Where are the folks who brought us the war in Iraq?

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THE ARCHITECTS OF THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

They’re all doing great, thanks for asking.

Jon Schwarz

March 15 2023, 4:52 p.m.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., on Dec. 15, 2006. Photo: Charles Ommanney/Getty Im

THE U.S. AND its allies invaded Iraq 20 years ago in Operation Iraqi Freedom. President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer twice accidentally referred to it as Operation Iraqi Liberation, which was definitely not its official name and would have generated an unfortunate acronym.

The men and women who launched this catastrophic, criminal war have paid no price over the past two decades. On the contrary, they’ve been showered with promotions and cash. There are two ways to look at this.

One is that their job was to make the right decisions for America (politicians) and to tell the truth (journalists). This would mean that since then, the system has malfunctioned over and over again, accidentally promoting people who are blatantly incompetent failures.

Another way to look at it is that their job was to start a war that would extend the U.S. empire and be extremely profitable for the U.S. defense establishment and oil industry, with no regard for what’s best for America or telling the truth. This would mean that they were extremely competent, and the system has not been making hundreds of terrible mistakes, but rather has done exactly the right thing by promoting them.

You can read this and then decide for yourself which perspective makes the most sense.

The following list doesn’t include anything about the Iraqis who’ve died since 2003. Partly, this is because it’s traditional for the U.S. media to pay no attention to the lives of foreigners. Partly, this is because we have no idea how many Iraqis deaths there have been. Various estimates range from 151,000 to over a million. While the U.S. ultimately spent at least $3 trillion on the war and the CIA put down $1 billion just to figure out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, we’ve allocated exactly zero dollars to learn how many Iraqis have died thanks to us. Come on, we’re not made of money!

George W. Bush

Former president Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin are the 21st century’s premier war criminals. In a better world, they’d be sharing a cell at The Hague, playing lots of pinochle and getting up to various mass murderer hijinks.

But here in this universe, Bush is gobbling down huge quantities of money on the speaking circuit, where he charges at least $100,000 for an hour of his pensées. He recently condemned “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” Then he said, “I mean, of Ukraine!” and he and his audience all chortled, because you have to admit that’s pretty funny.

His time is also devoted to painting and being buddies with the Clintons and the Obamas. In particular, he likes to sneak candy to Michelle Obama at solemn events.

“I mean, of Ukraine!” Ha ha ha ha ha, what a scamp.

Dick Cheney

Vice President Cheney told one of the most blatant lies about Iraq during the buildup to the war. In an August 2002 speech, he claimed that when Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected in 1995, he revealed that Iraq was trying to make nuclear weapons again. In reality, Kamel had insisted that Iraq had no unconventional weapons of any kind. This was not a big secret: Kamel said it on CNN in an interview that was available to anyone with an internet connection. America’s crack press corps ripped the lid off Cheney’s obvious deceit by completely missing it.

Since leaving office, Cheney has spent his time fishing, endorsing Donald Trump for president in 2016, and not being prosecuted for torture. Also, for a period of time, he had a kind of external mechanical heart that pushed blood through his veins continuously, meaning that he had no heartbeat yet was still alive (?).

Donald Rumsfeld

On the afternoon of 9/11, as the Pentagon was still on fire, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was eagerly askingwhether the U.S. could now attack Iraq.

Rumsfeld died in 2021, but before then, he got in some quality time at his antebellum vacation home on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The nickname of Rumsfeld’s estate was Mount Misery. As the New York Times reported, it had once been owned by a man named Edward Covey, who was “notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers.” One subjected to this treatment was a 16-year-old Frederick Douglass, who later wrote it made him “wrecked, changed, and bewildered; goaded almost to madness.”