That is a civil affair, and none of our business. FYI, all Iraqi's have the right to bear arms. Baghdad had 45 gunshops that sold AK 47's etc. for $250 to practically anyone. Let them take care of the problem, not us.
It was a phony war.
It was fought for reasons not stated. These reasons are obvious to anyone
who is inquisitive to search the internet to read about it in foreign
newspapers.
Years before George W. Bush entered the White House, and years before the
Sept. 11 attacks set the direction of his presidency, a group of influential
men had the plan drawn up. The group, the Project for the New American
Century, or PNAC, was founded in 1997. Among its supporters were three
Republican former officials who were sitting out the Democratic presidency
of Bill Clinton: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.
In open letters to Clinton and GOP congressional leaders the next year, the
group called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" and a
shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the
use of force if necessary to unseat Saddam.
And in a report just before the 2000 election that would bring Bush to
power, the group predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless
there were "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl
Harbor." That event came on Sept. 11, 2001. By that time, Cheney was vice
president, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz his deputy at
the Pentagon.
The next morning - before it was even clear who was behind the attacks -
Rumsfeld insisted at a Cabinet meeting that Saddam's Iraq should be "a
principal target of the first round of terrorism," according to Bob
Woodward's book Bush At War. What started as a theory in 1997 was now on its
way to becoming official
U.S. foreign policy.
Now there is a new and demonstrable connection, but it is not the kind that
the Bush Administration had in mind. In fact, it is more likely to fuel the
speculations of conspiracy theorists than it is to put their fears to rest.
It turns out that a money trail runs-albeit rather circuitously-from the
lucrative business of rebuilding Iraq to the fortune behind Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden's estranged family, a sprawling, extraordinarily wealthy Saudi
Arabian dynasty, is a substantial investor in a private equity firm founded
by the Bechtel Group of San Francisco. Bechtel is also the global
construction and engineering company to which the U.S. government recently
awarded the first major multimillion-dollar contract to reconstruct
war-ravaged Iraq. In a closed competitive bidding process, the United States
Agency for International Development chose Bechtel to rebuild the major
elements of Iraq's infrastructure, including its roads, railroads, airports,
hospitals, and schools, and its water and electrical systems. In the first
phase of the contract, the U.S. government will pay Bechtel nearly
thirty-five million dollars, but experts say that the cost is likely to
reach six hundred and eighty million during the next year and a half.
When the contract was awarded, two weeks ago, the Administration did not
mention that the bin Laden family has an ongoing relationship with Bechtel.
The bin Ladens have a ten-million-dollar stake in the Fremont Group, a San
Francisco-based company formerly called Bechtel Investments, which was until
1986 a subsidiary of Bechtel. The Fremont Group's Web site, which makes no
mention of the bin Ladens, notes that "though now independent, Fremont
enjoys a close relationship with Bechtel." A spokeswoman for the company
confirmed that Fremont's "majority ownership is the Bechtel family." And a
list of the corporate board of directors shows substantial overlap. Five of
Fremont's eight directors are also directors of Bechtel. One Fremont
director, Riley Bechtel, is the chairman and chief executive officer of the
Bechtel Group, and is a member of the Bush Administration: he was appointed
this year to serve on the President's Export Council. In addition, George
Shultz, the Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, serves as a
director both of Fremont and of the Bechtel Group, where he once was
president and still is listed as senior counselor.
Rick Kopf, the general counsel of the Fremont Group, which manages some
eleven billion dollars in assets, confirms that the bin Laden family
invested about ten million dollars in one of Fremont's private funds before
September 11, 2001. He noted that the bin Laden family has not enlarged its
stake since then, but he declined to provide additional details about its
association with the firm. He also chose not to discuss the origin or the
nature of the relationship between the bin Laden and Bechtel families, both
of which made fortunes in huge construction projects in the Arab world. The
Fremont Group evidently does not go in for connecting the dots. As Kopf
said, "Ownership is private and is not disclosed."
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Iraq had no real
connection with al Quaida or Osama bin Laden. This will be looked at as the War of 1,812 lies.