“de-Baathification Program”: Bush/Cheney Created Conditions That Led Directly To ISIL
It takes a lot of gall for people like Dick Cheney to utter even one critical word about President Obama’s strategy to eliminate the threat of ISIL in the Middle East.
In fact, it was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL).
Former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker said as much on this week’s edition of “Meet the Press.” He noted that after the first President Bush had ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. had refrained from marching on Baghdad precisely to avoid kicking over the sectarian hornet’s nest that was subsequently unleashed by the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in 2003.
But it wasn’t just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni’s and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.
Bush’s “de-Baathification program” eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn’t change it. He didn’t make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today’s ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.
General Petraeus took steps to reverse these policies with his “Sunni Awakening” programs that engaged the Sunni tribes against what was then known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the progress he made ultimately collapsed because the Bush/Cheney regime helped install Nouri Al-Maliki as Prime Minister who systematically disenfranchised Sunnis throughout Iraq.
And that’s not all. The War in Iraq — which had nothing whatsoever to do with “terrorism” when it was launched — created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.
And after all, contrary to Dick Cheney’s absurd assertion that U.S. forces would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators,” no one likes a foreign nation to occupy their country.
The War did more than any propagandist could possibly do to radicalize vulnerable young people. And by setting off wave after wave of sectarian slaughter it created blood feuds that will never be forgiven.
The Iraq War — and the Sunni power vacuum caused first by U.S. policies and then Al Maliki — created the perfect conditions that allowed a vicious band of extremists to take huge swaths of territory.
And now many of the same people who caused this foreign policy disaster have the audacity to criticize President Obama’s measured efforts to clean up the mess they created. And they do so often without ever saying what they themselves would do to solve the horrific problems that they created.
It reminds you of a bunch of arsonists standing at the scene of a fire criticizing the techniques used by the firefighters who are trying to extinguish the blaze they themselves have set.
Oh, they say: “If you had just left a residual force after the withdrawal of U.S. troops everything would be hunky dory.”
Do they really think that several thousand U.S. troops would have solved Iraq’s problems when hundreds of thousands failed to do so?
And of course they conveniently forget to mention that neither the Iraqi’s nor the U.S. voters wanted a “residual” force to remain in Iraq. And they forget that the Iraqi government would not agree to conditions that would allow a “residual” force to be stationed in Iraq.
Or perhaps they wish U.S. troops were now going door to door in Iraq cities rooting out adherents to ISIL? Only a few neo-con die-hards want more U.S. troops on the ground in the Middle East.
Or then there is the refrain that President Obama should have helped “arm” the moderate Syrian opposition earlier. Let’s remember that had he acted at an earlier point it is entirely likely that many of those arms would now be in ISIL hands — and we must be extremely careful even now to avoid precisely that problem in the days ahead.
The president’s response to ISIL is supported by almost two-thirds of Americans because it seems to be the only reasonable response where the cure is not worse than the disease.
It recognizes that the problem posed by ISIL must first and foremost be dealt with by other Sunni’s in the region. It is aimed at building an international coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy the ability of this vicious organization to threaten people in the Middle East or elsewhere. And it relies on American airpower to bolster the abilities of other Sunni forces to accomplish this goal.
But most Americans also realize this will not be easy — and they’re right. It won’t be easy to clean up the horrific mess created by the Bush/Cheney policies in the Middle East.
Frankly, I don’t think that any of the architects of the Iraq War should ever be invited on TV to say one word about foreign policy — and especially the Middle East. They have zero credibility to comment. They have been wrong over and over again and created the conditions that spawned the problems we face today.
But if they are invited to act as “talking heads,” interviewers must at least have the common decency to point out their failed track record — and to demand that they do more than criticize the president’s efforts to clean up their mistakes. They must also be required to tell us exactly what they would do to fix it.
And if any of them actually do propose a course of action, you can pretty much be sure that based on their past track records, that course of action is wrong.
By: Robert Creamer, Partner, Democracy Partners; The Huffington Post Blog, September 15, 2014
“Sniveling Little Children”: Boehner Laments ‘Knuckleheads’ Within House GOP
Once in a while, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sounds like a man who isn’t entirely fond of his ostensible followers.
Speaker John Boehner said that he’s got a “few knuckleheads” to deal with, and that’s largely why the Republican majority in the House looks good on paper but doesn’t always pan out with votes.
“On any given day, 16 of my members decide they’re going to go this way, and all of a sudden, I have nothing,” he said, describing the reality of his “paper majority” in the House, The Hill reported. “You might notice I have a few knuckleheads in my conference.”
According to the report in the conservative Washington Times, Boehner went on say, “Dealing with Democrats is one thing. Dealing with the knuckleheads is another.”
Whether he finds one easier to deal with than the other was unclear.
These comments come just five months after the Ohio Republican publicly mocked his own members over their reluctance to work on immigration reform.
“Here’s the attitude: ‘Oh, don’t make me do this. Oh, this is too hard,” Boehner said, in a tone deriding House Republicans as if they were sniveling children. He added, “We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems, and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to.”
Remember, this was the Republican Speaker referring to Republican House members. Now Boehner is also willing to concede an unknown number of his members are “knuckleheads,” too.
The candor is certainly welcome, though the larger point is how understandable the Speaker’s dissatisfaction is.
As we were reminded in late July, when House Republicans killed Boehner’s border bill, the Speaker has surprisingly limited influence over what his members actually support.
A Democratic source on Capitol Hill recently sent around a brutal collection of bills Boehner asked his members to support, only to see his own House GOP conference reject his appeals: a grand bargain, a debt-ceiling bill in 2011, a payroll tax extension, a transportation bill, a farm bill, one fiscal-cliff bill, another fiscal-cliff bill, another farm bill, and then yesterday. I think my source might have even missed a couple, including the collapse of Boehner’s debt-ceiling bill in February 2014.
What’s more, think about how regularly Boehner is pushed around. He didn’t want to initiate a debt-ceiling crisis, but his members didn’t give him much of a choice. The Speaker didn’t want to hold several dozen ACA repeal votes, but his members called the shots on this, too.
Four years after taking hold of the Speaker’s gavel, Boehner has no legislative accomplishments and has developed a reputation as the weakest Speaker in modern times.
The surprise isn’t that Boehner calls his members “knuckleheads”; the surprise is that he doesn’t use stronger language in public.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 17, 2014
“Tax Cuts Don’t Increase Revenue”: This Is What Happens When Republicans Actually Enact Their Radical Agenda
A persistent elite Washington trope, embodied by folks like Ron Fournier, says that bipartisanship is the key missing ingredient in our system of government. The two parties just need to stop their partisan bickering and join hands to hammer out serious, substantive compromises (read: slash social insurance).
It’s certainly the case that because of U.S. constitutional design, compromise is necessary during times of divided government — and the ones who won’t do it are ultraconservative Republicans. But there’s another model of governance that gets short shrift among the lovers of bipartisanship: letting election winners implement their agenda. By providing clear lines of accountability and making clear who is responsible for which policy, allowing an election winner to govern makes democracy work.
We see this today in Kansas of all places, where Gov. Sam Brownback is in an unexpectedly tight re-election race:
Although every statewide elected official in Kansas is a Republican and President Obama lost the state by more than 20 points in the last election, Mr. Brownback’s proudly conservative policies have turned out to be so divisive and his tax cuts have generated such a drop in state revenue that they have caused even many Republicans to revolt. Projections put state budget shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, raising questions of whether the state can adequately fund education in particular. [The New York Times]
Brownback’s tax cuts were passed back in 2012 with the help of Arthur Laffer, the conservative policy hand who has made his career insisting in the teeth of contrary evidence that tax cuts increase revenue. Multiple experts warned that the Brownback-Laffer plan would actually crater the state revenue collection, but Brownback ignored them and did what he wanted. The results are in, and it turns out when you cut taxes, you decrease revenue:
Kansas has a problem. In April and May, the state planned to collect $651 million from personal income tax. But instead, it received only $369 million. [The New York Times]
Naturally, the cuts have required more cuts to critical government services, and most of the tax benefits have been vacuumed up by the rich. Worse still, the promised job-creating effects have also failed to appear. On the contrary, Kansas has actually been performing worse than its neighbors on the jobs front.
In short, movement conservatism produces garbage economic policy. But the beauty is, now that fact is obvious to almost everyone in Kansas, including a bunch of Republicans. To his credit, Brownback actually believed in his ideas and put them in place. He is now paying the price for taking that risk.
Contrast that to the elite D.C. idea of bipartisanship, in which the ancient grandees from both parties get together, and through the magic of high-minded civil discussion, iron out a compromise to cut Social Security and Medicare, preferably by enough to be called a “Grand Bargain.” This has the not-coincidental effect of making it impossible for most people to figure out who is responsible for what — and very easy for either side to spin negative consequences as the other side’s fault.
Now, Brownback may well pull out a victory in the end. But Kansas is a very conservative state, and he ought to be cruising to a huge reelection. Future Republicans may well try to jam through similar tax policies copy-pasted from a conservative think tank’s guide to enriching the wealthy, but the colossal failure of the Brownback cuts will surely give them pause.
Government by the permanent D.C. establishment used to at least keep the country on two legs, but with ideologically well-sorted parties, one of them increasingly extreme, it’s come perilously close to breaking down multiple times. When considering reforms to the structure of government, as I believe will be necessary sometime in the future, we should keep in mind stories like this one. Democracy works best when the voters have meaningful and comprehensible choices.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, September 17, 2014
“Tell The Misses Not To Wait Up”: Florida Congressman Finds New Ways To Alienate Women
This election season, there are really only a handful of House Republican incumbents who are in real trouble. Freshman Rep. Steve Southerland (R), who narrowly won in his North Florida district in 2012, is one of them.
In a district in which registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, it seems Southerland would be smart to play it safe and try to avoid alienating key constituencies. And yet, the GOP congressman seems to have a knack for pushing women voters away.
For example, Southerland was recently caught misleading voters about his vote on the Violence Against Women Act. Making matters worse, voters recently learned the conservative lawmaker hosted a men-only fundraising event a few months ago. The invitation, obtained by BuzzFeed, encouraged attendees to “tell the misses not to wait up” because “the after dinner whiskey and cigars will be smooth & the issues to discuss are many.”
Southerland’s opponent, school administrator Gwen Graham (D), criticized the fundraiser, prompting the congressman to make matters just a little worse.
Asked to respond to the Democrats’ criticism that he’s anti-women, Southerland laughed and said: “I live with five women. That’s all I’m saying. I live with five women. Listen: Has Gwen Graham ever been to a lingerie shower? Ask her. And how many men were there?”
He didn’t appear to be kidding. In Southerland’s mind, a sitting congressman hosting a policy discussion with donors is comparable to women hosting a “lingerie shower.”
Just as an aside, I’ll confess to having the exact same reaction to this as the Miami Herald’s Marc Caputo: “What’s a ‘lingerie shower?’ Most people know what baby showers are. And a few are probably familiar with lingerie shows. To combine the two is kinda creepy.” When a reader noted that “lingerie showers” are usually held for brides to be, Caputo added, “And that makes Southerland’s comment even less helpful to his cause.”
MSNBC’s Anna Brand talked to Gwen Graham’s campaign manager about Southerland’s comments.
Graham’s campaign manager Julia Gill Woodward responded to the comparison to msnbc, saying “This isn’t just stuff Steve Southerland says; given his pattern of troubling actions and disturbing comments, it is obviously what Steve Southerland believes. Southerland says these things out of a fundamental disrespect for women.”
“Only if Southerland disrespects women could he hold an official, Men-Only Southerland campaign fundraiser and laugh it off after the fact,” Woodward continued. “Only if Southerland disrespects women could he air TV ads claiming to have voted for The Violence Against Women Act while he actually voted against it in Congress. Only if Southerland disrespects women could he make this insulting ‘lingerie party’ comment about a woman like Gwen Graham.”
The DCCC’s interest in this race was strong before. I have a hunch it just got stronger.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 15, 2014
“A Victim Of The True Intent Of Terror”: How Lindsey Graham Succumbed To The Tactics Of Terror And Embarrassed His Nation
If the objective of terrorism is to create fear in the minds and hearts of those who once walked the earth secure in the belief that their government will protect them from evil, Senator Lindsey Graham must now be presented as Exhibit A in the case to be made that the terrorists have, at least in the matter of Senator Graham, won.
Appearing on Fox in June of this year, Graham made the argument that America’s willingness to take on the ISIL challenge with a military response wld help head off another 9/11 style attack—not an irrational point of view at a time when we were coming to grips with the arrival of this new, well-funded and well-organized enemy.
A short time later, Graham was back on TV raising the ante.
As Simon Maloy points out over at Salon.com, “In August, Graham was invited to Fox News Sunday to talk terrorism, and upped the Islamic State’s fantasy body count to an entire city’s worth. “
Said Graham, “When I look at the map that Gen. Keane described, I think of the United States. I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorists’ ability to operate in Syria and Iraq.”
Somehow, in just a matter of weeks, Graham’s fears had escalated from concern over a 9/11 style attack to an entire American city going up in smoke at the hands of the ISIL forces. A bit much, in my opinion, but at least one could make a somewhat credible argument that terrorists seeking to destroy an American city might have the means to accomplish such an objective.
But that was nothing when compared to what was to come.
This past Sunday, Graham was making another of his seemingly never-ending appearances on Sunday morning TV when he looked at the camera, eyes ablaze in a fashion that brought to mind the frantic visage of Howard Beale, and exposed for all to see the terror that had come to grip his soul—
“This is a war we’re fighting! It is not a counterterrorism operation. This is not Somalia. This is not Yemen. This is a turning point in the war on terror. Our strategy will fail yet again. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”
I can agree with the Senator on his assertion that the battle to be fought in Northern Iraq and Syria is not akin to our experiences in either Somalia or Yemen. Like Graham, I thought the President was off-base when he sought to use our experiences in Yemen and Somalia as a point of comparison when describing what we might expect in the battles to be waged against the Islamic State.
I can also agree that this is, indeed, a war that we are now fighting, despite the huge amount of wasted ink and airtime that has been dedicated to useless discussions over those in the administration willing to use the word ‘war’ versus those who chose, initially, not to do so.
Sadly, I would also have to agree that Graham may be right about one more thing—this may indeed be a turning point in the war against terror, but certainly not the turning point Graham has in mind.
When a United States Senator appears before the world and reveals that he has grown positively unhinged and fully terrified at the prospects of our entire American population being wiped out by an organization infused and infected with a poisonous and murderous ideology, the terrorists have most assuredly succeeded in their efforts to terrorize Senator Lindsey Graham.
It is that fact that I now fear could be the turning point in the war against terror as it is now a United States Senator who seeks to put terror into the hearts of his countrymen where those committed to using that particular weapon of war have largely failed in their efforts.
One can only imagine the satisfaction terrorists around the world must have experienced at that moment when Lindsey Graham displayed how the latest example of a vicious terror campaign had, indeed, succeeded in infecting the mind and heart of someone who sits at the very highest levels of the United States government.
That feeling of inevitable satisfaction on the part of those who wish the world pain and evil comes at the expense of my own profound embarrassment that one of our nation’s leaders—and I could not care less which party that leader represents— would get in front of a camera and expose himself as a victim of the true intent of terror.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 16, 2014
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