The Empire 212

'Tomgram: Nick Turse on Iraq as a weapons lab

For the neocons of this administration, as a friend said to me recently, Iraq was to be a laboratory that would reveal the face of imperial America. It was there that we would finally take up our rightful role as the new Rome. Fierce as Saddam Hussein's regime was to its own people, by 2003 it was a relative pushover for the greatest military power on this or any other imaginable planet. After the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I, the endless bombings in the no-fly zones, and over a decade of harsh sanctions, Iraq's military was a shadow of its former self by the time the U.S. invaded.
The neocons and their allies had long dreamed of and planned for a "cakewalk" through Iraq that would establish in a new way American domination in the region and offer a calling card to the world. Iraq was to be the demonstration model, the prototype, for the Bush Doctrine as laid out in the National Security Strategy of 2002, which announced to the planet that we were an alliance of one, a power of a sort previously unknown in history that needed to follow no one's rules. Iraq would be where they would test out their version of "democracy" (our men in office) and "privatization" (our corporations in the saddle). And the rest of the Middle East, possibly the rest of the world, would fall in line or suffer the consequences.
While Iraq has since failed them in every regard other than the ease of military victory, it has proved an effective laboratory, a testing grounds, for other matters entirely, as Nick Turse, who writes regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-industrial complex, points out below. Tom
Living weapons labs.
War American-style...'

Lees verder: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1338