“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
“So Very 2002”: A National Amnesia About Our Experience In Iraq
Anyone who for some reason checked out of U.S. politics a month ago and then checked back in this week might well be startled to realize that the “problem” of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq had become a crisis, and for some an existential threat to the United States. What changed in that span of time? Did IS conquer some major new territory? Did Nouri al-Maliki hang on to power and thwart U.S./Iranian efforts to build a stronger Iraqi state? Is there evidence of IS possessing weapons of mass destruction?
I just threw in that last one as a reminder of how these things can get out of hand.
What actually seems to have happened is that IS cruelly executed two American journalists after trying to extort vast sums of money or perhaps even a change of U.S. policies. They’re threatening to execute more westerners in captivity, presumably with the same grim and barbaric ritual of videotaped beheadings. The images and the savagery behind them has momentarily produced national amnesia about our experience in Iraq over the last quarter century or so, and a decided bipartisan burst of war fever.
The President, Vice President and Secretary of State have issued various “this will not stand” declarations. According to an excellent report from HuffPost’s Sam Stein, there’s an instant consensus in Washington for more airstrikes and special ops attacks on IS; an effort to round up international support and commitments of assistance; and a reconsideration of U.S. wariness to engage more directly in Syria, where, of course, we have been supporting an anti-Assad coalition while avoiding the inconvenient fact that its most powerful component is IS.
You get the distinct sense the Obama administration is trying to preempt the lust for war emanating from a suddenly bellicose Republican Party, where even Rand Paul is strapping on the gunbelt and swaggering around making loose commitments of other people’s lives. Check out this report on the mood of the GOP from WaPo’s Sebastian Payne and Robert Costa:
A roiling national debate over how to deal with the radical Islamic State and other global hot spots has prompted a sudden shift in Republican politics, putting a halt to the anti-interventionist mood that had been gaining credence in the party.
The change is evident on the campaign trail ahead of the November midterm elections and in recent appearances by the GOP’s prospective 2016 presidential candidates, with a near-universal embrace of stronger military actions against the group that has beheaded two American journalists.
A hawkish tone has become integral to several key Republican Senate campaigns, with a group of candidates running in battleground states calling attention to their ties to veterans and their support for the U.S. military at every turn.
In contests in Iowa, Arkansas and Alaska — where Republicans are running for seats held by Democrats — the GOP candidates are military veterans and focusing much of their time extolling their expertise.
A thirst among many conservative activists for a more muscular U.S. foreign policy was clear over the weekend at a meeting of Americans for Prosperity, the tea-party-affiliated group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers. The loudest applause came when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a potential presidential candidate, called for bombing the Islamic State “back to the Stone Age.”
It’s feeling very, very 2002. The difference, of course, is that an opponent of the Iraq War is president at the moment, while Dick Cheney raves and snarls from the sidelines instead of deploying troops and crafting official lies. Like Digby, I hope Obama’s reluctance to articulate a “strategy” for “destroying” IS reflects an understanding that this task could indeed involve unacceptable costs and could definitively produce unintended consequences in an unstable region with multiple threats to U.S. security interests. But she’s right this hope could be naive:
Hysteria is building. The hawks sense that there’s action afoot. The Republicans are aroused at the prospect that this could change the dynamic in 2016. The Democrats are freaking out that someone might call them wimps.
The warship is sailing out of the harbor and once again we’re all just standing here on the shore screaming into the wind.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 4, 2014
“Paying For Bush’s 2003 Invasion Of Iraq”: Decision To Launch An Unwarranted Invasion Is Directly Responsible For The Chaos Today
As President Obama struggles to deal with the crisis in Iraq, it’s useful to remember who gave the world this cauldron of woe in the first place: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Their decision to launch a foolish and unwarranted invasion in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein and destroying any vestige of the Iraqi state, is directly responsible for the chaos we see today, including the rapid advance of the well-armed jihadist militia that calls itself the Islamic State.
Bush has maintained a circumspect silence about the legacy his administration’s adventurism bequeathed us. Cheney, however, has been predictably loud and wrong on the subject of, well, just about everything.
“Obama’s failure to provide for a stay-behind force is what created the havoc we see in Iraq today,” Cheney told CNN last month. “When we left, Iraq was a relatively stable place. We defeated al-Qaeda, we had a coalition government in place.”
Cheney predicted “the history books will show” that Obama bears much responsibility for squandering the peace and stability that the Bush administration left behind. If so, they will have to be books that don’t go back very far.
Let’s review what actually happened. The U.S. invasion toppled a Sunni dictatorship that had ruled brutally over Iraq’s other major groups — the Shiite majority and the ethnic Kurds — for decades. It seems not to have occurred to anyone planning the invasion that long-suppressed resentments and ambitions would inevitably surface.
The leader of that “coalition government” Cheney mentioned, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, turned out not to be a Jeffersonian democrat. Rather, his regime acted quickly and shamelessly to advance a Shiite sectarian agenda — and to marginalize Sunnis and Kurds.
What followed, predictably, was anger and alienation among the disaffected groups. The Kurds focused largely on fortifying their semi-autonomy in the northeast part of the country. Sunni tribal leaders twice cast their lot with violent Sunni jihadist forces that stood in opposition to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad — first with al-Qaeda in Iraq and now with the Islamic State.
Obama opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation from the beginning. He was nominated and elected president largely because of his pledge to end the war. He withdrew all U.S. troops only after Maliki refused to negotiate a viable agreement to leave a residual force in place.
Could Obama have found a way to keep more of our soldiers in Iraq if he really wanted to? Perhaps. But this would have required trusting Maliki, who has proved himself a far more reliable ally to the terrorist-sponsoring government of Iran than to the United States. And anyway, why would U.S. forces be needed to keep the peace in the “relatively stable” democratic Iraq of Cheney’s hazy recollection?
As I write, Maliki has barricaded himself inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and is refusing to leave office, despite that Iraq’s president has named a new prime minister. The United States has joined with respected Iraqi leaders to try to force Maliki out, but he holds enormous power — he is not only prime minister but also heads the Iraqi armed forces and national police.
Rewind the clock. If there had been no U.S. invasion, Iraqis surely would have suffered grievously under Saddam’s sadistic rule. But at least 110,000 Iraqis — and perhaps several times that many — died violently in the war and its aftermath. Is it likely that even the bloodthirsty Saddam would have matched that toll? Is it conceivable that the Islamic State’s ad hoc army would have even been able to cross the Syria-Iraq border, much less seize huge tracts of territory and threaten religious minorities with genocide?
Even after the invasion, if the U.S. occupation force had worked to reform the Iraqi military rather than disband it, there would have been a professional army in place to repel the Islamic State. If Maliki had truly acted as the leader of the “coalition government” that Cheney describes, and not as a glorified sectarian warlord, Sunnis likely would have fought the Islamic State extremists rather than welcome them.
Why is Obama intervening with airstrikes in Iraq and not in Syria, where the carnage is much worse? My answer would be that the United States has a special responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Iraq — because, ultimately, it was our nation’s irresponsibility that put their lives at risk.
Obama’s cautious approach — ask questions first, shoot later — may or may not work. But thanks to Bush and Cheney, we know that doing things the other way around leads to disaster.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2014
“As Long As He Draws Breath”: Dick Cheney’s Awfulness Is Here to Stay
People seem mystified by Dick Cheney. What on earth is he doing, popping up with such regularity defending a wholly discredited position, as he did again Monday at a Politico forum? Why would he continue to say things like invading Iraq was “absolutely the right thing to do”? The track record of utterances he compiled as vice president—all of them collected on video for our present-day delectation, like his famous “weeks rather than months” prediction to CBS’s Bob Schieffer right before we started the Iraq war—would have a person of decency and modesty hiding in self-imposed exile in the Pampean Andes.
I contend that there’s nothing mysterious about him at all. Incredible as it may seem, he does still think he was right. The tactical mistakes, if there were any, were mere details. But the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, he still undoubtedly believes. And it’s important that we understand the real reason he thinks it was the right thing to do, because Iraq failure or no Iraq failure, Rand Paul or no Rand Paul, Cheney’s view will always be dominant in the Republican Party’s higher echelons.
There were always a lot of misperceptions about the Iraq war, in the mainstream media and among liberal opponents of it. Oversimplifying a bit, the media bought that it was about 9/11; that we had to strike back. It was also, in this narrative, about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and his even more alleged nuclear capabilities. These were the reasons the Bush administration put forward to scare the public, and the media, to their everlasting dishonor, bought those arguments.
On the broad left, people tended toward the fundamental explanations of political economy: that it was about oil, or Halliburton, or, in Michael Moore’s interpretation, the Carlyle Group. Oil was a factor, a side benefit. But it wasn’t about oil, and it certainly wasn’t about Halliburton or Carlyle.
It was about establishing global American hegemony. To get this fully you have to go back to 1992, when Cheney was the secretary of defense. Cheney’s world view was wholly formed by the Cold War. The bipolar world of U.S. v. USSR, good v. evil, was all he’d known. It was the rubric under which all thought was organized. Then, suddenly, the USSR was gone! Now what?
Cheney’s Pentagon—including figures such as Paul Wolfowitz and even Colin Powell, who may be a good guy now but was fully implicated in all this at the time—set to pondering that question, and by the spring of 1992, it came up with an answer: The Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), a white paper outlining future U.S. defense policy. Now that we were the only superpower in the world, it said, our main job was to make damn sure things stayed that way. This would require a certain new tough-mindedness. We might have to thumb our noses at traditional allies. We certainly would have to expand our global reach. And the DPG introduced, for the first time ever in American history, the idea that preemptive war should be an official part of our policy. (Yes, it’s been unofficial policy plenty of times, but this was different.)
The DPG was enormously controversial at the time. Amid some media tumult, the first President Bush had to come out and say in essence, hey, kidding. But Cheney & Co. certainly weren’t. (For a lot more on this history, read the great Harper’s magazine piece by David Armstrong from 2002, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” still one of the finest pieces of Iraq war journalism we have.)
The Republicans lost the White House in 1992, of course, and were out of power for eight years. So they didn’t have a chance to act on their scheme. But then they got back in. And then came 9/11. Lo and behold! What a gift! Of course I’m not saying they were happy it happened, but imagine: If ever there were an event that could frighten the American people into embracing an aggressive foreign-policy posture that set out to establish the United States as the single global hegemon, 9/11 surely was it. It still didn’t frighten the people enough, quite, which is why the Bushies had to lie about WMD and nukes and “weeks rather than months,” but the hegemonists knew that this was their only shot to act on those 1992 schemes, and bam, they took it.
That’s why we went to war in Iraq. (We chose Iraq because of the “unfinished work” of the Gulf War, because it looked ripe for the taking, and because it was a medium-size dog whose quick whipping would scare the larger ones.) It wasn’t about terrorism or anything like that. It was about, as James Bond once sighed to Dr. No, “world domination, the same old story.”
It’s important to understand that history today because the dream of establishing global American hegemony is much more enduring and powerful on the right than all the stated reasons. Al Qaeda has receded; terrorism too; WMD was just a handy thing lying around. But the idea that the United States must maintain its hegemonic status in a unipolar world—on the right, that has staying power. And modern conservatism is organized in such a way that thousands of people are paid millions of dollars to make sure the staying power stays.
The Tea Party base, as we know, is less than enamored of these ideas. Sen. Paul articulates their views. So the feud between Paul and Cheney—and John McCain and others—is really a feud between the base and the elites. Paul is a savvy politician, and I certainly don’t count him out as the possible 2016 nominee, but we all know that in both parties, especially the GOP, the elites usually win such feuds. So Cheney will keep at it as long as he draws breath. And someday, something awful will happen, and the Cheney wing will step up to the plate and swing for the fences again.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 15, 2014
“Clinton vs. Cheney”: The More These Two Go At It, The Worse It Is For Republicans
No doubt trying to salvage his abysmal reputation, failed former Vice President Dick Cheney has maintained a near-ubiquitous media presence lately, condemning the Obama administration’s foreign policy and coming awfully close to accusing President Obama of treason.
Former President Bill Clinton is apparently a little tired of it, telling NBC News’ David Gregory this week that Cheney’s condemnations amounted to “attacking the administration for not doing an adequate job of cleaning up the mess that he made.”
“I believe if they hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, none of this would be happening,” the former president told David Gregory in the interview, which will air Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
He continued: “Mr. Cheney has been incredibly adroit for the last six years or so attacking the administration for not doing an adequate job of cleaning up the mess that he made. I think it’s unseemly.”
Apparently, the former V.P. wants to keep this going.
After Clinton knocked Cheney for attacking the Obama administration, Cheney threw one back at the former President on Wednesday night.
“If there’s somebody who knows something about unseemly, it’s Bill Clinton,” Cheney told the crowd at the Energy Expo trade show in Billings, Mont.
I don’t know if (or how) the former president will respond to what seems like a cheap shot, but if there’s a prolonged dispute between Clinton and Cheney, I like the Big Dog’s chances.
Laura Ingraham made a compelling case last night, for example, that it’s not in Republicans’ interest to re-litigate Cheney’s invasion of Iraq, which the American mainstream long ago turned against in large numbers.
[A]ccording to Ingraham, the war’s merits have been trumped by poll numbers. The people have spoken, and it would behoove Republicans to listen.
“The problem is when you go to the public on this, Bill, if we think this is somehow going to help the Republican Party in 2014 or 2016 to be re-litigating Iraq on a daily or weekly basis, I don’t think that’s a winner,” she told O’Reilly.
“The idea that you’re going to kind of one-up Clinton on this, I don’t think that that’s ultimately – as a political matter, that’s different than a foreign policy matter – it’s gonna work,” Ingraham added.
I think that’s correct – the polling on public attitudes towards the war is one-sided – but I’d go just one step further.
Even putting aside questions about foreign policies and the public’s war weariness, Bill Clinton vs. Dick Cheney is the kind of match-up that Democrats welcome.
Love him or hate him, the former Democratic president is enormously popular. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Clinton is easily the most admired president of the last quarter century. Whatever one might think of his presidency, Clinton is one of the most well liked figures on the planet.
Dick Cheney is … Dick Cheney. The man’s name is synonymous with violence and failure. Outside of far-right circles, Cheney enjoys little credibility, even less respect, and is more often seen as a punch-line to a painful joke.
The more these two go at it, the worse it is for Republicans.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 27, 2014
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