Day 4 (20 day story) year 2003
Year 2003 – Art Title: “21 Days to Baghdad”
DOWNLOAD ART 2003 “21 Days to Baghdad”
Open Source/Copy Left: Actual size: 44” X 62”
Website: AmericanHistory2000-2012.com
Read the story at: http://gayelub.com/posts/
or AmericanHistory2000-2012.com – UPDATES and NEWS
Follow Events: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/21stCenturyHistory
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisunitesus/
Twitter: @GayeLub
#whatdowehaveincommon #thisunitesus #21stcenturyamericanhistory #unumecho #RNC #DNC #activist #politics
01/15/2003 – White House announces huge deficits expected to top $200 billion in 2003 (due to the Bush Tax Cuts and the War in Afghanistan)
01/28/2003 – In his State of the Union address Bush said erroneously: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” and announces he is ready to attack Iraq even without a UN mandate.
02/05/2003 – US Secretary of State Colin Powell tells the United Nations about the threat of Iraqi weapons. He held up a vial of white powder equivalent to a teaspoon of anthrax and said that a lesser amount had closed down the United States Senate in 2001. Powell noted that according to UN Inspectors Iraq “could have produced 25,000 liters” of Anthrax”. While the UN inspectors had not accounted for any of this deadly material.
No Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) – Anthrax Coincidence
Much searching in Iraq found no WMD and the 2001 Anthrax scare was a domestic issue that had nothing to do with 9/11 or being under terrorist attack. Critical information was falsified and exaggerated, with the complicity of Mainstream Media, to engage our support for war in the Middle East.
The person the FBI named in 2006 as a possible suspect for the anthrax letters had no link to Iraq. He was Bruce Ivins, a scientist working at the Army’s biodefence labs at Fort Detrick, MD. Ivins denied any involvement and he committed a suspicious suicide in 2008. No formal charges were ever filed against him and no direct evidence of his involvement has been uncovered.
02/15/2003: Largest protest day in human history.
Massive peace demonstrations take place in the US and around the world, protesting the potential invasion of Iraq. They were ignored by our elected officials and by our mainstream media.
What do we have in common?
Fear! I wanted to protest but I was afraid.
02/18/2003: 100,000 U.S. troops were assembled in Kuwait in preparation for the invasion of Iraq.
03/20-21/2003: U.S. invades Iraq “21 days to Baghdad”
The world watched as U.S. Forces and their allies attack Baghdad.
05/11/2003: Weeks after the 21 days of Baghdad, Generals in charge of operations were removed from Iraq. On May 11, 2003 Paul Bremer took charge as the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
His first two orders destabilized the remaining Iraqi government and dismantled the Iraqi military putting 400,000 Iraqi soldiers out of a job. Soldiers were told to lay down their weapons and go home. Tune into a local radio station and wait further instructions. The resulting massive unemployment fueled the insurgency.
During his 13 months in Iraq, Paul Bremer established 100 new orders for governing the Iraqi people, including:
Order #12: Trade Liberalization Policy: Suspends all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq. This led to an immediate and dramatic inflow of cheap consumer products, which essentially wiped out all local providers of the same products.
Order #40: BANK LAW: Turned the banking sector from a state-run to a market-driven system overnight by allowing foreign banks to enter the Iraqi market and to purchase up to 50 percent of Iraqi banks.
Order #81: PLANT VARIETY LAW: Prohibits Iraqi farmers from using their own seeds and forcing them to buy seeds from multinational seed corporations from the US and Europe.
07/09/2003 – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announces the price of the Iraq war is about 3.9 billion a month. Nearly double the 04/2003 estimates.
We were told that Iraq was building and concealing Weapons of Mass Destruction. This justified the war but there were no WMD. Oops!
2003 Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan lowers Federal Reserve’s key interest rate to 1%. New and refinanced Home Mortgages are BOOMING as Americans take advantage of the lowest interest rates since 1958.
2003 – Census Bureau reported the number of Americans living in poverty had increased by 1.3 million in 2003 and the ranks of those without health insurance had increased by 1.4 million, the third straight annual increase in both categories.
2003 – Depression: 10 Million Americans suffer from Major Depressive Disorder.