How ‘cowboy’ Bush Actually Won the Iraq War (sic)!!

Hillary Clinton just two days back said that the Iraq war can’t be won. I really hope you didn’t get carried away reading it and started taking her seriously! She is still a first generation dynastic hopeful with her husband having no war experience. George Bush on the other hand is a seasoned second generation warring cowboy!! And trust you me he knows the game better than you can imagine. Let me explain you how the smoke ‘em out cowboy has actually won the war on Iraq... well at least as far as his schemes were concerned!!

It has been exactly five years since the time President George Bush went on a rampage on Iraq, hunting for those world threatening WMDs!! In these five years the world is testimony to the fact that the US could neither find any WMDs, nor could their intelligence establish any links between the Late Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida, but in effect, on account of the ongoing American engagement, Iraq got completely devastated. Over 1.1 million Iraqis have been killed, some 2.2 million displaced, and more than 40% has been pushed to abject poverty. The worst affected are the children, 28% of whom are malnourished and some 11% are underweight.

The obvious question then is that when there weren’t any WMDs, any Al Qaida links, and on top of that, of late, there had been glimpses of apparent acceptance of mistake of engaging with Iraq by the President Bush himself, then why is it that American troops are still occupying Iraq? And why on the earth am I trying to say that George Bush has won the Iraq war? Well, the answer to this complex question lies in the burgeoning budgets of Pentagon and the financial statements of few of the biggest corporations of America – because all wars aren’t always won on the battlefields. The fact is that from almost USD 300 billion in 2001, the defence budget of the US has grown to a staggering USD 670 billion in 2008.
  So? Well, most of this increased budget – as you would guess – has been consumed by the American ‘war on terror’ and engagements with Iraq… and (and this is the big and) … finally got routed to the balance sheets of a few powerful American corporations, who had been historically renowned for pocketing war dividends. In fact, reports state that 1% of the companies (contractors of Pentagon) have won 80% of all the defence contracts, and the top 10 cornered a whopping 38% of all the money. If you were intelligent it shouldn’t have shocked you, because that’s what capitalism is all about… profits at all cost, even if it means increasing business at the cost of millions of innocent lives... In fact, as per reports, topping the list of these death merchants are - Lockheed Martin, followed by Boeing, Raytheon, Northorp Grumman and General Dynamics. So as bodies continued falling in Iraq, their profitability surged, and as building after building collapsed, their market cap swelled. It is amazing that even in this environment wherein there had been strong signals of American economic slowdown, these corporations have been perpetually posting profits, every quarter!! Reports also state that, between 2003 and 2007, the profitability of corporations like Boeing shot up by a mind numbing 467%! That’s not all, since the engagement with Iraq, shares of the American defence companies have nearly ‘trebled’ and they have been clocking almost a double digit revenue growth.
There have also been reports and news, stating that the contracts for reconstructing Iraq had already been issued to these companies, even before the first bomb was dropped on Iraq. And it is not about the big companies that have been reaping the dividends of war alone, as there are almost 100,000 other government contractors (including the likes of DynCorp International, Blackwater USA, MPRI) who are currently operating in Iraq, milking in millions of dollars. All this plundering aside, the core agenda of the key American loot is still left undone. And that is to get the Oil Law passed by the Iraqi government, which would put the final nail on the coffin by virtually allowing the ‘takeover of Iraqi oilfields by the private companies’. It always was the real reason for this war. As I have been stressing from day one, had Iraq been an apple producing country, the cowboys of the west would have never bothered about its existence even, forget the sovereignty of Kuwait or the fear of (nonexistent) WMDs. So, given this background, it doesn’t make any sense for President Bush to order the troops back from Iraq! Does it?? The cowboy general of the world’s largest imperialistic force still has a lot of loot to do… even if it is at the cost of the lives of another few million Iraqis and few thousand American soldiers and a cost of war which would take generations of Americans and Iraqis to mitigate. So my friends, make no mistake...President Bush has actually won the war that he set out for, and for the ones he played it out for.