How may people have died for nothing (except more profit for the elite)?
And in Afghanistan it’s the same thing:
– Former UK ambassador Craig Murray:
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”
– Former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts:
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.
Missiles shown by Iraq just before the invasion to rebut claims about its arms
Intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have access to weapons of mass destruction was received by the Government ten days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, the inquiry into the war was told yesterday.
Inspectors in Iraq had also told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that they believed that Saddam might not have chemical and biological weapons. But with British and US troops massed on the border, the new intelligence was dismissed.
Sir William Ehrman, the Foreign Office’s director-general of defence and intelligence at the time, told the inquiry that information was receivedjust before the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. “We did at the very end, I think on March 10, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn’t yet ordered their assembly,” he said. “There was also a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents.”
Sir William said that it had not made any difference to the case for war. “I don’t think it invalidated the point about the programmes he had,” he said. “It was more about use. From the counter-proliferation point of view it just proved [Saddam] had been lying and that he had prohibited items.”
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, told the Foreign Office at the end of February 2003 that Saddam might not have weapons of mass destruction, the inquiry was told. Mr Blair continued to say there was a risk to national security from WMD without mentioning the new intelligence.
Tim Dowse, the Foreign Office’s head of counter-proliferation at the time, said that in 2001 the threat from Iraq had been placed behind those from Iran, Libya and North Korea. Iraq’s nuclear programme was believed to have been stopped by UN inspectors in the 1990. The chemical and biological weapons Iraq was thought to possess were not regarded primarily as battlefield weapons, he said.
But new intelligence suggesting that chemical and biological weapons were being produced by Iraq began to arrive in August and September 2002. “In a way it did not come as a great surprise,” Mr Dowse said. “It enabled us to firm up the assessment that had previously been carefully caveated.”
He told the inquiry that he was not surprised by the now notorious claim, in a government dossier published before the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be used within 45 minutes. He assumed that the claim referred to a battlefield weapon, not an interstate missile, but that was not spelt out.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, accused Gordon Brown of trying to “suffocate” the inquiry by giving Whitehall a veto on what could be in Sir John Chilcot’s report. Mr Clegg said a protocol to Sir John governing publication included nine reasons why information could be suppressed.
Alongside national security and international relations, the document lists “legal professional privilege” and “commercially sensitive information”.
November 26, 2009
David Brown and Francis Elliott
Source: The Times