Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Surely, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 by George W. Bush was one of the most wicked and abominable decisions ever made by a U.S. President. And, it proves that there is something terribly wrong with this country that he got away with it without consequences. In fact, after doing it, the American people re-elected him when he should have been imprisoned- for life.   

Every justification used for the Iraq War turned out to be false. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He submitted a 10,000 page document to the UN detailing how he had disposed of all his illegal weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell called him a liar at the UN, but it turns out that Saddam was telling the truth, and it was Bush and Powell who were lying. Likewise, Saddam was not aiding and abetting Al Qaeda. 

And about the weapons, they claimed that he had chemical, biological, and was pursuing nuclear weapons. And all three of those claims were proven false. 

Then, the cowardly US Congress gave him a blank-check authorization to start a war if he determined that the threat posed to the United States by Iraq was great enough, which is to say, if he felt like it. 

The Constitution states that only Congress can declare war. That means that it was their job to determine if Iraq was a threat to the United States- enough to justify attacking them. Iraq had not attacked the U.S. To do what we did to them on the basis that they might? We didn't even determine that they could- that they had the means. And, they didn't. Nor was there any evidence that they had the intent.

What did the Bush administration and its defenders say afterwards? They said that Saddam was a bad guy anyway, and aren't the Iraqi people better off having him gone? Well, not the dead Iraqi people. And not the loved ones of the dead Iraqi people. Not the ones we killed or maimed and their families. Not the parents of Iraqi children with birth defects or childhood cancers, the result of our use of depleted uranium. And let me make something crystal-clear: I am talking about not just the civilians deaths, the deaths of non-combatants, including women and children, that we killed, but also the killing of Iraqi soldiers. Why not? We invaded their country, and they tried to defend it. You can't assume that every Iraqi soldier was a monster. Remember, it started with our "Shock and Awe" campaign of aerial terror. The former Big Pharma exec Donald Rumsfeld had to approve every bombing run in which 50 or more people were expected to die as "collateral damage." Guess what percentage of those runs he approved? 100%. He never met a bombing run he didn't like. Talk about monsters. 

Iraq was a broken-down Third World country which had never recovered from the first Gulf War. The idea that they were a threat to us was preposterous. Our vicious campaign of sanctions resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. That is a well-established fact. And all those deaths are on us.   

AMERICA DIED IN 2003. Some say it died in 1963 when they slaughtered John F. Kennedy, but if it didn't die then, it surely died in 2003. America is dead. We are not the City on a Hill. We are the Evil Empire.