For months, the Bush administration attempted to get the U.S. public to believe that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction and therefore was a threat to the United States and the international community. Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, briefing on weapons of mass destruction to the U.N. Security Council was a bust and the Bush administration was unable to get the necessary votes for the U.N. to authorize military operations in its name. Nor did millions of ordinary citizens around the world believe Bush and Powell’s justification for war and they were marching against the war in numbers never seen in the recorded history of our planet.
Tragically and criminally, the Bush administration went ahead and attacked Iraq and in the next decade created massive instability in the Middle East and the conditions for the rise of violent militia groups that are still terrorizing the region and the world. In the next two decades, the U.S. continued its war mongering in Europe, Africa and North East Asia.
Today, 20 years after the beginning of the disastrous war on Iraq, the world is faced with the U.S. war mongering in two major areas and several smaller ones. In Ukraine, the U.S. is providing weapons for the U.S. proxy war to “weaken” Russia..at the terrible expense of the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians and the destruction of a large amount of housing and national infrastructure in Ukraine.
In the Pacific and Asia, the U.S. has encouraged NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to expand its area of concern/influence halfway around the world with NATO country ships and ground personnel in military war maneuvers to threaten China’s remarkable economic rise and modest military increase—in China’s own front yard. The U.S. and South Korea are having the largest war maneuvers in decades on the border with North Korea.
In these dangerous actions with Russia, China and North Korea, the U.S. and European media have been cheerleaders for military confrontation, just as they were for the U.S. war on Iraq. Only this time, the U.S. is challenging large, nuclear weapons countries, not a small country that the U.S. knew had already destroyed its weaponry.
Carlos Latuff
We are facing the same desire in the U.S. and European media to bow to the wishes of the governments rather than the media being investigative journalists to give the public the honest truth about what is happening in a current brutal war in Ukraine and the lead-up to military actions in the Western Pacific and Northeast Asia.
Having served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retiring as a Colonel and 16 years as a U.S. diplomat in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia, all I can say is “Don’t believe everything the U.S. government says or the U.S. media writes.”
No one wins when diplomacy is shot dead by military actions. Keep talking instead of shooting.
The future of our planet will depend on it!
Ann Wright is a 29-year U.S. Army/Army Reserves veteran, a retired U.S. Army colonel and retired U.S. State Department official, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She is a member of the Veterans For Peace Advisory Board. She received the State Department Award for Heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She is most noted for having been one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wright was also a passenger on the Challenger 1, which along with the Mavi Marmara, was part of the 2010 Gaza flotilla. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book Dissent: Voices of Conscience. She has written frequently on rape in the military.
