Attempts to hide past allegiance with Hussein led to American deaths
"Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq!" read the headlines calling for the United States to invade that now entirely-too-well-known quagmire after U.N. officials were denied access to Iraqi chemical factories — Iraqi chemical factories that the U.S. was certain had been converted into weaponized production centers by the nation’s power crazed dictator.
Shortly thereafter, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were deployed to Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and put an end to Iraq’s chemical weapons program.
Within days of the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom Hussein’s government no longer held power in most of the country, within months the last pockets of resistance led by Hussein’s Royal Guard were rooted out and within years Hussein himself was found hiding in a hole.
As to the second half of the plan, it was a $1 trillion plus “oopsy.” Top U.S. and national security officials (and thousands of news writers and reporters that had sided with them) openly admitted that they were wrong about the chemical weapons — that despite years of searching, no new chemical weapons were ever found.
Late last month we found out that those leaders weren’t wrong on those chemical weapons once, but somehow twice.
In an exposé, the New York Times acquired intelligence documents and testimony from soldiers proving that there were, in fact, thousands of chemicals weapons found throughout Iraq, but that the existence of these weapons had been covered up by some of those same security officials mentioned earlier.
The New York Times was able to find 17 U.S. soldiers and seven Iraqi police that were avoidably poisoned by the more than 5000 chemical warheads that were found, many of whom were not properly treated for their injuries because their doctors and superiors were also misled about the warheads they were handling.
The deceit didn’t stop there; one soldier reported that he was ordered to describe the 2,400 chemical weapons he found as “nothing of significance” in documents sent to Congress.
But why would they lie? Doing so needlessly exposed our servicemen and women to danger and then kept them from getting the help they needed when that danger turned out to be very real.
On a more personal level, the discovery of chemical weapons should have proved those officials correct in justifying the invasion for weapons of mass destruction, right?
Wrong. The chemical weapons we’ve uncovered were in a state of decay that suggested that they hadn’t been touched since they were created. In the 1980s. In America.
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Our top military leaders decided it was preferable to lie to the American people, risking the lives of the soldiers under their command in the process, than to remind us that America was once allied with Saddam Hussein and had supplied him with the chemical weapons he used to kill thousands of his own people.
As of last week, the U.S. had more than 3,000 troops deployed in Iraq to combat ISIS. We’re getting ready to invade the country for the third time in just over 20 years, and we still don’t even know what actually happened.
If the government is just going to keep launching interventions to fix their last failed intervention, I can’t stop them.
But if they’re going to hide the details of those interventions from the American people, I’m not going to call it a democracy. If they’re going to lie to our elected representatives about it, I won’t call it a republic either. I’m not certain what we’re left with then, but I do know Hussein would be proud.