MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Bush-Era Neocons Should Shut The Fuck Up About Iraq (And Everything Else)

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2023

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/bush-era-neocons-should-shut-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Caitlin Johnstone

David Frum and Max Boot, two neoconservatives who helped grease the wheels for the invasion of Iraq, have some thoughts they’d like to share with us as we approach the 20th anniversary of that horrific and unforgivable war. Both of these perspectives can be read in widely esteemed mainstream publications, because everyone who was responsible for inflicting that war upon our species has enjoyed mainstream influence and esteem to this very day.

Both men concede in their own ways that the war was a mistake, while simultaneously cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine that has brought humanity closer to nuclear armageddon than it has been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both men mix their Iraq War retrospectives with war apologia, historical revisionism, and outright lies. And both men should shut the fuck up. About everything. Forever.

Frum’s article is posted in The Atlantic, where he is a senior editor, and it is titled “The Iraq War Reconsidered“. Frum is credited with authoring George W Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech, which marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of US military expansionism and “humanitarian interventions” in geostrategically valuable nations after 9/11.

In just the second sentence of his article Frum opens with an absolute scorcher of a lie, saying “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads” were discovered in Iraq to suggest that the weapons of mass destruction narrative had been proven at least somewhat true. As The Intercept’s Jon Schwartz explained back in 2015, the only chemical weapons in Iraq were either (A) munitions sealed in bunkers at an Iraqi weapons complex by UN inspectors in the nineties and left there because they were too dangerous to move, and (B) some old munitions that had been lost and forgotten after the Iran-Iraq War. In neither of these cases is it true that Saddam Hussein was hiding any weapons of mass destruction.

🦀 Jon Schwarz 🦀 @schwarz

This is from an article by @davidfrum in the Atlantic yesterday. Iraq did not have “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads.” Even 20 years later, Frum absolutely cannot stop lying about Iraq. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

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Frum claims that “The United States went to war to build a democracy in Iraq,” which is an infantile fairy tale only idiots and children believe. Iraq was invaded because it was an oil-rich nation in a geostrategically crucial region whose leader had been insufficiently servile to US energy interests. Probably didn’t help that it was also moving toward re-normalizing relations with Iran

Frum hilariously claims that “What the U.S. did in Iraq was not an act of unprovoked aggression,” and shows that he has learned absolutely nothing about anything by criticizing the Obama administration for not invading Syria to enforce “its own declared red lines” on chemical weapons allegations. 

Frum begins the article by calling the war “a grave and costly error,” but by the end he has completely walked this back by gushing about how much better it made things for Iraqis.

See the rest here

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