{"id":162582,"date":"2015-06-29T21:16:59","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T21:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=162582"},"modified":"2015-06-29T21:16:59","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T21:16:59","slug":"hi-im-uncle-sam-im-war-oholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/hi-im-uncle-sam-im-war-oholic\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Hi, I\u2019m Uncle Sam and I\u2019m a War-oholic\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

It was the summer of 2002. The Bush
\nadministration\u2019s top officials knew that they were going into Iraq in a big
\nway. They were then in planning mode, but waiting until fall to launch
\ntheir full-throttle campaign to persuade Congress and the American people to
\nback them. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who oversaw the
\nselling of the invasion, put it<\/a> at the time, “From a marketing
\npoint of view, you don\u2019t introduce new products in August.”<\/p>\n

For them, it was a complete no-brainer.
\nThe U.S. military against Saddam Hussein\u2019s rickety army? It would be,
\nas a neocon supporter put it<\/a>, a “cakewalk.” In
\nfact, they were already thinking about where to turn next. As the insider
\nquip<\/a> of the pre-invasion months had it,
\n“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
\nOne key figure, however, had his doubts. According to<\/a> the Washington Post<\/i>\u2019s Bob Woodward, Secretary of State
\nColin Powell offered this warning to the president: “You are going to be
\nthe proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations,
\nand problems. You\u2019ll own it all.” Woodward noted as well that
\n\u201cprivately, Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called this
\nthe Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Pottery Barn had no such rule,
\nbut what might be thought of as the Powell rule turned out to be on the mark
\nin ways even he couldn\u2019t have imagined. Once things began to go desperately
\nwrong, there was, of course, no way to roll back the invasion and “ownership”
\nof Iraq would prove to be inheritable. The next president, who came to
\npower in part by opposing the war and swore that, once in the Oval Office, he\u2019d
\nend it and get the U.S. military out for good, is now the less-than-proud owner<\/a> of Iraq War 3.0. And if ever
\nthere was a nation that was broken, it\u2019s Iraq.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was the summer of 2002. The Bush administration\u2019s top officials knew that they were going into Iraq in a big way. They were then in planning mode, but waiting until fall to launch their full-throttle campaign to persuade Congress and the American people to back them. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":130285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-162582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}