By Jacob G. HORNBERGER

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President Trump says it was necessary for him to order U.S. pilots to bomb Iran to prevent that nation’s government from building a nuclear bomb.

Wait a minute. Something is coming to me. Just give me a moment. It’s coming into my mind. Oh, yes, I remember:

“WMDs! WMDs, Jacob! We have to invade Iran, I mean Iraq, because Saddam Hussein is coming to get us with his WMDs! We have to invade now! Tomorrow will be too late. WMDs! WMDs!”

That was 2003, just before the U.S. government invaded Iraq, a country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. That was another war of aggression, one that violated the principles set forth at Nuremberg and that also violated the U.S. Constitution’s declaration-of-war requirement, thereby making the war illegal under our form of government.

I remember National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. She knew what she was talking about. She said that mushroom clouds from Iraq’s WMDs could soon start appearing over American cities. Who can forget that?

Oh, and let’s not forget U.S. Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell. He was a military man. He’d never lie. He had charts proving that Saddam Hussein was about to unleash his WMDs on the American people. Who can forget the good general’s beautiful charts?

Oh, and what about that undercover CIA agent that U.S. officials illegally outed by publicly disclosing her identity to the world? That was in vicious retaliation for the audacity shown by her husband for challenging the truthfulness of some “yellow cake” uranium tale that U.S. officials were fraudulently using to “prove” that Saddam was coming to get us with his WMDs.

But where are those WMDs! Yes, I know that the U.S. national-security establishment ended up invading Iraq to protect us from those WMDS. I know that U.S. forces killed, tortured, and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people in the process. I know that the U.S. government destroyed the entire country — infrastructure, homes, and businesses. I know that they impoverished those who survived the onslaught. I also know that U.S. forces are still in Iraq.

Yes, I know all that. But that’s not what I’m asking about. I’m asking: Where are those WMDs? Are the U.S. troops that are there in Iraq today still looking for them?

I’ll answer the question. There aren’t any WMDs. There never were any WMDs. There was never going to be any mushroom clouds over American cities. It was all a lie from the get-go. It was always about regime change — that is, ousting their former partner and ally Saddam Hussein from power and replacing him with another loyal and brutal U.S. puppet dictator. The national-security state just needed a way to make U.S. soldiers feel good about killing innocent people as part of a regime-change operation. Otherwise, the troops might have felt a bit squeamish about engaging in the legalized murder of innocent people.

Of course, the same goes for the American people. They too might have suffered a crisis of conscience over the mass killing of innocent people, especially given that their government had already killed countless Iraqis, including children, with brutal U.S. sanctions throughout the 1990s as an indirect way to get regime change. They needed to be scared to death into supporting the invasion and the resulting U.S. killing/torture spree.

What are we supposed to do today? Believe them when they say that Iraq — I’m sorry, Iran — was now about to acquire WMDs?

Let me tell you what, in my opinion, is really going on here. U.S. national-security state officials and their imperialist-interventionist supporters in the private sector have a bloodlust that needs to be quenched. The invasion and multi-year occupation in Iraq, where U.S. forces killed, injured, maimed, and tortured hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis ended in 2011. It was in August 2021 that Taliban forces booted U.S. forces out of their country after a 20-year U.S. killing spree. Four years is a long time to go without killing people. Furnishing brand new state-of-the art weapons and bombs to the Israeli government to kill multitudes of people in Gaza, and also now in Iran, is just not sufficiently satisfying. Using NATO to provoke a war that kills and injures hundreds of thousands of foreign soldiers also just doesn’t cut it. To satisfy the bloodlust, it’s necessary for the U.S. government to participate directly, not indirectly, in killing. Killing multitudes of Iranians in a brand new foreign war could certainly help quench the thirst for more death and destruction.

Original article: fff.org