“Beware Simple Solutions On Iraq”: Anyone Who Tells You Different Is A Dangerous Fool
With the situation in Iraq growing more grave by the hour, we’re going to be hearing a lot from the gang of cretins who brought us the Iraq War in the first place, who will now be emerging to tell us that it was all a splendid American victory until Barack Obama came along and screwed the whole thing up. (I can’t wait to see what Bill Kristol has to say when he appears on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.) More than anyone else, we’ll be hearing endlessly from President McCain, a man so uninformed he is unaware that ISIS, the group now controlling large parts of the country, is not actually the same thing as Al Qaeda. (“Al Qaeda is now the richest terrorist organization in history,” he said after ISIS raided the bank in Mosul.) But reporters and TV bookers are beating a path to his door, so important is it that the American people hear his wise counsel.
If there’s one thing you should keep in mind as this develops, it’s that anyone who says there’s a simple solution to the problem of Iraq is a dangerous fool. The people who started the war there thought that we didn’t need to understand the complexity of any situation in the Middle East—indeed, that the very desire for understanding was evidence of intolerable weakness. What was necessary was George W. Bush’s “moral clarity,” in which there are good guys and bad guys, and if there’s a bad guy we just have to be strong and go get ‘im.
It was 11 years and one month ago that Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” He went on to say, “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.”
It was true that terrorist networks would be unable to acquire weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime. They would also find themselves unable to acquire a unicorn army from the Iraqi regime, or a cache of magic beans. What they would acquire, however, was a breeding ground for their ideology in a place where no amount of American blood and funds could create the thriving, stable democracy Bush and his allies imagined.
I don’t pretend to know how to solve this problem, or even if we can contribute anything but marginally to its solution. (In his statement about it today, President Obama worked hard to tamp down expectations about what we might accomplish.) But what I do know, and what anyone should be able to see, is that the situation in the Middle East today is inordinately complex. (Consider that our most important ally in helping prop up the Maliki government and defeating ISIS is none other than our friends in Tehran.) There will be lots and lots of people assuring the public that no, it’s actually quite simple: We just need to be strong and decisive. You know—like George W. Bush. And we know where that got us.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 13, 2014
“The $6 Trillion Dollar Mistake”: The Iraq War, An Immoral Waste
A new study says the Iraq War has cost the United States $2 trillion. By the time all the veterans’ bills are paid, it will likely cost us up to $6 trillion.
Let that sink in for a moment. Per National Priorities, here’s an estimate of how much money is allocated for various programs in President Obama’s 2015 federal fiscal year budget:
Education: ~ $70 billion
Health: ~ $58 billion
Unemployment and labor: ~ $58 billion
Energy and Environment: ~ $35 billion
International Affairs: ~ $35 billion
Science: ~ $35 billion
Transportation: ~ $23 billion
Food and Agriculture: ~$11 billion
Think about what we could have done with $6 trillion. With a “t”. As in, one thousand billions.
Almost eight years ago David Leonhardt wrote about what $1.2 trillion could have bought, which was the estimated cost of the Iraq War at the time:
For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.
Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.
Next time a politician or pundit tells you that we don’t have the money to pay for cancer research or climate change abatement or housing for the homeless or extended unemployment benefits, always remember that most of these Very Serious People gladly cheered on and still refuse to apologize for a $6 trillion pointless blunder.
And that doesn’t even get into the lives stupidly thrown into the fire on both sides, when that money could have been used saving lives instead. What an immoral waste.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 1, 2014
“The Wars Not Fought”: The Doors Into Hell Are Many, The Exits However Are Fewer
We owe Mother Jones, the magazine, a public service nod for a graphic tour last year of all the countries that John McCain has wanted to attack. Spanning the globe, the fist-first senator has called for violent regime change in more than half a dozen nations, ranging from all-out ground invasions to airstrikes to arming sides in endless sectarian conflicts.
The map of McCain’s wars is worth considering as a what-if had the would-be vice president Sarah Palin and her running mate in 2008 prevailed. McCain continues to play quick-draw commander in chief to this day. He said he’d send troops into Nigeria “in a New York minute,” to rescue the girls kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, even without permission of the sovereign country. And just after President Obama’s speech Wednesday at West Point, McCain lamented that America’s young men and women were not still in the Iraqi city of Falluja.
Yes, Falluja — where tribal militias loyal to one warped religious tenet or another continue to slaughter each other with abandon. It’s a hard truth for a country as prideful as the United States to accept, but most Americans have now concluded that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake. Obama, at least, has tried to learn something from it.
Al Qaeda was never in Falluja before the American invasion. They have a stronghold in Falluja now, for which McCain blames the withdrawal of United States troops. Think about that: it’s not our fault because we opened the doors to the factions of hell; it’s our fault because we withdrew from hell.
As Obama tries to pivot from foreign policy by bumper sticker, McCain and an intellectually bankrupt clutch of neocons are trying to present themselves as the alternative. Dick Cheney, the warrior with five draft deferments, is in this diminishing camp, calling Obama “certainly the weakest” president in his lifetime. But both McCain and Cheney are outliers, blustery relics with little backing in either party. Only seven percent of Americans expressed support for even considering a military option after Russia forced Crimea into its fold. That’s a sea change in sentiment from 2001, or even 2008.
The nation’s future military leaders embody this shift. The biggest response from the cadets at West Point came when Obama said, “you are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.” They cheered.
But all of that is not to let Obama off the hook. His big foreign policy speech was flat and passionless, with no central vision. The fault may lie with this particular moment in world history. The Cold War was easy to frame. The War on Terror was as well, at least at first. Now, things are more muddled. How do we help the newly elected government of Ukraine? If we aggressively arm one side in Syria, what happens if they turn out to be religious extremists who want to put women back in the 9th century?
Obama didn’t specifically say so, but the guiding principle for this era of nuance and shadows may be no more complex than this: Stay out of wars of unintended consequence.
“Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint,” said Obama, “but from our willingness to rush into military adventure — without thinking through the consequences; without building international support and legitimacy for our action, or leveling with the American people about the sacrifice required. Tough talk draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.”
Is that weakness, or wisdom? Well, neither. But it’s a realistic reaction to the hard fact that the last 50 years have produced the three longest wars in American history. And it’s a pitch-perfect reflection of where most Americans are today.
Afghanistan was supposed to be a swift move to crush a regime that allowed terrorists to flourish — not 13 years, and counting, of nation-building. Vietnam was billed as a blow for freedom against global communism — not a 10-year military muddle in a civil war posing no threat to the United States. Iraq was going to be clean and quick — we’ll be greeted as liberators! — not eight years in one of the most ghastly places on earth, at a cost of more than $2 trillion and a loss of at least 190,000 lives on all sides.
Obama’s foreign policy is a lot like his economic policy. Give him credit for preventing something awful from happening. The financial collapse could have been truly catastrophic, save for the action the president and the Federal Reserve took in the first year following the meltdown. For that, history will be kind. The wars not fought by Obama are the alternative to John McCain’s map. For that, the verdict of the ages is less certain. After 50 years, what a war-weary nation does know is this: the doors into hell are many; the exits, fewer.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, May 29, 2014
“Don’t Cry For Condi!”: Why Students Were Right To Scuttle Her Commencement Address
As sincerely as I wish everyone involved with the George W. Bush administration would just go away — or at least agree to only appear in the public eye in brief, tweet-size increments — I must admit that I think the recent kerfuffle over former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Rutgers University has been valuable, if only for the way it’s laid bare some of American society’s ugliest hypocrisies and quirks. I’m thinking of two in particular: the contradictory demands we make of our college students, and the intellectual ravages of our toxic cult of American exceptionalism.
For those who don’t know, here’s a quick recap of the incident: After a vocal student outcry at her selection, Rice decided she would not accept the university’s offer to speak at this year’s commencement, walking away from $35,000 and an honorary doctorate. “Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families,” Rice wrote in a Facebook note explaining her decision. Describing her invitation as “a distraction for the university community at this very special time,” Rice took the high road and swiftly put the controversy to rest by bowing out.
Because hers was just one of a recent handful of commencement reversals — the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde withdrew from a Smith College engagement, as did Robert Birgeneau from one at Haverford College — some pundits have since argued that Rice’s concession is proof that “liberal intolerance” is ascendant, threatening academic freedom and free speech all across our nation’s campuses. (To her credit, Rice disagreed, writing in her Facebook note that while she has “defended America’s belief in free speech and the exchange of ideas” these values are “not what is at issue here.”) Other, smarter pundits have instead claimed that her story is an example of college kids being intellectual hothouse flowers, incapable of gracefully listening to opinions they don’t like without throwing a fit.
Olivia Nuzzi of the Daily Beast, for example, wrote with obvious frustration that the class of 2014 needs to “calm the hell down” and recognize that “oftentimes you find great wisdom in shitty people.” Before declaring that young people “are the worst” (which, considering Nuzzi’s own young age, was almost certainly written with tongue slightly in cheek) Nuzzi writes that the “entire point of college is to be exposed to different things,” a truism that 2014 graduates of Rutgers and Smith shamefully forgot. “[M]aybe some of those people will hail from organizations that negatively impacted poor countries, or maybe they were partly responsible for a war that ate up the country’s resources and resulted in human rights abuses and lots of needless death,” Nuzzi grants. But still.
At the Week, meanwhile, Damon Linker took Nuzzi’s attack one step further, arguing that not only did these students fail to understand the point of college but that they were perpetuating “the tyranny of right-thinking moralism” that is ruining America’s institutions of higher learning. Noting that he, too, opposed the war of choice that will forever be Rice’s chief legacy, Linker writes that “[t]he world is an imperfect and morally complicated place, filled with people who regularly do things I consider wrong, stupid, misguided, foolish, and unethical” but that such people should still not be “excommunicated, ignored, or banished from public life.” Besides, Linker writes, what good does protesting Rice serve “beyond convincing the protesters of their own moral superiority?”
Two thoughts. First (and less important) is that bashing college kids — especially ones who are defined by their idealism and hunger for change — remains one of our most widely accepted and least logically defensible pastimes. Despite telling ourselves that we in America value youth, education and self-expression, there are few cultural archetypes more universally loathed than the campus activist. We say we want our kids to be independent, informed, fearless and disruptive, but then we attack, patronize and demean them as soon as they decide they’d like to be more than seen and not heard. (This dynamic is especially unfortunate when played out among the press. As my friend Ned Resnikoff snarked on Twitter, “What made you guys all want to be journalists? For me it was the thrill and fulfillment that comes with mocking college activists.”)
Moreover, there’s something particularly nonsensical about thwacking a bunch of students for supposedly ignoring the right to free speech when all they’ve done is exercise that right for themselves by peacefully organizing and expressing their disapproval.
The other (and more important) thing that comes to mind when surveying the backlash to the Rice backlash is the corrosive effect American exceptionalism can have on even the smartest and most skeptical among us. In both Nuzzi and Linker’s pieces — as well as a similar one from GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson — opposition to Rice is framed in partisan or ideological terms. Students don’t like Rice, we’re led to assume, because she’s a Republican, full stop. But while I’m sure that’s the case for at least some of the kids at Rutgers — who must be disappointed to hear that Rice’s replacement will be Tom Kean, another GOPer — it’s also a real misrepresentation of the fundamental problem with Rice and other top-tier members of the second Bush presidency. The implication is that the mistakes made by the last GOP president are more or less within the normal bounds of American politics, as if initiating an arguably illegal war and systematically flouting the Geneva Conventions is the same thing as cutting the estate tax or privatizing Social Security.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but: They’re not. And it’s only in a political world where the lives of non-Americans are unconsciously considered less valuable that such thinking could survive. To be clear, I’m not accusing Nuzzi or Linker of knowingly devaluing human life — Nuzzi describes the Iraq War in strongly negative terms, and Linker so hated Bush’s decision to invade Iraq that he left the Republican Party. Instead, what I’m arguing is that our mainstream political debate is so saturated with unstated assumptions about our inherent goodness, our natural righteousness, and our basic decency that serious war crimes, when committed by American politicians, are sanitized as matters of differing opinion. (And in Rice’s case, it’s not as if we can pretend that she was somehow only tangentially related to the administration’s worst crimes — here she is, back in 2009, defending torture with the Nixonian logic that nothing a president commands in service of national security can possibly be illegal.)
As if to make my point for me, the New York Times recently ran an Op-Ed from Timothy Egan in which Rice’s failures and mistakes — which, remember, cost perhaps as many as 500,000 human lives while wrecking millions more — are dismissed with a chilling breeziness. “Near as I can tell, the forces of intolerance objected to her role in the Iraq war,” Egan writes (apparently unaware that the magic of Google allows him to find the protesters explaining their objections in their own words). “The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush,” Egan continues, “was clearly a debacle … But if every speaker has to pass a test for benign mediocrity and politically correct sensitivity, commencement stages will be home to nothing but milquetoasts.” Taking the already grotesque line that non-American life is less important than entertainment to an even more hideous extreme, Egan continues, “You want torture? Try listening to the Stanford speech of 2009, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.”
So there you have it: Torture, when sanctioned by Americans, is basically a joking matter, an experience that’s comparable to being bored while sitting in the sun. And it’s the students at Rutgers who are the problem?
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, May 17, 2014
“An Actually Weak President”: If Held Accountable Then, We Wouldn’t Have To Listen To Dick Cheney Mouthing Off Today
When Dick Cheney appeared at American University on March 28th, students protested outside Bender Arena, including the student government’s comptroller, who stated that he had voted against allowing Cheney to appear and had so far refused to sign a check compensating the former vice-president for his appearance. The protesters brought enough attention to the issue that Cheney felt compelled to defend himself against accusations that he is a war criminal.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney refuted accusations that he is a war criminal during his speech to students and members of the AU community in Bender Arena on March 28. The Kennedy Political Union hosted Cheney as part of a stream of speakers coming to campus.
“The accusations are not true,” Cheney said.
During his vice presidency, three people were waterboarded, Cheney said. Waterboarding refers to either pumping a stomach with water or inducing choking by filling a throat with a stream of water, according to a report by NPR.
“Some people called it torture. It wasn’t torture,” Cheney said in an interview with ATV.
Of course, “some people” includes virtually every disinterested observer, including the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who stated back in July 2012 that “[Cheney] and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have.”
Perhaps one could argue that America had some kind of mandate to contain Iraq resulting from the Persian Gulf War and, therefore, our decision to invade that country and remove its leadership cannot be judged by the same type of standard we used to condemn Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait or Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea. If you want to try to carve out some of kind of double standard for America arising from our unique capabilities and responsibilities for maintaining the international system, I think we can have that debate. But it’s much harder to even imagine how one might justify our government’s decision to torture people during the Bush-Cheney administration.
This effort to simply call it something other than what it was is never going to fly. And, on that basis, Dick Cheney is unambiguously a criminal violator of human rights. But why do people have such an easy time condemning Cheney, or even Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice, and such a hard time condemning George W. Bush?
It seems one of the lasting features of the Bush administration is that people simply don’t think that Bush was calling the shots and, as a result, they are inclined to give him a pass on the decisions he made.
That’s a mistake.
If he and his subordinates were held responsible for what they did, we wouldn’t have to listen to his subordinates mouthing off about how weak the current president is.
You’ll know that the current president is as weak as Bush when students line up to protest former vice-president Joe Biden and completely ignore Obama.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 29, 2014
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