Former US defense secretary: Hold Pentagon accountable for Iraq, Afghanistan disasters

Former acting Pentagon chief Christopher C. Miller said the United States must hold senior American military leadership accountable for the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Miller who served as acting US secretary of defense from November 9, 2020, to January 20, 2021 wrote in “Soldier Secretary,” a memoir released this week, that the US military-industrial complex has now become a “hydra-headed monster” with “virtually no brakes on the American war machine.”

“The more I thought, the more I was horrified,” Miller wrote, The Hill reported on Thursday. “We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis, and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a goddamned lie.”

The book “Soldier Secretary” offers an insight into the life of an American soldier who rose to the top of the Pentagon as he grew increasingly indignant about the US military-industrial complex’s hunger for death and destruction abroad.  

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Miller said in an interview with The Hill that there is an urgent need for accountability in the upper ranks of the Pentagon.

“That really bothers me. Our young soldiers see the hypocrisy in that … if they end up being late for work, they get in a lot of trouble. Or let’s say they mess up a piece of paperwork for a supply request, there’s a possibility they can be kicked out of the service,” he said.

“And then there’s the people who lose wars and end up advancing on to other positions of power and wealth,” Miller adds. “And that’s what really bugs me.”

“The recognition that so many sacrifices were ultimately made in the service of a lie, as in Iraq, or to further a delusion, as in the neoconservatives’ utopian fantasy of a democratic Middle East,” writes Miller, who became President Donald Trump’s acting defense secretary.

“It still makes my blood boil, and it probably will until the day I die,” he adds.

American journalist Don DeBar said the story of Miller is “that he was naive and then followed orders and then reached his limit of cognitive dissonance.”

“He came back when Trump appeared to offer a challenge to the paradigm that he walked away from. He has a level perspective towards the absurdity of the January 6th narrative, although he retains some of his original, almost religious fixation on US military power,” he told Press TV on Thursday.

 In his infamous February 5, 2003 speech at the UN Security Council, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell lied to the world about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to prepare the ground for the invasion of the country.

Powell presented false American intelligence to the United Nations that then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.  The presentation led to the Iraq War and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.

In March 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding WMDs; but no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.

More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion, and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

The US war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan, despite the fact that no Afghan was involved in the attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in the US war on the country.

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But as the US forces left Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban stormed into Kabul, weakened by continued foreign occupation.

“In my mind, the death of each and every person killed by any military associated with the US since 2001 inside Afghanistan should be reported as a wrongful death,” DeBar said.

“The US invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. The US occupation of Afghanistan was illegal. Each and every death of every Afghan citizen, military or civilian, and anyone else who died as a consequence of the US invasion and occupation, whether directly by US forces or by the forces of their allies, was an illegal killing (or, more simply, a murder),” he commented to Press TV.

US officials assert that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, but many experts and independent researchers have raised questions about the official account.

They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.

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