“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
“The Damage The Neocons Did Lives On”: Armchair Hawks Still Cling To Fantasies About Iraq
Once upon a time, I believed that if a mature adult made an obvious mistake, he would own up to it, apologize and take responsibility. I believed that if he were a leading political figure who had willfully led the public into disaster, he’d work tirelessly in an attempt to make amends, preferably in some low-key role in which he avoided attention and applause. I believed that if he had made a catastrophic mistake — one that cost tens of thousands of people their lives — he’d spend the rest of his life in quiet reflection, seeking to atone for his sins.
I’ve long recognized my naivete, but Dick Cheney has recently reminded me just how wrong I was.
Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops and more than 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives during a misguided occupation that Cheney helped to mastermind. Now, that country is disintegrating, torn apart by bloody sectarian warfare that was a foreseeable consequence of the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Yet, Cheney and his neocon allies have come out blasting Obama for Iraq’s woes.
Last week, Cheney and his chip-off-the-old-block daughter Liz published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that bears witness to their alternative reality universe.
“When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al-Qaida in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory,” they wrote.
That is breathtaking — stunning — in its deceit, its gall, its malevolence. Before George W. Bush invaded Iraq, al-Qaida in Iraq was just a jihadist fantasy. Deposing Saddam Hussein — a sadistic tyrant, but the glue that held together that fractious country — allowed terrorists to bloom.
Cheney’s ahistorical analysis reminds me of the old Soviet Union, where apparatchiks routinely erased previous party leaders out of photographs in an effort to persuade observers that they never existed. But evidence of the former vice president’s attempts to rewrite the past abounds. For example, a 2002 speech he delivered to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in which he was wrong about, well, everything:
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. … Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. … Extremists … would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced,” he said.
The Cheneys are not the only neocons on the rebound. They are joined by several discredited names from the past, including Robert Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. Indeed, Dick and Liz have launched a new fundraising group, The Alliance for a Strong America, to propel armchair hawks into political office.
No worries. The public is war-weary and wants nothing to do with further military interventions abroad. They are unlikely to win many converts.
But the damage the neocons did, not only abroad but also at home, lives on. The United States is left with a huge budget deficit, a result of Bush’s two wars with tax cuts, and thousands of veterans who still suffer severe physical injuries, significant emotional trauma or both. No one should be surprised that the Veterans Administration has had trouble keeping up with its caseload.
But that may not be the worst of it. Polls show that Americans’ trust in their government has fallen through the floor; in a recent survey, only 19 percent of people told Gallup they trust the “government in Washington” to do the right thing most of the time.
It’s probably no coincidence that the last time many Americans trusted their government was during the Bush/Cheney “war on terror.” They left us with a dangerous cynicism toward our democratic institutions.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting professor at the University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 21, 2014
“Paul Lunges For The Reagan Mantle”: His Government-Shrinking Visions Just Might Be A Problem
Yesterday I wrote skeptically about Ross Douthat’s “spitballing” scenario whereby the two parties could undergo a role reversal on foreign policy in 2016 with “interventionist” Hillary Clinton pushing GOPers towards “non-interventionist” Rand Paul. Today we have Paul’s own effort to use the Iraq crisis to re-frame the partisan debate over foreign policy, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
It’s pretty audacious: according to Paul there’s the Bush Republicans who got Iraq wrong before 2009, the Obama Democrats who got Iraq wrong after 2009, and then his own self, right all along, as the sole disciple of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.
Saying the mess in Iraq is President Obama’s fault ignores what President Bush did wrong. Saying it is President Bush’s fault is to ignore all the horrible foreign policy decisions in Syria, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere under President Obama, many of which may have contributed to the current crisis in Iraq. For former Bush officials to blame President Obama or for Democrats to blame President Bush only serves as a reminder that both sides continue to get foreign policy wrong. We need a new approach, one that emulates Reagan’s policies, puts America first, seeks peace, faces war reluctantly, and when necessary acts fully and decisively.
Paul defends this hypothesis with lengthy exegesis of a famous 1984 Cap Weinberger speech laying out criteria for military action. It was, in fact, extended by the so-called “Powell Doctrine” often touted as the justification of the limited-war nature of the First Gulf War, but that made Powell’s stamp of approval on the 2003 Iraq War so important.
So Paul’s attempt to appropriate the Reagan mantle in foreign policy will be sharply contested by “Bush Republicans” of all varieties. Beyond that, there’s one problem with Paul quoting Weinberger worth pondering. Cap was less famous for his “doctrine” than for his persistence in securing the highest level of defense spending imaginable. In his endlessly fascinating account of the budget wars of Reagan’s first term, The Triumph of Politics, David Stockman all but calls Weinberger a traitor for his mendacious and successful efforts to trick Ronald Reagan into double-loading defense increases into his seminal 1981 budget proposal. This is one part of the Reagan-Weinberger legacy Paul will probably not want to emulate. And it matters: the most obvious way to convince reflexively belligerent Republicans that he’s kosher despite opposing various past, present and future military engagements would be to insist on arming America to the teeth. But Paul’s government-shrinking visions would make that sort of gambit very difficult. And try as he might, it will be very difficult for Paul to make a credible claim Ronald Reagan stood tall for taming the Pentagon.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 20, 2014
“How Dumb Do We Have To Be?”: Should We Listen To Those Who Were Wrong On Iraq In 2002?
Last week, I wrote a post over at the Washington Post expressing amazement that so many of the people who were so spectacularly wrong on Iraq in 2002 are now returning to tell us what we should do about Iraq in 2014. While it went out under the headline “On Iraq, let’s ignore those who got it all wrong,” I didn’t actually argue specifically that they should be ignored, just that we shouldn’t forget their track records when we hear them now (although I did allow that seeking out John McCain’s opinion on Iraq is like getting lost and deciding that Mr. Magoo is the person you need to ask for directions). Then yesterday, after Dick Cheney popped up with a predictably tendentious criticism of Barack Obama, I wrote another post on the topic of our former vice president, and here I did get a little more explicit about how his opinions should be greeted, after running through some of his more appalling howlers:
There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.
And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen?
Is there a bit of over-enthusiasm with which people like me are attacking the return of the Iraq War caucus? Maybe. Part of it comes from the fact that a decade ago, those of us who were right about the whole thing were practically called traitors because we doubted that Iraq would turn out to be a splendid little war. And part of it comes from the fact that the band of morons who sold and executed the worst foreign policy disaster in American history not only didn’t receive the opprobrium they deserved, they all did quite well for themselves. Paul Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank. Paul Bremer, Tommy Franks, and George Tenet—a trio of incompetents to rival the Three Stooges—each got the Medal of Freedom in honor of their stellar performance. Bill Kristol was rewarded with the single most prestigious perch in the American media, a column in the New York Times. (The drivel he turned out was so appallingly weak that they axed him after a year.) The rest of the war cheerleaders in the media retained their honored positions in the nation’s newspapers and on our TV screens. The worst thing that happened to any of them was getting a cushy sinecure at a conservative think tank.
But Jonathan Chait sounds a note of dissent on the idea that all these people should simply be ignored, and I think he probably has a point:
When you’re trying to set the terms for a debate, you have to do it in a fair way. Demanding accountability for failed predictions is fair. Insisting that only your ideological opponents be held accountable is not fair. Nor is it easy to see what purpose is served by insisting certain people ought to be ignored. The way arguments are supposed to work is that the argument itself, not the identity of the arguer, makes the case. We shouldn’t disregard Dick Cheney’s arguments about Iraq because he’s Dick Cheney. We should disregard them because they’re stupid.
In my Cheney post I did make some attempt to address his argument about Iraq, but it was rather hard to find, because like most conservatives, he (and daughter Liz, with whom he co-wrote that op-ed) are silent on what they would actually do that Barack Obama is not doing. But when it comes to the war brigade, we can do both: We should keep recalling their past blunders, and look thoroughly at what they’re saying now. They can and should be accountable for both their past and their present. The latter is showing no greater promise than the former did.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 19, 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
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