“They Have Earned The Right Not To Be Listened To”: All They’re Doing Is Embarrassing Themselves And Annoying The Rest Of Us
In mid-January 2002, the Weekly Standard published a piece from Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol on the need for a U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. The headline read, “What to do about Iraq.”
Yesterday, the exact same publication published a piece from the exact same authors with a headline that was almost exactly the same: “What to do in Iraq.”
James Fallows mocked the discredited conservatives, highlighting their consistency “in attitude as well as typography and headline writing and page layout,” before lowering the boom.
Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life – writers, politicians, academics – who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense.
None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to.
And yet, listening to them has become harder than avoiding them. As Rachel noted on the show last night, the very same people who were “disastrously wrong about what it would mean for the United States to toss a match into the tinderbox of the Middle East by toppling Saddam, all those guys who were so wrong, they either never went away in the first place or they have recently been dug back up over the last few weeks, simply for the purpose of arguing that we ought to invade Iraq again.”
I’ve seen some suggest that those who got U.S. policy in Iraq completely wrong in 2002 and 2003 need not wear a permanent scar. It’s not an entirely unreasonable point – some sensible people fell for a con job. They know better now and want to contribute to a constructive conversation about U.S. foreign policy more than a decade later. It’s hardly ridiculous to think some of them should have a voice in the discussion.
But that’s not quite what’s happening here.
When we see Kristol, Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Paul Bremer, Ken Pollack and their cohorts all over the print and broadcast media, their chosen task is not to be the target of rotten vegetables. Rather, these men still choose to present themselves as experts whose advice has merit.
It would be challenging in its own right if, say, Paul Wolfowitz showed up on a Sunday show to declare, “Look, my buddies and I may have flubbed U.S. policy in Iraq the last time around, but we’re totally right this time.” But neither he nor his pals are saying anything of the kind – the usual suspects still think they were right in 2002 and 2003, and can’t imagine why their words of wisdom would be ignored now.
Accountability may seem like a quaint, almost antiquated, concept in today’s political discourse, but that’s a shame. When life and death decisions are being made, here’s hoping accountability can still make a comeback, forcing the discredited voices among us towards obscurity.
I’m not arguing that everyone who was wrong about Iraq 11 years ago must remain silent now. I am saying that those who were wrong then but remain convinced of their own self-righteous credibility now, certain that the 2003 invasion was wise and that Iraq’s deterioration should be blamed on that rascally President Obama, all they are doing is embarrassing themselves – and annoying the rest of us.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 17, 2014
“So Wrong, So Often”: Welcome Back To Reality, Neocons
Here’s an amazing fact that most of the Chicken Little rhetoric about the crisis in Iraq fails to take into account: The city of Mosul, population 1.5 million, fell to ISIS insurgents because two divisions of Iraq’s army (30,000 soldiers) shed their uniforms, abandoned their weapons, and fled from 800 Sunni religious extremists in pickup trucks.
You read that right: 800 holy warriors routed 30,000 Iraqi soldiers. Large parts of Iraq’s army clearly have no trust in their officers or loyalty to the Maliki government, which is seen by most people as sectarian organized crime.
Writing in the Washington Post, Marc Lynch explains: “Maliki lost Sunni Iraq through his sectarian and authoritarian policies. His repeated refusal over long years to strike an urgently needed political accord with the Sunni minority, his construction of corrupt, ineffective and sectarian state institutions, and his heavy-handed military repression…are the key factors in the long-developing disintegration of Iraq.”
In short, it’s a political and religious breakdown more than a military failure, and one that no amount of U.S. bombs or military advisors can fix.
Been there, done that. Screwed it up so badly that only the most perfervid TV studio commandos want to go back. So naturally, those were the only guests the TV networks booked on the political talk shows: a parade of sad-sack Bush administration retreads and embittered GOP presidential candidates who blamed it all on President Obama.
The whole gang was there: Mitt Romney, Senator John McCain, even neoconservative carnival barker Paul Wolfowitz, who explained that everything would have been just dandy if we’d committed to stay in Iraq as we’d stayed in South Korea for another 60 years.
“We had it won. Thanks to the surge and thanks to Gen. David Petraeus, we had it won,” explained perennial sorehead McCain. “The fact is we had the conflict won, and we had a stable government…but the president wanted out and now we are paying a very heavy price.”
The Very Angry Senator has been so wrong so often about Iraq, that putting him on national TV is like asking Bernie Madoff to comment upon economic policy. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes compiled a series of devastating video clips — including McCain’s confident assertion that Iraqis would see American soldiers as “liberators,” that the war would pay for itself, and that “there is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along.”
However, the TV networks are in the business of marketing political melodrama. They require conflict to push the narrative, the more bellicose and simple-minded the better. They don’t put McCain on despite his dismal track record, but because of it. Almost regardless of the question, you get the same answer: It’s all Obama’s fault, and Bombs Away!
By now, however, the TV commandos have lost audience share. Polls show that 16 percent of Americans would support sending troops back into Iraq, while 74 percent are opposed. As reliable a conservative as Thomas Sowell writes that he’s had it with “glib and heady talk of ‘national greatness’ interventionists who were prepared to put other people’s lives on the line from the safety of their editorial offices.”
The Washington Post’s George Will thinks GOP presidential aspirants should be asked whether “given the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and given that we now know how little we know about ‘nation-building’ and about the promotion of democracy…if you could rewind history to March 2003, would you favor invading Iraq?”
Welcome back to the real world, fellows. There never was anything remotely conservative about Wolfowitz and company’s “Project for a New American Century” to begin with, which this column long ago described as “a grandiose scheme for world domination that would have credited a James Bond villain or V.I. Lenin.”
Anyway, here’s the second big thing the Chicken Little rhetoric gets wrong: A sectarian civil war between Sunni jihadists and Shiite militias in Iraq may be an appalling human tragedy. But it’s not necessarily a grave threat to U.S. security. As Steven Simon of the Middle East Institute explains in the New York Times, a few thousand lightly-armed Sunni militants are highly unlikely to overrun Baghdad—a largely Shiite city of 7 million. And even if they did, they’d end up wishing they hadn’t.
The more brutally Sunni militants act in the conquered provinces, the fiercer the resistance they’ll encounter—almost regardless of the Malaki regime. Lest we forget — and most Americans never knew — Iraq and Iran fought a terrible bloody war between 1980 and 1988, leaving more than a million dead but nothing changed, strategically speaking. Back then, the neocons all supported Saddam Hussein.
For President Obama, the important thing is to resist being stampeded into doing something stupid, and to make damn sure the American people know why.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 18, 2014
“Where Is The Accountability On Iraq?”: At Best A Fool’s Errand, At Worst A Criminal Act
Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)? How many times does the Beltway hawk caucus get to be wrong before we recognize that maybe, just maybe, its members don’t know what they’re talking about?
Certainly Politico could have found someone with more credibility than Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration and one of the architects of the Iraq war, to comment on how the White House might react to the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Iraq today. Certainly New York Times columnist David Brooks knows what folly it is to equate President Obama’s 2011 troop removal with Bush’s 2003 invasion, as he did during a discussion with me last Friday on NPR?
Just a reminder of what that 2003 invasion led to: Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes authoritatively priced Bush’s war at more than $3 trillion. About 320,000 U.S. veterans suffer from brain injury as a result of their service. Between 500,000 and 655,000 Iraqis died, as well as more than 4,000 U.S. military members.
Yet as Brooks’s words reveal, the prevailing mindset in today’s media is to treat the 2003 invasion as if its prosecution were an act of God — like Hurricane Katrina, an inevitability that could not have been avoided. Seen this way, policymakers can ignore the idiocy of the decision to invade in the first place and can instead direct all of their critical attention to how to deal with the aftermath. It’s almost as though the mainstream media have demoted themselves from a corps of physicians, eager and able to diagnose, prognosticate and prescribe, to one of EMTs, charged instead with triaging, cleaning and cauterizing a catastrophe without investigating its underlying cause.
Since so many liberal hawks reached the same conclusion as did Bush et al., this notion of the 2003 invasion’s inevitability can falsely seem to have some credence (which is, perhaps why, as Frank Rich points out in New York magazine, so many erstwhile hawks, especially so-called liberal ones, feel no need to acknowledge their erroneous judgments of a decade ago).
But if so many were wrong about Iraq in 2003, why are they still being invited (and trotting themselves out) on Sunday morning talk shows and op-ed pages as authorities on U.S.-Iraq policy? Where is the accountability for the politicians’ and pundits’ warmongering of 11 years ago? James Fallows — who was “right” on Iraq in a 2002 Atlantic cover story — tweeted Friday, “Working hypothesis: no one who stumped for original Iraq invasion gets to give ‘advice’ about disaster now. Or should get listened to.” Amen.
In the current cacophony of Washington, we must remember that there is no equivalence to be drawn between Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq and Obama’s 2011 decision to withdraw U.S. troops. Bush’s invasion, after all, was not just a mistake. At best a fool’s errand, at worst a criminal act, this great blunder helped set the stage for Iraq’s chaos today. The increased sectarian violence stems not from the 2011 withdrawal; rather, it is the fruit of the 2003 invasion, subsequent occupation and much-vaunted “surge” of 2007–08.
McCain and Graham insist that airstrikes are the only way forward in today’s Iraq. But what we need now are not armchair warriors calling for military strikes or sending weapons. (As an aside, I will say that, should members of the neoconservative movement feel so motivated, we would wholeheartedly respect their decision to enlist in the Iraqi army.) Obama, himself “right” on Iraq during the war’s run-up, is also right today to resist calls for direct U.S. military action — including airstrikes — in Iraq. The U.S. misadventure in Iraq ended in 2011; we do not need another. Experience and history have (clearly) taught us that there is no military solution in Iraq. Only a political reconciliation can quell the unrest, and this requires more than bellicose calls for violence from 5,000 miles away. To find a solution, we must commit to regional and international diplomacy.
We learned in 2003 that when we move in with guns blazing, we tend to spark a lot more fires than we extinguish. In 2014, we cannot afford to learn this same lesson. Regardless of how many are too blind (or proud or foolish) to realize it, we need to write a new scenario for 2014, so that 11 years from now, we can look back and ponder how, this time, we did things right.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 17, 2014
“Their Own Genre Of Stupidity”: On Iraq, Let’s Ignore Those Who Got It All Wrong
At noon today, President Obama issued his first statement on the deteriorating situation on Iraq. “This is not solely or even primarily a military challenge,” he said. “The United States will do our part, but understand that ultimately it’s up to the Iraqis as a sovereign nation to solve their problems.”
Obama left the door open to unspecified “actions,” but repeated that the Iraqis themselves had to seize the opportunity that the years of American effort gave them.
This will no doubt be greeted by the President’s opponents with something akin to apoplexy. They will be arguing that in fact the problem does have a military solution, that the U.S. can solve it, and that whatever is happening, everything would be better if we applied more force.
We have now reached the rather ironic situation in Iraq where we find ourselves allied with Iran in an effort to save the corrupt and thuggish government of Nouri al-Maliki, while the army we spent eight years training falls apart. I’m not going to pretend to have unique insight into Iraqi politics (I’d suggest reading Marc Lynch, for starters, as a way of getting up to speed on what has led to this point).
But there are few people who understand Iraq less than the Republican politicians and pundits who are being sought out for their comments on the current situation.
As you watch the debate on this issue, you should remind yourself that the most prominent voices being heard are the very ones who brought us the Iraq War in the first place, who promised that everything was simple and the only question was whether we’d be “strong” and “decisive” enough — the same thing they’re saying today. They’re the ones who swore that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, that he had a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that the war would be quick, easy and cheap, that since Iraq was a largely secular country we wouldn’t have to worry about sectarian conflict, and that democracy would spread throughout the region in short order, bringing peace and prosperity along with it.
We can start with the man on every TV producer and print reporter’s speed dial, John McCain. McCain does provide something important to journalists: whatever the issue of the moment is, he can be counted on to offer angry, bitter criticism of the Obama administration, giving the “balance” every story needs. The fact that he has never demonstrated the slightest bit of understanding of Iraq is no bar at all to being the most quoted person on the topic.
For context, here’s a nice roundup of some of the things McCain said when he was pushing to invade Iraq in the first place. When asked if Iraqis were going to greet us as liberators, he answered, “Absolutely.” He said, “Post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is going to be paid for by the Iraqis” with their oil wealth (the war ended up costing the American taxpayer upwards of $2 trillion). And my favorite: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along.”
The conflict between Sunnis and Shiites is the central dynamic of the Iraq conflict, of course. Yet today, the media once again seek out John McCain’s wisdom and insight on Iraq, which is kind of like saying, “Jeez, it looks like we might be lost — we really need to ask Mr. Magoo for directions.”
Of late, he has a habit of walking out in the middle of briefings where he might actually learn what’s going on so he can head to the cameras and express his dudgeon. His current genius idea is for the administration to rehire David Petraeus and send him to Iraq, where he’ll…do something or other. He showed his deep knowledge yesterday by saying “Al Qaeda is now the richest terrorist organization in history,” apparently unaware that ISIS, the group sweeping through Iraq, is not in fact the same thing as Al Qaeda.
And the rest of the neocon gang is getting back together. Here’s Lindsey Graham advocating for American airstrikes — and I promise you that if the administration does in fact launch them, Graham will say they weren’t “strong” enough. Here’s Max Boot saying that what we need is just short of another invasion of Iraq: “U.S. military advisers, intelligence personnel, Predators, and Special Operations Forces, along with enhanced military aid, in return for political reforms designed to bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together.” Former Bush administration official and torture advocate Marc Thiessen is appalled that Barack Obama squandered George W. Bush’s glorious Iraq victory.
And Bill Kristol, who may have done more than any single person outside the Bush administration to make the war a reality, and whose predictions and assessments about the war were so spectacularly wrong they constituted their own genre of stupidity? He’ll be on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, so he can enlighten us about what’s really going on.
We’re facing yet another awful and complex situation in the Middle East where we have a limited set of options, and none of them are good. But whenever you hear anyone say that the answer is simple and that being “strong” is the key — as one conservative after another will no doubt be saying in the coming days — don’t forget what happened the last time the country listened to them.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 13, 2014
“Are Our Memories Really So Short?”: It’s Impossible To Reconcile Members Of The Bush/Cheney Team Pretending To Have Credibility
Politico published a piece over the weekend about President Obama’s challenges in Iraq, which was otherwise unremarkable except for a quote about midway through the article.
“This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people [and] to the American national interest,” said Doug Feith, a top Pentagon official during the George W. Bush administration.
“They were pretty blase,” Feith said of the Obama team. “The president didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.”
The piece added that Feith would, true to form, like to see the White House deploying a “residual force” to Iraq.
That Feith disagrees with the Obama administration hardly comes as a surprise, but what was striking about all of this is the context of his criticisms: Politico presents Feith’s condemnations as if they have value. Indeed, Feith is presented to readers as a credible voice whose assessments of U.S. policy in Iraq have merit.
The article never mentions, even in passing, that Feith was a national laughingstock during his tenure in the Bush/Cheney administration, getting practically everything about U.S. policy in Iraq backwards. General Tommy Franks, the former Commander of the U.S. Central Command, once famously referred to Feith as “the dumbest f***ing guy on the planet.”
And yet, there Feith is in Politico, taking shots at Obama, without so much as a hint that news consumers may – just may – want to take his perspective with a healthy dose of skepticism, given his humiliating track record.
Of course, my point is not to pick on Politico alone. It’s not the only major news organization that’s stumbled into familiar mistakes. Take the major Sunday shows, for example.
Bill Kristol, for example, was on “This Week” yesterday, sharing his criticisms of Obama’s handling of Iraq – and no one laughed in his face. On “Meet the Press,” viewers saw Paul Wolfowitz. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made not one, but two Sunday show appearances, popping up on “Face the Nation” and “State of the Union.”
When most media professionals reflect on the period preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there’s a general consensus that it was not American journalism’s finest hour. News organizations needed to be skeptical, but weren’t. Reporters needed to push back against dubious sources, but didn’t. Nearly everyone in the business realized that we’d all have to be better next time.
Over the weekend, then, it was hard not to wonder: are our memories really so short?
More broadly, it’s nearly impossible to reconcile members of the Bush/Cheney team pretending to have credibility. Feith is an easy target, but he’s hardly the only one: Dick Cheney is offering guidance to congressional Republicans on, of all things, foreign policy; Donald Rumsfeld still shows in face in public and is sought after in GOP circles; and Condoleezza Rice presents herself as a successful former official.
The political world never fully came to terms with the scope and the breadth of the Bush/Cheney failures. In more ways than one, we’re still dealing with the consequences.
Update: Regina Schrambling reminds me that Paul Bremer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s another piece of a twisted mosaic.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 16, 2014
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