Juan Cole: Cheney's Mission Accomplished

[marmar]

Published on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Informed Comment
Cheney's Mission Accomplished

by Juan Cole


Dick Cheney: "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...."

What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

* An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

* It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

* Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/17-2

[BeFree]

1. Profits

Ill-gotten profits, yes, but war is a racket, eh?

Good to know Cheney is done, what he set out to do is finished and now the Iraqis can progress back to some peace.

Yep, Cheney is done making war on the Iraqi people.

[leftchick]

2. John King was all over those stats

:sarcasm:

[Winterblues]

3. Everything that was discussed in those "Secret Energy Meetings"

was accomplished. Every Oil company that was present has been given access to Iraqi oil with the majority of the revenues going to them and the remaining amount left to the Iraqis. I hope every single one of those "executives" that participated in those "Secret Meetings" dies a horrible painful death that far exceeds the pain and misery they caused to the Iraqi people, but I'm not bitter, no way..

[chimpymustgo]

4. Yes.

[gratuitous]

5. When you put it that way

It almost seems like Dick Cheney has filled his pockets with blood and bones. But we really know that he filled his pockets with sweet, sweet money! Halliburton was on the verge of bankruptcy at the end of 2002, but it's hale and hearty now, thanks to defense contracts. And Unka Dick's pension and deferred compensation are safely funded.

So a few million people died or were made refugee. Is that really such a high price to pay for Dick Cheney's financial security?