“Iraq Is Beyond Cheney’s Comprehension”: Democracy Is Not Something That Can Be Imported
Much has been said of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Wall Street Journal op-ed where he criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of Iraq. Cheney’s contribution to the discourse in Iraq is as meaningful as someone holding an emergency meeting on the Titanic to ascertain the whereabouts of the missing bucket.
I doubt there are many levelheaded individuals who would take seriously anything Cheney offers about Iraq, given his dubious contribution to what can only be considered as an unmitigated disaster.
Included in Cheney’s recent screed was the now infamous quote: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Short of Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, what were the artisans of the Iraq War correct about? Weapons of mass destruction, victory would be a “slam dunk,” along with “mission accomplished” are among of the misguided quotes that placed American lives and treasure on a fool’s errand.
Appearing on Meet the Press, Republican Senator Rand Paul countered Cheney’s charges:
I don’t blame President Obama. Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame the Iraq War on the chaos that is in the Middle East. I also blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now who are petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry.
While Paul appears to have come to the aid of the president, it was also a salvo fired toward former Secretary of State, and possible 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. An area where Clinton could be vulnerable remains the clumsy manner that she explains her vote as senator in support of the Iraq War.
But Clinton’s inability to explain her participation in Iraq is the least of America’s problems. What should America do as a growing number of Iraqi military forces are withdrawing in the wake of the consolidation of power by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which is now reportedly controlling much of Iraq’s western border?
The latest developments in Iraq are the most glaring evidence to date how sophomoric the 2003 preemptive invasion has proven to be. Democracy is not something that can be imported. Nor is it displaying a purple finger after casting a vote.
Voting does not equate to democracy. Stalin had elections, as did the South during Jim Crow segregation.
Some even attempted to argue that the Arab Spring was the unintended consequence that vindicated former President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
What plagues Iraq and ostensibly the Middle East is most likely beyond America’s sphere of influence.
Columnist Tom Friedman has argued the Middle East needs someone that can appeal to the moral consciousness of the region, a Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, or Martin Luther King-like figure.
While the aforementioned fought against oppression in their homelands, they did so in countries that possessed enough democratic infrastructure so that their marvelous abilities and influence could ultimately rise to the top.
Shadi Hamid, author of Temptations of Power, argues that before any democratic ideals can take hold authentically, the Middle East must go through its own form of Enlightenment period. But such efforts require time.
The Age of Enlightenment in the West began more than 200 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Moreover, the Revolutionary War was fought while many Americans remained loyal to the British.
How can there be any type of stabilization in the Middle East that is not rooted in its own people? And how can the people undertake that revolutionary mission until there is an emphasis placed on reason and the individual that untangles the unhealthy interdependence between religion and politics?
These were probably questions that should have been posed before the preemptive invasion in 2003. But alas, everyone’s IQ is higher ex post facto — certain neocons notwithstanding.
By: Byron Williams, The Huffington Post Blog, June 24, 2014
“Don’t Be Bashful!”: Anyone Here Miss Dick Cheney? Neither Do I
As Iraq ruptures into fragments, none other than Dick Cheney has shambled forth to blame Barack Obama.
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong so much at the expense of so many,” the former vice president huffed in a Wall Street Journal column, blind to the irony of his own toxic self-righteousness.
No American political figure in recent history has been dead wrong as consistently as Cheney, or as loath to admit it.
It was he and George W. Bush who set in the motion the catastrophe now unspooling in Iraq. The decision to invade was peddled to Congress and the American people with a campaign of myth making that Cheney still refuses to disown.
Long after Bush was forced to concede that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and long after U.S. intelligence agencies affirmed that Saddam Hussein had no connection to al Qaeda, Cheney continued to promote these discredited scenarios to justify his own hyperbolic cheerleading for the war.
Remember, this is the same arrogant boob who predicted that U.S. troops would be welcomed as “liberators.”
It took nine years and a new administration to finally get our ground forces out of that sad and awful mess. Now Cheney is pathetically trying to elevate his lowly place in history by attacking Obama for letting Iraq go to pieces.
In truth, the collapse began March 19, 2003, the day we started the “shock and awe” bombing.
Hussein was a rotten guy who ruled with an iron first, but he had no tolerance for jihadist terrorists. Eleven years ago, al Qaeda steered clear of Iraq. Today the country is overrun by al Qaeda-inspired insurgents, leaving the United States at a far greater risk than before.
Thank you, George and Dick.
Unlike his retired vice president, Bush has shown the calm decency — and good sense — not to stir foreign-policy debates. Cheney’s whining and jeering only serves to remind Americans of his own disastrously bad judgment and needy ego.
The hero’s legacy that Cheney craves for himself belongs instead to those men and women who were sent by his administration to fight in Iraq.
Cheney himself never served in uniform, having avoided Vietnam by securing numerous draft deferments. His appetite for war arose later in his life, when he was no longer at personal risk, and has followed him into his spiteful old age.
His views on Iraq have provoked mass public eye-rolling. It would be hard to find someone with less credibility, or someone more callous to the sacrifices that have already been made.
Beyond the $2 trillion-and-counting price tag, the cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation has been enormous.
Officially: 4,486 American soldiers died in combat there, and 32,226 were wounded in action. The unofficial toll is much higher — nearly a million veterans of the war have sought medical or psychological treatment at VA hospitals since their return.
The exact number of Iraqi civilians killed during the long conflict is impossible to determine, but estimates start at 115,000 — and still there’s no peace. The country is being split by ancient religious feuds that were barely held to a simmer during the U.S. occupation.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has resisted U.S. pressure for him to include Sunnis in the government, and now he’s paying the price. His hold is so weak that many Iraqi troops (the ones we spent billions to train) dropped their guns and surrendered immediately to the insurgents.
Cheney’s op-ed column, written with his daughter Liz, dishonestly blasts Obama for abandoning Iraq. Actually it was Bush, Cheney’s own boss, who signed the agreement requiring all U.S. troops to be gone by 2011.
And it was still too long.
Obama won the White House campaigning on a promise to end the war, which he did. No one who’s been paying attention to the Mideast seriously expected peace and harmony to ensue. Only the Iraqis can fix Iraq.
Surprisingly, the two opining Cheneys didn’t call for a brand-new invasion. Liz probably talked the old man out of it. Brushed the crumbs off his bathrobe. Sent him upstairs for a nap.
Note to future presidents: Whatever advice Dick Cheney offers, do exactly the opposite and you’ll never go wrong.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, June 24, 2014
“Pesky Niceties Just Aren’t Important”: Cheney Doesn’t Want To Talk About ‘What Happened 11 Or 12 Years Ago’
It was discouraging last week when discredited conservatives, who failed spectacularly on U.S. policy in Iraq, were given a media platform to talk about U.S. policy in Iraq. Last week’s Sunday shows alone, featuring the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, led James Fallows to argue, “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, these discredited voices remain ubiquitous. Kenneth Pollack, for example, was on CNN yesterday, presented to viewers as a credible expert. Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, and went on serve on the Bush/Cheney National Security Council as head of the Mideast bureau, had a lengthy piece in Politico yesterday describing President Obama as “the man who broke the Middle East.”
And then there was ABC’s “This Week,” which welcomed Dick Cheney for his third Sunday show appearance since March. It went about as expected, though I was struck by the failed former vice president’s response to some of his catastrophic errors of fact and judgment.
“With all due respect, Jon, I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq, I’m a strong supporter now. Everybody knows what my position is. There’s nothing to be argued about there.
“But if we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.”
In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” there’s a scene in which John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot, certain he’s doing the right thing in behalf of a damsel in distress, storms into a castle during a wedding party, indiscriminately slaughtering most of the guests with his sword. The castle owner, eager to curry favor with Lancelot, urges the survivors to let bygones be bygones.
“Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom,” he tells his few remaining guests.
Cheney’s rhetoric is similar in its own pathetic way. Sure, he failed miserably, helping launch a disastrous war under false pretenses, the consequences of which we’re still struggling with today, but let’s not bicker and argue about who lied to whom about a deadly and unnecessary catastrophe. Pesky niceties such as accountability, credibility, and responsibility just aren’t important at a time like this, the argument goes
The difference is, in Monty Python, it was funny.
In the same Sunday show appearance, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Cheney about his recent op-ed in which he argued that Obama is trying to deliberately undermine the United States’ global standing, effectively suggesting the president is guilty of treason.
“I don’t intend any disrespect for the president, but I fundamentally disagree with him,” Cheney said.
Of course. All Cheney did was accuse a war-time president in the middle of a crisis of wanting to hurt the country on purpose. Why would anyone think the failed former V.P. intended “disrespect”?
Nevertheless, the divisions within the Republican Party on foreign policy were also on display over the weekend. While Cheney was condemning the president who’s tried to clean up Cheney’s messes, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was doing largely the opposite, arguing that it’s a mistake to point fingers at the White House.
“I don’t blame President Obama,” Paul said. “Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now who are petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 23, 2014
“The Cheneys’ Continuing Iraq Disaster”: Dick And Liz Are Trying Desperately To Justify The Unjustifiable
On the heels of Father’s Day, we get a Wall Street Journal missive from none other than Dick and Liz Cheney, the father-daughter duo. Really?
For those who thought they had seen the last of Liz and her ill-fated and absurd challenge to Republican Sen. Mike Enzi from Wyoming, the state she hardly lived in and didn’t know, she’s back! And Dick, who can’t resist a diatribe to justify his ill-fated and disastrous policy in Iraq, has never learned to zip it.
The worst part is the supposed substance of their piece: Iraq is all Obama’s fault. He is “willfully blind,” “he goes golfing,” “he abandoned Iraq,” he is guilty of “simple -minded appeasement.” The Cheney team’s conclusion: “President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”
What drivel.
There is absolutely no discussion of the dynamics of the Middle East in their article. There is no mention of the deeply religious conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. There is no mention of the Kurds. There is no substantive exploration of the involvement of other nations, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, in this conflict. There is not one reference to policy options that should be considered in response to the attack by terrorist groups associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIL or ISIS.
In short, this is an article devoid of substance, let alone a reasonable discussion of public policy.
So, aside from being a vitriolic attack against President Obama, why did they write it? The answer is pretty straightforward, I think. The Cheneys are trying desperately to justify the unjustifiable.
Dick Cheney lied to get us into Iraq: weapons of mass destruction; Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; the people want us there; we’ll be greeted as liberators; chemical weapons are ready to be unleashed. On and on. Dick Cheney was one of the architects of one of the most extraordinary disasters ever in the history of American foreign policy: more than $1 trillion spent, thousands killed, a country destroyed. Al-Qaida was not present in Iraq before the invasion, but what about now? Because of the Bush-Cheney policy, we created more terrorists than we could ever have dreamed of killing.
The line from Dick and Liz that is truly astounding, and they seem most proud of, is: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” It is truly sad that they don’t recognize that such a line applies so much more completely to them and what they did. Their preferred policy was a complete disaster, and most people know it.
President George Herbert Walker Bush surely understood, when he wrote these words in his book about the policy decisions he made on Iraq back in the early 1990s: “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. … There was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”
Yes, Mr. and Ms. Cheney, and that is precisely what you did and what you recommend now. A disaster then, a disaster now.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, June 18, 2014
“No Remaining Credibility”: 5 Iraq ‘Experts’ Who Are Always Wrong About Iraq
American pundits have an unusual profession; it is one of the only careers in which repeated, catastrophic, and humiliating failures seem to do nothing to prevent one from continuing to find work. Just ask Dick Morris.
The media’s tendency to forgive blown predictions and provide airtime and column inches to guests with little to no remaining credibility has become particularly offensive since the Iraq situation rapidly devolved into crisis. Despite the fact that those who made the case for the war helped end thousands of lives and waste trillions of dollars, many of those who have been proven to understand nothing of the country have been welcomed back as “experts” on the disaster.
Here are five of the worst offenders:
Judith Miller
On Friday, Fox News contributor Judith Miller took it upon herself to criticize the media’s coverage of the situation in Iraq.
“There have been a couple of reporters who have stayed in Iraq, who have been covering the growing power of ISIS…but the American media are so busy playing the blame game, ‘who’s responsible for this debacle,’ that they don’t even pay attention to a story that was there, and available for all to cover,” Miller complained.
“Did the media buy the line from the administration?” host Eric Shawn later asked Miller.
“It’s really a failure — another, yet another — failure of reporting,” Miller said.
This is, as The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson deftly put it, “a turn of events that could signal the departure of all irony from the world.” After all, through her catastrophically flawed reporting in the buildup to the war, Miller arguably did more than anyone alive to advance the myth that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It would be almost impossible to find someone less qualified to criticize journalists for their Iraq reporting.
Douglas Feith
Douglas Feith, who served as the undersecretary of defense for policy during the Bush administration, ripped President Obama’s approach to Iraq in comments to Politico on Thursday:
“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 blasé,” 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.”
While credulously quoting Feith’s opinion on the situation in Iraq, Politico declined to note that Feith was in charge of postwar planning after President Bush declared the fiasco to be “Mission Accomplished.” It did not go well.
Rather than being presented as an expert on how the president should manage the crisis in Iraq, Feith may be better remembered as he was once described by retired general Tommy Franks: “The dumbest fucking guy on the planet.”
Paul Wolfowitz
On Sunday, NBC’s Meet The Press invited former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz to argue, essentially, that we should have stayed in Iraq for decades.
“We stuck with the Kurds through 20 years. Northern Iraq, Kurdistan’s a success story. We stuck with South Korea for 60 years. South Korea is a miracle story. But if we had walked away from South Korea in 1953, that country was a basketcase,” he said.
Wolfowitz is another odd choice for an Iraq expert, considering that — like most of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration’s Pentagon — he has a remarkable record of being wrong about almost everything related to the war.
It’s not like Wolfowitz doesn’t know that it was a catastrophe; when MSNBC’s Chuck Todd introduced him as the “architect” of the 2003 invasion during yet another talking-head appearance on Tuesday, Wolfowitz immediately pushed back.
“If I had been the architect, things would have been run very differently,” he insisted. “So, that’s not a correct label.”
Bill Kristol
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol has a long and well-earned reputation for being America’s least accurate pundit (non-Dick Morris division). But the nadir of his busted analysis centered around the Iraq War, for which he fully embraced the flawed case. Kristol claimed at various points that “American and alliance forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators” and that “there’s almost no evidence” that the country’s Sunni and Shia populations might clash, among many, many other false assertions.
That still didn’t stop ABC’s This Week from inviting Kristol to analyze the current situation in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, he blamed President Obama:
“It’s a disaster made possible by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011,” he argued. Kristol added that President Obama was wrong when he declared the war was over.
“President Obama said two days before election day, in 2012, Iraq is on the path of defeat, the war in Iraq is over. That was enough to get him re-elected. Iraq is on the path of defeat. Neither is true. It’s a disaster for our country,” Kristol said.
Nevermind the fact that Kristol himself predicted that the conflict would “be a two-month war” — and declared it “won decisively and honorably” in April 2003.
John McCain
Perhaps no supporter of the Iraq War has been more shameless in his criticism of President Obama than his opponent in the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain (R-AZ).
“Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right,” the Arizona senator boasted of himself and his South Carolina colleague on the Senate floor. “Our failure to leave forces on Iraq is why Sen. Graham and I predicted this would happen.”
“We had it won,” McCain later said during one of his many cable news appearances. “General Petraeus had the conflict won, thanks to the surge. If we had left a residual force behind, we would not be facing the crisis we are today. Those are fundamental facts … The fact is, we had the conflict won. We had a stable government … But the president wanted out, and now, we are paying a very heavy price. And I predicted it in 2011.”
As MSNBC’s All In with Chis Hayes recently illustrated, McCain doesn’t exactly have the best record on the topic. Much like Kristol, McCain was certain that Iraq had WMD, that Americans would be greeted as liberators, that the war would essentially pay for itself, and that sectarian violence in the country would never ignite: http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/EmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_hayes_montage_140612
Don’t expect the Arizona Republican to evolve on the issue, by the way; he’s too busy knocking the president to bother attending Senate hearings on the crisis.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, June 18, 2014
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