Al Sadr’s Mahdi Army has been battling US and Iraqi forces almost non stop since the Iraqi military’s attacked them in Basra on March 25. April was the deadliest month for US troops since September 2007 with 50 casualties, most of who were killed in and around the Mahdi Army’s stronghold of Sadr City.

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    KEEP ON PUSHIN’: TODAY’S ANTIWAR DILEMMAS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Max Elbaum March 29, 2007

    In March 1965, before ordering the first deployment of U.S. ground troops to Vietnam (U.S. “advisers” had been there for years) President Lyndon Johnson told Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “I don’t think anything is gonna be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.”

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    A War Foretold: The Destruction of Iraq John Cox July 14, 2002

    The “war on terrorism” waged by the United States seems certain to target Iraq in the very near future. The Bush administration, with full bipartisan support, openly pursues its plans to effect a “regime change” in Baghdad and to install a more submissive government—albeit one headed by figures as unsavory as the current dictator, Saddam Hussein. This despite the inconvenient fact that Iraq had no connection to the September 11 attacks or to the anthrax hysteria that swept the United States last fall and winter. Not surprisingly, the mainstream news media provides little if any historical background to the present conflict between Washington and Baghdad.

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    A Decade of Sanctions & Bombs A.K. Gupta July 14, 2002

    From Star Wars to Stuart Little, this is the summer of sequels. But for many, the most-anticipated sequel of all hasn’t even begun shooting—the invasion of Iraq. Bush and Co. have been itching to finish of the regime of Saddam Hussein, seeing the September 11 attacks as the perfect pretext to launch Desert Storm II. But another long-playing Middle East show, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, has cooled the White House’s war fever, at least for this year. Feeling rebuffed by Arab audiences who’ve panned previews of an all-out US invasion, Bush has had to console himself with a Tom Clancyesque plot to bring down Hussein’s house.

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    Defying the World: America’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Mike Burke July 14, 2002

    “We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties and then systematically break them.” Those were among the words the US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush shared with officers at West Point at their early June 2002 graduation ceremony. Based on such a definition of ‘tyrant,’ it would be hard not to list Bush in the company of the Saddam Husseins of the world as his administration has rejected international treaties on the development of nuclear, chemical, biological and germ weapons in defiance of world opinion.

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    Gamble in Iraq John Cox October 10, 2002

    For the first time ever in recent US history, there appears to be a public debate among our rulers on the pros and cons of launching an unprovoked war. The debate does not address the morality of such an action, and everyone agrees on a few basic premises: the United States, as the leader of the democratic world, has a duty to defend itself and to act unilaterally; this responsibility is especially heavy after September 11; Saddam Hussein’s regime is a threat to world peace, and in particular to the United States, and therefore must be removed. How to accomplish this, and to what degree the US government can act on its own, are in question. Beyond dispute—in “respectable” discourse, anyway—are the premises underlying the saber rattling.

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    The Bush Doctrine: Guns, Money & Oil Stan Goff February 14, 2003

    Imagine a game of chess with four big players and a hundred little players. Imagine a multi-layered chessboard that shifts positions, with pieces held in common by more than one player. This only begins to describe the complexity of the game the Bush Administration is playing with Russia, Euroland, the Gulf States, and China—and the rest of the world. “The Bush Doctrine,” if it can be characterized as a doctrine at all, is not something Bush and his cabinet have designed. It’s a reaction. Robert Biel, Samir Amin, Maria Mies and others have described capitalism as a world-system of accumulation in deep crisis by the 1970s.

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