Iraq and Afghan War Inquiries: Ten Years After: Truth of Iraq War {continued}

Continuing from previous post with some recent earlier related posts found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The abandoning the main missions, reason for and the promises of the country to the people, after they've lived under war and control for decades, for why we even sent our military into that region, Afghanistan, and with cheers by the greater majority as the drums beat louder and louder till 'shock and awe' and then beyond till the public served totally lost interest while occasionally waving their flags! Not paid for by their own sacrifice that they demanded of the very very few and families of and especially not as to the results of, DeJa-Vu, previous decades and wars from, all over again!

U.S. pledge to help Iraqis who aided occupation largely unfulfilled

click on graphic for larger view
March 14, 2013 - Ten years after the United States’ invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and set off a sectarian war that continues to this day, thousands of Iraqis are eligible for resettlement to the U.S. because they risked their lives to help the war effort as interpreters, cultural advisers and other support staff.
But of the legislated allotment of about 25,000 “special immigrant visas” – which offer permanent residency as a reward to Iraqis who worked with the U.S. government – just 4,669 cases have been approved since 2008, and the program is scheduled to end in September.
Advocates for the Iraqi applicants say the resettlement process for such U.S. allies has been shamefully slow and complicated, and remains an ordeal despite recent tweaks that have increased the flow of immigrants.
And the glacial bureaucracy in Washington, Iraqi applicants and their advocates say, can have disastrous consequences in Iraq, where people who worked with Americans read more>>>

Letters To My Dead Father

March 15, 2013 - Ten years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, NPR is taking a look back, revisiting people and places first encountered during the war. In 2006, NPR aired a story about a 9-year-old girl who loved her father so much, she wrote him letters to take to work with him. Even after he died, in a carjacking that appeared to have a sectarian motive, she still wrote to him.
We expected to find the angry, grief-stricken girl who had pounded her fists and thrown herself into the mud when she first heard her father was killed, back in 2006.
Instead we found a poised, tall, gazelle of a young lady. Now 16, Guffran says she spends most of her time studying.
Her father had hoped she would become a doctor. But the teenage Guffran has a different plan. read more>>>

Counting the cost, and unraveling the reasons, behind Iraq's war without end

March 16, 2013 - NOTHING that the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could have done 10 years ago would have prevented George W Bush and his coalition of the willing from invading Iraq on March 19, 2003.
As those of us from the western media who bunkered down at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad braced ourselves for Bush and Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" campaign, and everything that dreadful term stood for, it was crystal clear that Bush and his allies including John Howard, would not rest until Saddam Hussein was dead and buried and Iraq's huge oil reserves were secured.
The pretext of ridding the world of the brutal dictator's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and preventing the spread of Islamic terrorism post 9/11 had been spun into a fine thread of deceit and we and millions of innocent Iraqis as well as hundreds of thousands of coalition troops massed along Iraq's borders, and a handful of elite special-forces troops already operating inside the border, braced for all-out war. read more>>>

Iraq war anniversary - turmoil continues

March 16, 2013 - President George W. Bush kept it simple in his short television address the evening of March 19, 2003: U.S. forces had begun their campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein, he said. The goals, he outlined in his first sentence, were straightforward: "to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger." Some 522 words later he promised the result: "We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail."
As he spoke, members of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were already crossing from Kuwait, where they'd been preparing for weeks, into southern Iraq. In those sands, it was Thursday, March 20, the dawn of a new day. read more>>>

Never forget: Our invasion of Iraq was a breach of trust

March 17, 2013 - On Tuesday, at this 10th anniversary of the American Invasion of Iraq, we would do well to remind ourselves about some painful facts.
Keeping those facts in our collective memory may make it easier for us as a nation to prevent future mistakes. So, let us recall five unfortunate facts about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
First, the leaders of the Bush administration were intent on invading from the beginning of their time in the White House. When the 9-11 attacks occurred, Bush Cabinet members immediately discussed how that tragedy could be used to justify an invasion.
Bush himself asked me to try to pin the blame for 9-11 on Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney propagated a myth that a hijacker had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, even though we knew at the time Cheney said it that the report was false and that the hijacker was in Virginia at the time of the alleged meeting. read more>>>

New UK poll reaffirms Iraq war damaging

Mar 17, 2013 - A new poll has found one in two Britons believe the invasion of Iraq damaged their countries’ reputations, further reaffirming the extent of public outrage against the illegal war in 2003.
The joint study, led by King’s College London (KCL) and Ipsos Mori and held ahead of March 20, which marks the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion, found that 52 percent of Brits think the war was damaging to their country while 40 percent said it made the world a more dangerous place.
This is while, another poll led by YouGov found on Thursday that half of people in Britain think former Prime Minister Tony Blair knowingly misled MPs to justify the war, with claims that Iraq had ready-to-launch weapons of mass destruction. read more>>>

The British Iraq War Inquiry In the above link, yet to be officially released, delayed till summer of 2013 supposedly, is the site of the often called 'Chilcot Inquiry', you will find these

24 November 2009 - Even before Bush's administration came to power an article written by his then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, warned that "nothing will change" in Iraq until Saddam was gone
27 November 2009 - But there was a 'sea change' in attitude after the atrocities, with former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice targeting Iraq on the very day of the outrage.
30 November 2009 - George Bush tried to make a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida in a conversation with Tony Blair three days after the 9/11 attacks, according to Blair's foreign policy adviser of the time.
1 December 2009 - There was "a touching belief [in Washington] that we shouldn't worry so much about the aftermath because it was all going to be sweetness and light".
3 December 2009 - Boyce mentions the "dysfunctionalism" of Washington. He says that he would find himself briefing his American counterparts on what was happening in different parts of the US administration. Rumsfeld was not sharing information