Bush's (New) Lies About Iraq

How many times have we heard recently that "as Iraqis stand up Americans will stand down" and this is the test for U.S. withdrawal from its invasion and occupation of that country? Several factors prove George W. Bush has no such intentions however. As always with Bush you must look at his deeds, not his words. We learned early on not to trust a thing he said. He came to Philadelphia to celebrate Head Start while cutting its budget 60%. He called his program to allow power companies to increase their mercury emissions "Clear Skies." His program to allow lumber companies to log our national forests was called the "Healthy Forests Initiative." The man is truly orwellian.

So as we listen to the President speak about conditions for withdrawal from Iraq lets look at the reality. Fourteen permanent American military bases being built. Then Congress last week stripped a provision from a bill allocating yet more funding to the war effort a provision to ban permanent bases. If we're going to leave Iraq why do we need to be building these bases and why did the Administration ask Congress to strip this provision from the bill? Because we aren't leaving.

Perhaps the biggest signal we have no intention of leaving is the massive new embassy being built in Baghdad. This behemoth is the size of eighty football fields, is completely self supporting, and is being built to hold 8000 Americans. $592 million of your tax dollars are going into its construction. At least this is one contract Halliburton didn't receive. The Nation has a very interesting article detailing this huge project. It illustrates how clueless this White House is regarding their image in Iraq and/or their contempt for the Iraqi people. And we wonder why we can't stop this insurgency....

Decide for yourself if you can continue to trust Bush when he says we'll leave Iraq. A few excerpts from the article:

"At a time when most Iraqis are enduring blackouts of up to 22 hours a day, the site is floodlighted by night so work can continue around the clock."

"The Tribune says that "for security reasons, the new embassy is being built entirely by imported labor. The contractor, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co., which was linked to human-trafficking allegations by a Chicago Tribune investigation last year, has hired a workforce of 900 mostly Asian workers who live on the site." In a land where half the population is out of work the United States ought to win countless native hearts and minds with this labor policy."

"An "embassy" in which 8,000 people labor, along with the however many thousand military personnnel necessary to defend them, is not a diplomatic outpost. It is a base. A permanent base."