Total Victory
by Tom Turnipseed, attorney, writer and political activist in Columbia, South Carolina

''We're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory,'' was President Bush’s message to U.S. troops in Iraq from the White House in a video conference produced this week for the media. Before Bush made his appearance for the cameras, the troops were rehearsed by Allison Barber, a Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary. Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war veteran and director of an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the event was a "carefully scripted publicity stunt. If he wants the real opinions of the troops,...he needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

What could be a total victory in at war staged and waged on lies and deceit?

In the run-up to the war, Mr. Bush and his administration told us repeatedly that we must invade Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction, including an imminent nuclear capability that would be used against us because Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks and would attack us again. The unspoken objectives were control of Iraq’s vast oil reserves, permanent U.S. military bases, oil and war profits, and a distraction from corporate scandals like Enron. Bush’s fear-fraught excuses to attack Iraq have proven to be as bogus as Adolph Hitler’s charade when he declared that Poland had invaded Germany to justify launching the horror and holocaust of World War II.

The cost of Bush’s Iraq war is outrageous and unsustainable!


Full story here.