The Difference Between Johnson, Bush and Obama

Dear Mr. President,
Ironic that the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war falls on Kill List Tuesday. That war’s over for American politicians but not the soldiers who returned home wounded and traumatized. Nor for their families. It’s not over for the families of those who returned in flag-draped coffins, either, and it isn’t really over for the rest of us. A team of 30 economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts and physicians just released “The Costs of War,” a study that estimates the Iraq war has so far cost us more than $1.7 trillion and will eventually cost between $2.2 and $4 trillion. It reports at least 190,000 people killed in the war, 130,000 of them civilians, probably double that since no one keeps an accurate count. And are Iraqis better off than they were under Saddam Hussein? Hassim al-Shimari: “ [Americans] did all the things possible to ensure that Iraq is going to be ruined.” Abdullah Fadil: “There was nothing accomplished…” Ahssan al-Shimmary: “What was a dream for Iraqis has become a nightmare for Iraqis.” (Today’s NYT, p. A4.) Iraq was a criminal act. It was not about good versus evil, not about self-defense and not about WMD. It was about oil. Dennis Kucinich, Chuck Hagel and General Abizaid all said it early on and were attacked for saying it; even Alan Greenspan admitted it years later in his memoir. David Frum (“the axis of evil”) revealed recently in Time that Cheney spent long hours with Chalabi (remember him?) plotting a Western-oriented Iraq that would be “an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.” All wars are based on the lies and duplicity of politicians. Thus it has always been and thus it will ever be. The BBC’s March 15 report on newly released recordings of LBJ’s private conversations reveals the scuttling of the Paris Peace talks in 1968 by Nixon to promote his presidential campaign. Johnson considered it an act of treason but never revealed it publicly. Nixon’s sabotaging of peace and his subsequent election prolonged the war by 5 years and resulted in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, 22,000 of them American. All wars are crimes and all politicians who take us to war are war criminals. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, Iraq was Bush’s, Afghanistan is yours. So are the drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Johnson, Bush, Obama, liars one and all. The only difference is that they didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize.