Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

It's not much of a secret why the US got involved with the Iraq war — to make a lot of money for the people who put Bush into power. That much is obvious and has been the reason that the upper class has been involved in nearly every war, which has made them continually richer while stealing both the lives and the assets of those below them. Let me emphasize: A LOT OF MONEY!!! If you are an American, that half a trillion dollars you spent last year on war came out of your taxes and went into the pockets of the wealthy. Let's look at some basic facts:

• The US is at no risk of invasion from anyone and never has been.
• To invade the US successfully would take an utter minimum of 3,000,000 troops landing simultaneously, with 12,000,000 in support manpower, and at least 42,000,000,000 pounds of gear. It's just not going to happen.
• The US has by far the world's best air force and navy and is at no risk of those invasion types either because there is no force on the planet capable of mounting it.
• Bio-attacks and isolated WMD strikes can not be countered with military action anyway.
• The US, especially in conjunction with Canada, is capable of producing enough oil and bio-oil products to meet all current and expected demands. It does not need to rely on far more costly imported product.
• US interests in foreign nations are elements of large corporate entities profiting from war (ie. so if war is used to protect them, it's an insane cyclical argument — we need to go to war to ensure that our war machine is protected from war).

So war isn't needed for anything other than a very specific type of corporate profit. When these corporate profits are high, tax revenue moves from the lower and middle classes to the upper classes who are in league with these corporate engines. War is ignorant and useless unless you're very rich and are positioned to siphon money with it.

However, to trick the lower classes into supporting war (which never helped them in any way), they use a combination of propaganda (no offense to country hicks, but how more obvious can the propaganda be) and (somewhat manipulated) real events such as WMD scares, various attacks around the world (oops, forgot to get some of the operatives out first), and so on.

To get into Iraq, WMD claims as well as the after-shock of 9/11 were used to trick the American people into supporting it. Sometimes it's easiest to guess who's behind something by playing the who had the most to gain game. We know that money motivated the core players, but others in the region had life and land to lose and gain… Some people have said Israel, but in hindsight I don't think so.

Israel had nothing to gain from the death of an Arab state that was pushing secularism (or I'll say less to gain than other players), and given the less-than-ideal results, has actually lost a great deal in this mess. Iran on the other hand was directly threatened by Iraq… “lucky” for them Iraq's secular government has been destroyed and is well on its way to being replaced by an Islamist one.

Now, we know two things about Chalabi, the man who provided the Bush Cabal with most of the intelligence used to get into this war in the first place:

1. Almost all of the intelligence he provided was wrong.
2. He was passing US secrets to Iran.

So to be clear. If the above statements do continue to prove true, there is a very large circumstantial case that Chalabi is an Iranian intelligence agent, and that Iran used false intelligence and manipulation to trick the United States into attacking Iraq for them. But even though all of the pieces are public news and not being disputed, I doubt you'll see much more about that story. Not that Chalabi has been replaced by anyone more trustworthy.

So on to torture. Returned soldiers are telling their stories, and report after report is coming out: Rumsfeld specifically OK'd torture of Lindh (more), Bush overruled Pentagon lawyers and personally insisted on torture being done (more), and that the Pentagon gave long lists of how to on torture including murder (more). There is effectively no doubt that torture is and was official US policy and that the torturers at Abu Ghraib were being told that they were working directly for the White House.

Good news for the money makers though… Thanks to Bush, terrorism is way up, ensuring that even if he is thrown out of power this November, the money keeps rolling in as Kerry plays the highly profitable clean-up game. The money is already in the bank… Brings a whole new meaning to that banner, doesn't it?