They lied to us

by Ed Felien

They’ve lied to us. The President, Congress, the StarTribune, all the networks, they’ve all lied to us. And not just about little things. They’ve lied to us about matters of life and death.

The war in Iraq is the most obvious and most recent example. They’ve lied about that so many times they have a hard time keeping their story straight. Bush addressed the nation Sept. 13 and tried to convince an increasingly skeptical public that progress is being made in Iraq, but a new White House report says there is only progress on one of 18 goals. Bush cited a commission report saying, “the Iraqi army is becoming more capable, although there is still a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police.” As Glenn Kessler said in the Washington Post the following day, “But the report said Iraq’s army will be unable to take over internal security from U.S. forces in the next 12 to 18 months and ‘cannot yet meaningfully contribute to denying terrorists safe haven.’ It also described the 25,000 national police force as riddled with sectarianism and corruption, and it recommended that it be disbanded.”

Right now the big lie is about the “Oil Revenue Sharing” agreement that the Iraqi parliament refuses to ratify. Every other country in the world knows that this agreement is to let U.S. companies come in and steal Iraqi oil, and the company that has the lock on leasing rights is Bush’s own company, Halliburton. Halliburton has had temporary leasing rights up to now, and the action by the parliament would simply confirm Bush’s personal ownership of Iraqi oil. The pennies in royalties that Halliburton would pay, according to the proposed agreement, would be split between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. But, if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

All the countries in Europe know what’s going on. Every country in the Middle East knows what’s going on. The people in Iraq know what’s going on. And the Iraqi parliament knows that if it gives away the oil to Halliburton on a permanent basis, then, it has signed its own death warrants because the Iraqi people will never forgive such a mistake. And, yet, the American people believe the Iraqi parliament won’t sign the revenue sharing agreement because the parliament is greedy or stupid.

“Weapons of Mass Destruction,” “Mission Accomplished,” “To Bring Democracy to the Middle East,” all outrageous lies told to cover up the theft of Iraqi oil, and the StarTribune, network television and the U.S. Congress go along with it.
The current big lie is, “We can’t leave now, it would be a bloodbath.” First, it’s a bloodbath now. Second, there is every good reason to believe that the U.S. occupation is the cause of the bloodbath not the solution. In his address to the nation, Bush compared Iraq to Vietnam. He said if we leave now, there will be a bloodbath like there was in Cambodia when we left Vietnam; there will be re-education camps and there will be thousands of refugees. The bloodbath in Cambodia was a direct result of our efforts to destabilize the government of Cambodia. We didn’t like the neutral King of Cambodia, so we threw him out and installed a puppet regime that was easily overthrown and led to the killing fields of Pol Pot. When we overthrew Saddam Hussein we overthrew the most secular and one of the most democratic regimes in the Middle East (certainly more democratic than our allies Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and less corrupt than Egypt. We have caused the re-introduction of dogmatic re-education, and refugees are already a burden on neighboring Syria and Jordan.

But we won’t leave because we haven’t stolen every last drop of Iraqi oil. That’s why we’re building permanent bases in Iraq. That’s why we have 130,000 private contractors in Iraq (paid for by U.S. taxpayers) to protect Halliburton’s pipelines and drilling equipment. That’s why Bush really doesn’t want a strong functioning Iraqi government. A weak government gives him easier access to the oil. And, if a weak and divided Iraq is in the interests of Bush and big oil, then it seems entirely probable that some of those private contractors might be mercenaries who could be murdering Sunnis and Shiites to perpetuate civil strife.

As long as there is this clear conflict of interest, as long as the Bush family owns Halliburton and the oil drilling equipment and leases, and as long as major U.S. oil companies stand to benefit from the theft of Iraqi oil, then the U.S. occupation of Iraq will stand condemned before the world as guilty of theft, naked aggression and murder.

In the middle of September Gen. Petraeus (sounds like betray us) reported to Congress that with more troops and more time the U.S. will win in Iraq, yet any objective source says it’s a quagmire and a disaster with no end in sight. After a month and a half in Iraq, independent journalist Rick Rowley, with Big Noise Films, said, “When Gen. Petraeus says he’s merely applauding the new Sunni militia allies from the sidelines, he’s lying. While embedded with the U.S. military, I filmed U.S. commanders handing wads of cash to tribal militias. And when he says that the U.S. military is facilitating their integration into Iraq’s security forces, what he means is that the U.S. military is pressuring Iraq’s government to incorporate these militias wholesale into the police forces. In fact, that’s one of the promises that these tribes are given—that after working with the Americans for a few months, they’ll become Iraqi police, be armed by the Iraqi state and put on a regular payroll.” The U.S. is arming both sides just as it did in the Iran-Iraq war. The result of this is a destabilized and weak central government and perpetual civil war.

It is possible that some Americans who have figured this out are silent because they think they somehow benefit from this war. They may think that our involvement in Iraq means we benefit from lower gas prices at the pump. This is wrong for two reasons. First, even if the U.S. were to leave Iraq tomorrow and an Iraqi government were to award the leases for Iraqi oil to France and Russia (which was the case before we invaded), the oil would go into a common pool the same as it does now. It would make no difference in the U.S. consumers’ access to oil. The only difference would be that Halliburton wouldn’t get their cut. Second, the reason European gas prices are so much higher than American prices is because European countries tax gasoline at a higher rate to subsidize mass transit. Silence in the face of U.S. aggression in Iraq buys U.S. observers nothing but the condemnation of history as accomplices to genocide.

How many times have they lied to us? Most lies have been lies of omission, rather than lies of commission. They neglected to tell us that the CIA overthrew a democratically elected government in Guatemala that led to over 50 years of civil strife and genocide for native peoples. They neglected to tell us that they overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran at the end of World War II and installed the Shah on a peacock throne and began 30 years of brutal repression by SAVAK, his U.S.-trained secret police. They never told us about the CIA coup in Indonesia that unleashed genocidal attacks on native Chinese that cost an estimated 10 million lives. They didn’t tell us about CIA involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile that led to the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Pinochet. The list goes on.

We have a responsibility to learn about the actions of our government, and, once we know what they are doing, we have a responsibility to act.

“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” —Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823.