← Videos
Why We Fight: Inside the Office of Special Plans
The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and how Iraq war intelligence was built, from the people inside it.
Why We Fight clips · Sociology Videos · uploaded 2015-10-11 · 54:09
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=KoSJQIi2vmY · IPFS QmQK3GiutQZ627HxKoqrJUdW32YtKSHmkTxXnWA5Qy1vqZ
What this video is evidence for
These clips come from Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight (2005, Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival). The film opens with President Eisenhower's 1961 farewell warning about the "military-industrial complex" and follows it to the Iraq war.
The key eyewitness is retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. In 2002 she worked in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia directorate, next to the expanded Iraq desk that became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) under Under Secretary Douglas Feith. Her account in the film:
"The Office of Special Plans was created in the Rumsfeld Department of Defense in order to produce the intelligence that the president and the vice president wanted, making an enemy out of Iraq."
She says the office "had one primary job, and that was to produce a set of talking points on the topic of Iraq, WMD, and terrorism," which action officers were required to use "exactly as they were written." She describes taking intelligence "out of context, without the qualifiers... and presenting it as if it's a factoid," in papers that went up to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
This is Kwiatkowski's first-hand account. The Pentagon Inspector General's February 2007 report later found that Feith's office produced "alternative intelligence assessments" on Iraq and al-Qaeda that were "inappropriate," though not illegal. The film also covers the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran, the "blowback" that runs through US–Iran relations to this day.
Where this fits: see Pentagon Greater Israel Wars for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:54:09. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
From the White House in the office of the President of the United States, we present an address by Dwight D. Eisenhower. This is the farewell address for President Eisenhower, whose eight years as chief executive come to an end at noon Friday. Good evening, my fellow Americans. We now stand 10 years, past the midpoint of a century, that has witnessed four major wars, among great nations.
Three of these involved our own country. We have been compelled to create a permanent arminence industry of vast proportions. Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. We recognize the imperative need for this development.
Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. What are we fighting for? Why do we bury our sons and brothers and lonely graves far from home? Our men are dying to preserve a way of life. These privileges, these rights, if precious enough to fight for, precious enough to die for.
The United States is the greatest force for good in the world, and we have, not an obligation to go out and fight and start wars, but to certainly do everything we can to spread democracy and freedom throughout the world. We shall pay any price. Bear any burden to assure the survival and the success of liberty. What are fighting for? Freedom?
Freedom. I think we fight because it's necessary. I think it's just right. We're not talking simply about the price of gas. We are talking about the price of liberty.
We see neither territory nor bases. We fight for the principle of self determination. America's strength and, yes, or military power. have been a force for peace, not conquest. By keeping our military strong by using force where we must, America is making a difference for people here and around the world.
Our cause is just. And no matter how long it takes, we will defeat the enemies of freedom. I was on my way into work, and I was taking the subway, which is elevated subway, and as the subway heads to New York, there comes a point where it makes a very abrupt left hand turn, almost almost a 90 degree turn. And when it does that, the wheels of the subway always screech loudly. If you look out the window, that's when you can see the World Trade Center.
I was sitting on a subway reading, as I always do, train made the left hand turn, the wheels screeched. Everybody in the car jumped up and started to gasp. Oh, oh. And I look up, and there's the building with smoke pouring out of it. I didn't know if that was my son's building.
Because Tower 1 and Tower 2 were in perfect symmetry, and I didn't know which tower I'm looking at. And I'm just thinking to myself, you know, how did my son get out of there? Well, I don't know how, but he got out of there. There's no two ways about that. He can't be in there.
'Cause anybody who's in there is gonna die. Blowback. It's a CIA term. Blowback does not mean simply the unintended consequences of foreign operations. It means the unintended consequences of foreign operations that were deliberately kept secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation comms, The American public is not able to put it in context, to put cause and effect together, that they come up with questions like, Why do they hate us?
The forces of evil declared war on the Americans. That since Pearl Harbor, has there been so much national rape? Freedom and democracy are under attack. Why do they hate us? That's the question everybody's asking.
Our government did not want the forensic question asked, what were their motives, and instead chose to say they were just evildoers. And the towers keep falling. Every five minutes, they go the tower again. I got on the phone, I called NBC. I'm listening to your newscast.
How many times are you gonna show those goddamn towers coming down? Don't you have any respect for the people who have family and friends in those towers? Do we have to keep watching them fall down? I watched them fall down, 50 times already. When are you gonna stop?
Please stop. You're ripping my heart out. But win a war against people that hate freedom. God gave me two of the greatest sons any parent could ever ask for, why he took one back. I'll never know.
I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people... and the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. Yes, sir. Somebody had to pay for this.
Somebody had to pay for 9/11. I... I want enemy dead. I want to see their bodies stacked up for what they did. For taking my son.
There was a moment when the entire world was behind us. There was a million people demonstrating in the streets of Tehran in favor of the United States. We had the world behind us. Now kids are dying. Billions are being spent every month.
Animosity against the United States is stronger now than it ever has been in history. Put him down. What happened here? Is it just that the experience of September 11? Or is there something else going on here?
When something like this happens, you gotta take stock of this. You gotta understand what went wrong here. We live here in the United States of amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning. Everything is a blank.
We have no history. Guatemala, 1954. The United States intervened unilaterally to protect its vital interests. 11 in 1958. The United States feels its policy of complainment in the Middle East is threatened.
Responds openly and unilaterally. The United States intervened in Laos, the Congo, Brazil. There are so many theories about what happened in Iraq, and why we really went in. But when you look at the history of the United States, almost every president, there is something we don't like somewhere in the world, and we've got to dispense military force. Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983.
Last night, I ordered U.S. military forces to Panama. This is not about one president or one party. We fight as a nation because we perceive it is in our interest to fight, and we then mention words like freedom, and nice common values that who can be against freedom, when, in fact, much more has been going on privately.
Just complete a meeting with our national security team, and we've received the latest intelligence updates. The deliberate and deadly attacks, which were carried out yesterday against our country, were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war. September 11, 2001. Provided a group of people deeply committed to the expansion of the American Empire, the opportunity to implement plans that they had been laying since 1992.
At that time, a young Paul Wohowitz was working in a subordinate position under Dick Cheney, was then Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cheney orders Wolfowitz to write a plan to write a grand strategy. That it was now our destiny, that without the Soviet Union, there is no one who can possibly approach us in military terms. It says, That's the way it ought to be, and our policy must be to maintain and expand that, that we are the new Rome.
That's their strategy on 9/11, they begin to implement it. It's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states, who sponsor territories. The people who came in with the president, or many of them anyway. We're certainly prepared to shift directions. And in a radical direction.
I think it's fair to say radical. When September 11 happened. The president and his top advisors said to themselves correctly, I think, we need to rethink American foreign policy. And I think that would have happened even without September 11th. But September 11th was really the event that changed American foreign policy.
Well, I was in the Pentagon. When we got hit, you know, I yes, it did change. It was a very dramatic and terrible thing. And it does change your perspective. But the war in Iraq had nothing to do with the war on terrorism, that was a huge leap.
a manufactured leap in order to implement a very calculated and pre developed foreign policy. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. The Bush doctrine is that, uh, preemptive strikes or preemptive conflicts, which were never contemplated in the past, now have to be contemplated under certain scenarios. If you saw a missile about to be launched and you could kick it over before it could be launched, you'd do it, of course. If you saw someone about to shoot at you and you thought you could shoot first, you'd do it.
It's common sense. I don't know anybody who doesn't agree with that. So what's the big fuss about preemption? The Bush doctrine is certainly not something unprecedented, unknown in American life. This statement that we are going to dominate the world through military power that we reserve to ourselves, the right of preemptive war.
It is an extreme statement of what has been there in the works for a long time. World War II is, without question, the formation of the American military empire. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander in Chief, Allied Expeditionary Force. I have complete confidence that the soldiers, soldiers, and mermen of the United Nations will demonstrate that an aroused democracy is the most formidable fighting scene that can be devised.
Eisenhower was there and saw it happening. He had seen the build up of the American military to fight World War II. In this war, More than any other in history, we are on the side of decency and democracy and liberty. He believed very deeply in the necessity for World War II, and felt that Nazism was a terrible tyranny. And he brought this conviction and drive to defeating Nazi Germany.
People waited for this moment, the culminating victory. the end of the war. We were on top of the world. We were the only unwrecked major power on Earth. Europe was bleeding to death.
Japan was gone. Those papers, cities had all been burned up. So what are we doing? At 2:45 in the morning, August 6, 1945, Colonel Tibbotts takes the Enola gay... It is an atomic bound.
It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The United States bombed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, and three days later, they detonated another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science and history. I can remember in the Pacific, when the words spread that the bombs had been dropped. 99.
9% of us were delighted because we'd been convinced that if Japan was not hit by nuclear weapons. One million of us would be killed. Drop those bombs, and they will surrender. Well, they were trying to surrender all that summer. But Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs.
What? To show off, to frighten Stalin, to change the balance of power in the world, to declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a preemptive world war. Eisenhower hated the dropping of them and thought it should not have been done. Well, you just thought war was terrible enough as it was.
I cannot, uh, trace evolution in my, uh, dad's thinking, he was complex. He was a five star general, but he was never a military fanatic, never. One night, in July of '45, that day, the Secretary of War had told my father about the development of the atomic weapon, topic bomb. We were sitting up in his bedroom, and he said that his own first impression, his own emotion had been, uh, to be feeling down low. He wished we hadn't invented it.
In the background was the growing conflict between two great powers to shape the post war world. Already, an iron curtain had dropped around Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia. You see, we had to fight communism wherever it was in the world. So a decision was made. that the United States remain militarized, permanently.
We lack the weapons to defend ourselves. Build, prepare is the crime. Quickly, the government springs into action and initiate the gigantic rearmament program, a program designed to make America, the arsenal of democracy. From that moment on, the American Empire was in every corner of the Earth. In Burma and Iceland, we were going to maintain dominance, not just of Europe, but not just of Japan, but of the entire globe.
Oh, gee, I wish that I could be with you tonight... See, I wish... And a G, I know that everything will be all right. Be all right. The crickets are singing a love song...
What are we fighting for? Fighting for continued freedom. That's the only way we're gonna have it, I think. Why do we fight? I think that the, uh, I honestly don't have an answer for it.
It's just.. So people start the war who know what they're fighting about. I think we fight for ideals and what we believe in, so I hope that's what it is. Today, we don't have a broad based American feeling about why we're fighting in Iraq. People's confidence in the United States is not what it was 15 years ago.
It's not what it was during World War II. Yesterday, USA. Precious solenoids, such as the boy we fight orientation films, familiarizing our soldiers... You know, it's interesting why we fight. was actually the title of a series of World War II films that were done by one of the great directors.
Master of the art of motion picture entertainment, Frank Capra. The Frank Capra films. Even back then, were propaganda, to kind of build up a war fever. America. Fighting.
But given that it was during a global World War, there were a lot of reasons that Americans embraced. We're fighting for librities... The most expensive luxury known to man. Today, if you went downtown to my local town, and you asked five people why we're fighting in Iraq, you'd get five different answers. Why do we fight?
I'm not quite sure, but I think it's for power and control, for greed. I'm not sure, uh, if we're fighting for the oil or not. We could be, we could not be. The government has more knowledge than I know. I think everybody has a different idea why we're there.
And a lot of people think we shouldn't be. What we're seeing is a disconnection of our American foreign policy from the, uh, citizen, from the average American citizen. Why do we fight? Oh, I wish we didn't. I wish we didn't.
Sometimes you have to, though. Assassination, people sometimes think with precision weapons that maybe you can now assassinate people from very how to, I mean, golly. First of all, if it's a fixed target like a building, you have the time to understand it, its location. The next hardest target is one that moves around, and the single hardest target of all is a human being. Sometimes, before you can bring about democratic change, you have to remove the obstacle to democratic change.
You have to remove a Saddam Hussein, because there's no hope for democracy with Saddam there. The point, in many ways, where these guys wasn't just to topple Saddam, it was to transform the Middle East. They want to take the U.S. military and go in and shore up American interest in the key area of the world.
And that's their vision. They want to spread democracy around the world on the point of our bayonets. I think most Americans don't want to police the world, but I think most Americans understand that if we don't at least help police the world, and no one's going to. Where the debate and controversy begins is how far does the United States go, and when does it go from a force for good to a force of imperialism? People complain a lot about American arrogance in American power, but the great threat for the future is not American power in American strength.
It would be American weakness in America withdrawal. They do believe that this is not only for the long term benefit of the United States, but it's for the long term benefit of everybody else as well. We'll bring them American values, prosperity peace, all the rest of it. But the way we're gonna do that is to take over. Even more than we did at the height of the Cold War.
Three, two, one, two... After the Second World War, the United States literally divided the world up into commands. And some American officer was responsible for every region of the world. Brings me down in Mexico. There was this domino theory, if any of these places fall to communism, in the next place, in the next place, in the next place will fall as well, and the next thing you know, they're in Missouri.
Once upon a time your hometown was safe. But not now. It is possible for a rocket to strike your home. Right now. Today, right now.
And what defense remains? Strength. Strength, ready if we need it. When my dad first became present, he came in at the real beginning of the thermonuclear age. I think we have to put the 1950s into perspective, we look back today, and we think the 1950s was a period of Elvis Presley and poodle skirts.
But, in fact, it was a very dangerous period of time. Defense budgets throughout the Western world doubled or tripled in the four years between 48 and 52. The Soviets are out producing America's aircraft factory. There is a threat, but we can't measure how much is enough defense spending to stop the Soviet Union. So by the time Eisenhower is president, there is a huge new flow of cash into defense industries.
He was the first to acknowledge that a permanent military establishment would be required during this period, but then unless we could find some kind of breakthrough, that, in fact, it would end up creating a terrible cost. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this. A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each Serbia town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels a week. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all. 92 cents. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from across a vine.
My father as president, had strong, guiding principles. He used to say, buttered weapons, take food from the hungry and shelter from the homeless. And so he was fighting with the Pentagon all the time. For asking for too much, Congress for giving it to him. I don't think we should pay one cent for defense more than we have to.
Well, Eisenhower saw us starting to build program after program that was just out of control, and his own ability to shape national security policy, was being hemmed in by these forces he couldn't control, and he was the president. on at least one occasion. Eisenhower was heard to say, by those in the room, God help this country when somebody sits at this desk who doesn't know as much about the military as I do. My fellow Americans. This evening, I come to you with a message of leave taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
We have been compelled to create a permanent arminence industry of vast proportions. Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every state house, every office in the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. You have to realize this is one of the great president's great military leaders on his way out the door. At the end of his second term, he says, By the way, watch out for the military industrial complex. People know that he invented the phrase military industrial complex. But very rarely do you see the whole thing, and realize how utterly strident his warning was.
I think it's one of the most profound statements ever made by an American president. Just like George Washington gave his warnings about Ford entangled and things like that. My dad was giving his warning against letting this military industrial complex get out of hand. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. This is the media machine gun, 7.
62, millimeter, over 450 rounds in it. So I'm here to see the hit to kill technology. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a missile that goes up and shoots tactical ballistic missiles out of the sky. These are my two dogs. President Eisenhower's concern about the military industrial complex.
His words have, unfortunately, come true. He was worried that priorities are set by what benefits corporations as opposed to what benefits the country. Name, any playing card that will come into your mind. One, two, three, name a car. Perfect.
Now, we've never met before. No collusion, which is really odd, because collusion is our business. Yes, collusion with the military. You know, people sometimes think of the defense budget as you got to arm the troops, defend the nation. But for most people that are involved in it, you realize this is business, competition for contracts, between very large corporations, industry has to have a bottom line that's black, otherwise there are shareholders don't like that.
So they have to find ways to interest the government in continuing to buy the product. Lockheed Martin and McDonald, Douglas, and Boeing throughout America. There are factories, there are corporations that are involved on a daily basis, to produce the weaponry, the ammunition, to carry out the American way of war. I'm just gonna take your driver's license. Hi, sorry, I called here.
It was cold hands, warm heart. The overall Raytheon mission, in general, is to be the premier supplier of solutions in metal art. Our customers needs. Our job is to provide tactical missiles for all practical purposes. Paveway laser guided bombs, tomahawk missiles, stinger missiles, phalanx, which is actually a great big gun.
The American way of war has been described as overwhelming...... supported by overwhelming logistics. For every shooter out there, every man with a gun. There are hundreds behind supporting, providing the ammunition. The boots, the gas for the tanks, the oil.
I don't guess I'm real proud of the fact that I make bombs, you know, for what they're used for. I think about when I see something explode over there, did my hands actually help make that, you know? I'd rather really be helping Santa make toys, is what I'd really rather be doing. We try and connect our people with the actual guy in the field, in the plane. Some of them are their sons or their daughters.
Your son is reservist? Yes, he is reserviced with the 6 52nd engineer. Sometimes, I'm okay, another time, I can... try a river. You wrap the flag around every weapon system, every weapon system is supposed to before the troops, give the soldier the tools they need.
But really, what it ends up becoming is product competition. If you had the same car year after year, if industry didn't change the car at all, would you buy a different car? No, but when they come up with something that's got extra bells and whistles on it, that suits what you need it to do, then you'll buy more. If you look at the weapons that we're buying, new aircraft carriers, new submarines, F 22 fighters, you know, for an attack that if FBI estimates probably cost Al Qaeda or Osama 500K to pull off, we are now spending more than we did at the peak of Vietnam. A lot of what's going on is simply because people don't understand the larger architecture of how the Pentagon operates.
Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the committee. I am the U.S. Air Force program manager for the Boeing Company.
Let's use the example of buying a weapon, like a new fighter plane for the Air Force. The action usually starts in the Pentagon, maybe at the contractors' initiatives, but essentially, everybody's working together. The KC 7678 can carry up to 190 troops. Basically, what you do is you come in, and you lowball the initial estimate. The actual vinure cost is about half that estimate.
You over promise what it's gonna do, and you underestimate the kind of burdens it's gonna impose. We separately met with the companies, and both proposals very good, both. Once the Air Force buys off on it. Then you start flooding money to as many congressional districts as possible as quickly as possible. The B 2 bomber has a piece of it made in every single state.
To make sure that if you ever tried to phase that project out, you will get howls, howls from among the most liberal members of Congress. I believe in this military. I am urging the Senate to support this bill. $66 billion for our men and women in uniform. Well, I just want to thank the chairman for working with me and adding $100 million to upgrade 10 additional B 1 bombers.
And that B 1 has been a great asset for the projection of power... The F 35 joint strike fighter, the FA 22 raptor, and the... Because the military industrial complex is not two links. It's three. Some military, and the industry, and Congress.
For Congressman, defense spending means jobs. Humvees are manufactured in my district in Mr. Walk, Indiana, by losing 100 defense jobs in his district could mean 500 votes. Because it's not just 100 workers. It's their spouses, it's their children.
It's the representatives duty to bring home the bacon. I am also grateful. for the work that the House Armed Services Committee has done to fully fund the FA22 program this year. God bless our contractors. It is our conclusion that the Lockheed Martin team is the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter Program.
We have a snapshot in time after September 11th, where at least 71 companies that we were able to identify are starting to get contracts to go in in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of the top 10 companies had former U.S. officials who had worked in the Pentagon or other parts of the U.S.
government, on their boards of directors, or as their top executives. It's known as the revolving door, and people cash in all the time. Public officials go to work for companies, and they make triple, quadruple, 10 times, sometimes as much money as they used to make in public service. There's too close a relationship, and there's outright... I hate to use the word corruption, but it borders on it, the behavior of some of these individuals, both in industry and in the Pentagon.
The number one recipient of contracts was Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, and a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Ruth. KBR. We're the army's contractor on the battlefield. Currently 65,000 KVR people around the world, assisting the troops. Ten of what?
You know, in the military industrial complex, isn't just the people in the Pentagon and the people producing the weapons. It's now increasingly got a very large service sector. Hem and eggs. Things that troops used to do, like peel potatoes, and do laundry, we now have contractors doing. Somebody has to do this work.
And the Halliburton thing is just an outrageous effort to associate the vice president with the activities of a company with which he has no connection. No connection at all. Congressional critics are questioning whether Dick Cheney, held Halliburton, get billion... FBI has revealed. It is expanding its investigation into how Halliburton Company bill taxpayers for its contract work in Iraq.
And it now appears some of those contracts were awarded with the knowledge and approval of the vice president's office, which would seem to contradict his previous statements. As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of involvement of knowledge of, in any way, shape, or form of contracts. We did a report that took two and a half years, $600,000, 33 people, including 10 investigator reporters on six continents, looking at private military companies, and outsourcing war all over the world. And we noticed that in 1992, there was a contract of $9 million given out to a company, Kellogg Brown en route, to study the idea, should the Pentagon start using the private sector to do some of the support type functions like food service, latrine duty, but even maybe some military things as well. And the Secretary of Defense at the time was one, Dick Cheney.
So Cheney gives the contract out. Kellogg, Brown and Ruth, comes back and says, This is a terrific idea. The next 10 years, they get seven or 800 contracts to do just that. Well, I ran Halliburton. I'm proud of it.
Halliburton's a quintessen. This company brought in a Rolodex guy, a former U.S. congressman, defense secretary, chief of staff, to a president, to make sure that he could get doors opened not only in Washington, but in capitals all over the world. And, yes, he becomes personally wealthy from that.
No question about it. His net worth went from a million dollars or less to $60 or $70 million in the span of five years. Are you ready to take the oath? I am. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.
So we elected a government contractor as vice president. Congratulations, Mr. Pres. This could be Indonesia. Sounds like Russia, Nigeria.
No it's the United States of America. Everything I just said is entirely legal, and it is our system of legal corruption. If I am sure of anything, I'm sure of this, Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with with the award of any contract, Halibut. He wouldn't pick up the phone, he wouldn't whisper in someone's ear, I know him. He just wouldn't do it.
It looks bad. It looks bad. And, uh, apparently Halliburton more than once has overcharged the federal government. That's wrong. How would you tackle it over like that?
I would have a public investigation of what they've done. So... Yeah, the time of June... What's that? Vice Presidents on the phone?
Okay. You probably have to take the... Okay, okay, cool. Whenever you get into a situation where anybody's got unwarranted influence that has the potential to be deeply distorting, it corrupts our system. You don't have to show that he directly came in and hit the cash register button.
The door flew open, and he took some money out and put it in his pocket. It's to say, anybody allocating things at the Department of Defense knows who the vice president is, knows what his connections are in Halliburton. We have a process that has a seamlessness where the corporate interests that stand to benefit are so intertwined and interwoven with the political forces that the financial elites and the political elites have become the same people. You do have to follow the money. If you follow the money here, it's not so much that Halliburton wanted a war, so they told Dick Cheney to go get one for him.
It wasn't that, but you do get a willingness to go to. war. Eyes are 296. The Nays are 133. The joint resolution is passed without objection.
You get a willingness to look at the cost benefit scenario. American people who have a son or a daughter that's going to be deployed and may be shot at maybe killed or maimed in Iraq. They look at the cost benefit, and they go, Hmm, I don't think that's good. But when politicians understand contracts, future contracts. When they look at war, they have a different cost benefit analysis.
The defense budget is 3/4 of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year, well over 25%. I guarantee you when war becomes that profitable, you're going to see more of it. I don't know how you would want to assess the reasons the United States went to war in Iraq. But ultimately, you have to ask yourself at the end of the day, does any of this contribute to whether or not we are making valid and appropriate decisions about our conduct of foreign policy?
From the American people. I grew up knowing that should the situation arise, you were expected to answer the call when your country made the call. There was no such thing as, Well, I wonder if my country's right. Is anybody lying to me about this? You don't grow up thinking that?
You grow up saying, If the bugle calls, you go. Well, as, you know, as time went on, and we found out, well, this whole gal for Tompkin thing was BS, and nobody was really attacked. So you say to yourself, You know what? That's really crap, man. Why did somebody lie to us?
There was no need to lie. We have been lied to in every military escapade, frankly, over the last 50 or 60 years, without exception. There's no better example probably than Vietnam. where you had the President of the United States and the top generals in the Pentagon, out and out lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and got us into the war, about the casualties, about how the war was going. Anyone who has ever looked closely at the Vietnam War can see that the public and the media were manipulated substantially.
We don't like this. think of ourselves as a militant nation, but we are, in fact, an incredibly militant and militaristic nation. It's not a view of ourselves that we want to carry around, but the fact is we are. If the president and the military industrial complex, the defense establishment, if they all have decided that suddenly there's a problem somewhere, we need to drop some bombs or even put land forces somewhere in some country. This is a ritual that we have been seeing for decades.
We've toppled governments, we've done coup d'état. We've used intelligence services for COVID purposes and done horrible things around the world, and we have put up with the most heinous human rights abusing countries. We have propped them up, we've even trained them how to commit human rights abuses. Today's demon was yesterday's friend, all in the name of either the Cold War, or for commercial reasons. It's basically economic colonialism.
No one uses the colonialism word, but instead of just taking over the countries, we have a better way. We just go in and have free markets, whether we're trying to sell our products to their citizens, or we're trying to mine their resources, we need to be in that country for some reason, and therefore, we're gonna talk about free markets, free trade. But what's really going on is, we want our companies to get rich in your country. There she is. That's what all the fuss is about.
Oil. That's kind of pretty, isn't it? Oil, coming up out of the ground to make life a bit more easy for all of us. The United States is the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels. Oil is what drives the military machine of every country.
That is, it provides the fuel for the aircraft, for the ships, for the tanks, for the trucks. Control of oil is indispensable when you run out of it, your army stops. There is a direct connection between events that happened more than 50 years ago and the war in Iraq today. In 1953, the Prime Minister of Iran, Muhammad Mozadek, became extremely irritated. The British were ripping off his country's national resources, he wanted a greater share in it.
The British came to the new President Eisenhower and asked for help on this. Eisenhower, very conveniently, declared Mosadek to be a communist, and we then set the CIA to overthrow him. Three days of bloody rioting, culminating in a military cool... The result was, we brought the shop to power, and he created an extremely repressive regime that, within 20 years, had led to a revolution against him, the Ayatollahomeni creates a government that is violently anti American. For Americans, shot up the president.
Mani said, I pray to God to cut the hand off all those foreign advisors... In the after action report by the CIA on what they had done in Iran in 1953, they said, We're going to get some blowback from this. We then made a puppet out of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who was a friend of ours. He was an asset in the CIA's computers. We did so because he was anti Iranian.
He was very fearful that the revolution in Iran which spread into his country. He therefore went to war. Iran. The war was extremely bloody, went on throughout the 1980s. Unfortunately, for Saddam Hussein, he began to lose the war.
At that point, in comes the United States, in the form of Donald Runsfeld, sent to Saddam Hussein by President Reagan to tell him, We will supply you with intelligence. We will supply you with the weapons you may need through covert means. His wife, cynics in Washington, say, We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We have the receipts. This is what we mean by blowback.
He remained a friend of ours right up to his invasion in the summer of 1990 of Kuwait. We became alarmed when he invaded Kuwait that he could also go on and invade Saudi Arabia itself. The largest reserves of oil on Earth. We stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. It was a mistake in every sense of the term.
Remember, Osama bin Laden had said, I resent the government of Saudi Arabia for using Americans to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraq. At that point, we began to fear that we were going to lose our position in Saudi Arabia. Well, the second largest source of proven reserves on Earth are in Iraq. This leads us now to demonize our previous ally, and to prepare the American public for the thought that we must take him out. So throughout the summer, something was operating.
in the Pentagon, that was unique. In August of 2002, it was announced to us that all of those folks that had come in and made up this expanded Iraq desk would be called the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans was created in the Rumsfeld Department of Defense in order to produce the intelligence that the president and the vice president wanted, making an enemy out of Iraq. Open chair over here, General Riggins. The Officer Special Plans had one primary job, and that was to produce a set of talking points.
On the topic of Iraq, WMD, and terrorism. And we were to use them in any document that we prepared, exactly as they were written in their entirety. We were all of us, myself included, very familiar with what the intelligence was saying about Iraq. But the problem was, when you look at what was in these talking points, You could tell. It was designed to convince the reader that Iraq, and Saddam Hussein specifically, constituted a major, serious, terrible, evil threat, to not just his neighbors, but to the United States.
His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa. And that would be the statement. He's actively seeking it, and this means that he's a danger. But the intelligence actually said that Saddam Hussein, in the '80s, in the late '80s, actively sought fashionable materials in Africa, but he hasn't done anything like that in the past 12 years. A statement, we act like he did it yesterday, taking bits of intelligence out of context, without the qualifiers, without the rest of the story, and placing it as a bullet, and presenting it as if it's a factoid.
There is no doubt. The Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. And this was given to us, action officers, to use in papers that we would prepare for our higher ups, to include guys like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The UK knows that they have weapons of mass destruction.
Any country on the face of the Earth, with an active intelligence program, knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. These guys were manipulating public opinion, okay? Creating falsehoods and fantasies to inspire fear in the American people so that they could have their war. The President of the United States. If war is forced upon us, We will fight with the full force and might of the United States military, and we will prevail.
The reason we're in Iraq, first off, has not honestly been told to the American people, it certainly had nothing to do with the liberation of the Iraqi people. It was never part of the agenda, and it's not part of the agenda now. We know we did not have an exit strategy in the invasion of Iraq because we didn't intend to leave. We are in the process right now of building 14 permanent bases in Iraq. There is this incredible euberus right now that we are invincible, and we are the preeminent power on planet Earth.
American power, an American Empire is actually flaunted in people's faces around the world, where we rub our shoe and their face and tell them that we're top dog. And you will work with us because you sure as hell don't want to be against us. The world has changed, and we're not going back to where we were. I find one of the sillier ideas, is the notion, and you hear it all the time. American policy has been hijacked by a handful of people.
As soon as they're out of there, we're gonna go back to the way it was. They're wrong about that, because we are not the same people we were before. We're walking on thin ice. We are treading the same path taken by the first Democratic regime ever created in the Western world, namely, the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic inadvertently acquired an empire around the world, and they then discovered that to maintain, expand, protect this empire, they required standing armies.
Standing armies is what George Washington warned us against, and his farewell address, that they will destroy the structure of government that we tried to create in our Constitution to prevent the rise of an imperial presidency. The single most important article in our Constitution is the one that gives the right to go to war exclusively to the elected representatives, the people, to the Congress. Our Congress, in October of 2002, voted in both houses to give this power to a single man, including the use of nuclear weapons, if he so chose, and, of course, less than six months later. he did choose to exercise it in Iraq. For too long, our culture has said, If it feels good, do it.
Now America's embracing a new ethic, and a new creed, let's roll. I think the history of the United States, as a work in progress, and our attempt at democracy here, is a constant struggle between capitalism and democracy, and there have been ebbs and flows where democracy looks like it's winning. You rein in those powerful forces, but the fundamental reality is that most of the government's decisions today are substantially dictated by powerful corporate interest. Clearly, capitalism is winning. In my lifetime, I have seen the collapse of the Nazi, of the Imperial, Japanese, of the British, French, Dutch, and Russian Empires, they go down pretty easily.
What I want Americans to understand today, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and we have not been vigilant, since Dwight Eisenhower issued his warning to us back in 1961 about the dangers of unauthorized power in the form of the military industrial complex. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals. So that security and liberty may prosper together. You got to realize, 20 years of the military, you're trained always to respect authority to be a team player.
When the war started in Iraq, I hit a turning point in where my values as an officer diverged. Hey, buddy. I had to basically remove myself. So, um, why we fight? I think we fight, 'cause too many people are not standing up saying, I'm not doing this anymore.
Last Updated: 2026-09-27