5 year occupation of Iraq

Really , it's all because of my father's illness. Otherwise it would not have been so obvious to me. Because I live abroad , I would have missed the media blitz the Bush administration created to convince the people that they needed to "go to war".

Only because of my return to the US in the fall of 2002 did I become aware that something was terribly wrong.
We vacationed that summer with my family at my sister's place on the Jersey shore , and during our 3 week stay we heard virtually nothing , or very little about the Iraqi threat. There were those silly color coded threat level reports , and an overstated terrorist arrest here and there , but the media at that time was in the grip of the Enron frenzy , and the measures needed be taken to ensure "that it would never happen again."

It was a great summer vacation , with real tropical weather while we were at the shore , really a lovely time.
My father fell ill however 6 weeks later , and I was forced to make an urgent trip back from my home in Amsterdam to visit him in the hospital.

His final heart attack was further complicated by a growing lung cancer , and I was informed by the "social worker"?? that he was an ideal candidate for the hospice program.

She estimated that "without his medication" he would live 2 to 6 months.
After 2 weeks I needed to return home to Amsterdam , only to learn one day later that "dad" had passed away.
During my 3rd visit , in the middle of October for his funeral , I found that the country was being assaulted with a new media frenzy. Something had happened between July and October that transformed the Iraqi nation into the greatest threat of world peace since the 3rd Reich. It seemed very peculiar to my wife and myself that such a dramatic change could have taken place in 6 weeks.

The TV news was full of uniformed officers telling how the US would take apart the Iraqi regime. We were on the path to war , and people seemed fired up about it , finally there was a way to vent their pent up 9/11 fury.

I was not aware at that time that the Bush administration was full of the good folks from the PNAC , and the sales campaign had begun to sell the unnecessary invasion of Iraq.

The rest is history of course , but it had not been for my unfortunate father's illness , I would never have been aware of the extent some would go to manipulate a people into an unnecessary war.