“The Unknown Man”: Rummy Returns And It’s Like He Never Left
Don Rumsfeld, believe it or not, is back. And though I haven’t read Rumsfeld’s Rules, (available in paperback soon!), I’m pretty sure he hasn’t changed a bit. Which is something that I think it’s fair to say is true of most people who worked at high levels for George W. Bush. As far as they’re concerned, they were right all along, about everything. Rumsfeld thinks President Obama is going about this Syria thing all wrong, about which he could well be right, but how can anybody hear him offer opinions about that sort of thing and not remind themselves that he bore as much responsibility as anyone for what was probably the single greatest foreign-policy screw-up in American history?
Anyhow, the real reason I mention Rummy is that Errol Morris has a new documentary about him coming out soon called The Unknown Known. Like Morris’ The Fog of War, his film on Robert McNamara, it’s basically a long interview with Rumsfeld. But unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld has no regrets. Watch this preview all the way to the end: http://youtu.be/NptUMuDAljA
“Not an obsession. A very measured, nuanced approach.”
To me, that self-satisfied smile Rumsfeld gives at the end says, You can try all day, buddy, but I’m never going to say we were wrong. Give me your best shot. Rumsfeld seems to be treating the interview like a game, which in some sense it is. It might seem odd that Rumsfeld would agree to participate in the film, but he has no small amount of self-regard. He no doubt believed that no matter what Morris asked him, he’d be able to give the answer he wanted and not get trapped into saying something embarrassing. In the end, he’d be victorious. Just like he was in Iraq, right?
But the fact that he can describe the administration’s beliefs about Iraq as “Not an obsession. A very measured, nuanced approach” is quite something. You’d expect at least an acknowledgement that things didn’t work out quite as they had hoped. This is, after all, the man who said about phantom WMDs, “We know where they are,” and who predicted about the war, “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months” (another time he said, “Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that”).
The propaganda war over Iraq never ends, I guess. Maybe the bigger the mistake you make, the more you need to convince yourself and others that it was never really a mistake to begin with.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 4, 2013
“Armchair Warriors”: The Syria Question That Congress Must Answer
Congress is asking the wrong questions about Syria. The issue can’t be who wins that country’s civil war. It has to be whether the regime of Bashar al-Assad should be punished for using chemical weapons — and, if the answer is yes, whether there is any effective means of punishment other than a U.S. military strike.
Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey showed the patience of Job this week as House and Senate members grilled them about the impossible, the inconceivable and the irrelevant.
At Wednesday’s hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I thought for a moment that Kerry was going to blow. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) launched into a self-righteous soliloquy about Benghazi, the IRS, the National Security Agency and what he portrayed as Kerry’s longtime aversion to using military force.
Kerry, you may recall, is a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran. Duncan is an armchair warrior.
“I am not going to sit here and be told by you that I don’t have a sense of what the judgment is with respect to this,” Kerry said.
But he held it together and gave Duncan a more civil answer than he deserved. “This is not about getting into Syria’s civil war,” Kerry explained. “This is about enforcing the principle that people shouldn’t be allowed to gas their citizens with impunity.”
For Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the question is why President Obama hasn’t been doing more to shape the outcome of the war. As the price of his vote to authorize a strike, McCain insisted that the resolution approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee include language calling on Obama to “change the military equation on the battlefield.”
I respect McCain’s knowledge and experience on military matters, even when I disagree with him. In this case, I think he’s hallucinating.
In Iraq, with U.S. forces occupying the country and a compliant government installed, it took a huge troop surge and a long counterinsurgency campaign to beat back the jihadists who threatened to take over part of the country. In Syria, with no boots on the ground and a hostile regime clinging to power, how is Obama supposed to ensure that the “good” rebels triumph over the “bad” ones? Why does McCain think we have it in our power to favorably change the equation now?
Let me clarify: I believe that a U.S. strike of the kind being discussed, involving cruise missiles and perhaps other air-power assets, can make it more likely that Assad loses. But I also believe that — absent a major commitment of American forces, which is out of the question — we cannot determine who wins.
For some skeptics on Capitol Hill, the question is why we don’t wait for others to act — the United Nations, perhaps, or some of the 188 other nations that have ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing atrocities such as those committed in Syria.
I guess hope springs eternal, but that’s how long the wait will be. Russia has vetoed every attempt by the U.N. Security Council to act. Britain’s House of Commons has said no. France is willing but won’t go it alone.
Maybe all this reluctance is a warning that we, too, should demur. But let’s at least be honest with ourselves: If we don’t act, nobody will. The clear message to Assad, and to other tyrants, will be that poison gas is frowned upon but not prohibited.
There is no way that Assad can be shamed into contrition and atonement; at this point, he’s fighting not just for power but for his life. He has to believe that if he loses the war and is captured by rebels, be they the “good” ones or the “bad,” he will be tried and executed like Saddam Hussein — or perhaps killed on the spot like Moammar Gaddafi.
If someone has a workable plan to snatch Assad and his henchmen, haul them before the International Criminal Court and put them on trial, I’m all ears. As things stand, however, the possibility of someday facing charges in the Hague must be low on the Syrian dictator’s list of worries.
If Assad and his government are ever to be held accountable for the use of forbidden weapons to murder hundreds of civilians, the only realistic way for that to happen is a punitive, U.S.-led military strike. This is the question that Obama put on the table — and that too many members of Congress seem determined to avoid.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 5, 2013
“For Most, There’s Been No Shared Sacrifice”: Syria And The Myth That Americans Are “War Weary”
Perhaps the most misleading phrase in the debate over Syria is “war weary.” Americans, say commentators and politicians across the political spectrum, are exhausted by a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, with sideshows in Libya and Yemen. Now Syria? Where does it stop? Americans must be weary.
Of exactly what?
The truth is that for most Americans, the constant combat has imposed no burdens, required no sacrifices and involved no disruptions. True, the money spent has been substantial. From 2001 to 2012, reckons the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with related operations cost $1.4 trillion. Although that’s a lot even by Washington standards, it pales next to all federal spending and the economy’s total production. From 2001 to 2012, federal spending totaled $33.3 trillion; the wars were 4 percent of that. Over the same period, the American economy produced $163 trillion of goods and services. War spending equaled nine-tenths of 1 percent of that.
As important, no special tax was ever imposed to pay war costs. They were simply added to budget deficits, so that few, if any, Americans suffered a loss of income. It’s doubtful that much other government spending was crowded out by the wars.
The largest cost, of course, involves Americans killed and those who suffered life-altering wounds, both physical and mental. As of Sept. 3, the Pentagon counted 4,489 deaths connected to the war in Iraq and 2,266 connected to the war in Afghanistan, including some U.S. civilians. To these numbers must be added thousands more with serious injuries. Through September 2011, according to the CBO, 740,000 veterans from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan had received treatment from the Veterans Health Administration. In a study of veterans treated from 2004 to 2009, the CBO found that 21 percent were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, 2 percent with traumatic brain injury and another 5 percent with both.
The pain, suffering, sorrow and anguish of these and other losses are borne by a tiny sliver of Americans: those who joined the volunteer military, plus their families and close friends. There was no draft. There was no shared sacrifice, as there was in World War II, Korea and (to a lesser extent) even Vietnam. Those who have made the sacrifices have a right to feel “weary.” For the rest of us, it’s a self-indulgence.
What many Americans seem to mean by “weary” is “frustrated.” They’re frustrated and disillusioned that so much fighting over so many years has not brought the clear-cut psychological and strategic benefits of “victory.” For others, the lesson is more stark: These foreign military forays were a waste and, in many respects, have done more harm than good. One way or another, there’s a widespread impatience with our engagements when patience is often required for success.
If it is to be useful, the debate over Syria must broach larger issues. The United States cannot be the world’s policeman. It cannot rectify every wrong or redress every atrocity. It cannot impose the “American way of life” and values on diverse peoples who have their own ways of life and values. But the United States isn’t Monaco. Since World War II, we have assumed a sizable responsibility for the international order. We have done this not so much out of idealism as out of self-interest. The large lesson of that war was that American absence from the global stage ultimately contributed to a global tragedy from which we could not remain aloof.
This lesson endures. But it lacks a firm footing in public opinion. Members of the World War II generation have largely died. Their experience is now an abstraction. The new applications of an old doctrine often suffer from carelessness and expedience — sometimes too much eagerness, sometimes too little. We do have overriding interests in a stable global order. To state an obvious case: It cannot be in our interests (or the world’s) for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Whatever we do in Syria must spring from a sober calculation of national interest so that it commands broad public support. The worst outcome would be a retreat justified by nothing more than an exaggerated and artificial sense of “war weariness.”
By: Robert Samuelson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 4, 2013
“The Unknowns That Are Known”: No One Cares What Donald Rumsfeld Or The Cheney’s Think About Syria
A sneering Liz Cheney, looking to unseat Wyoming GOP Sen. Mike Enzi, told a Tea Party town hall in Jackson Hole Tuesday night that she would not support a congressional resolution to back President Obama’s planned Syria strike, deriding him for “an amateurish approach to national security and foreign policy.”
The daughter of the man responsible for fabricating the case for the Iraq war, the man who famously insisted “we will, in fact, be treated as liberators” and who had no plan for when that predictably turned out not to be the case – the daughter of that man is upset that Obama doesn’t seem to have a clear plan for Syria. This news comes on the heels of disgraced former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s partner in war crime, blasting Obama’s plan as “feckless” and deriding him as the “so-called commander in chief.”
So let’s recap: The team responsible for one of the worst decisions in American foreign policy history is kneecapping the president in a time of crisis. Of course, Dick Cheney has been attacking Obama from the beginning, insisting before he was inaugurated that he was making America less safe by promising to end torture and close Guantánamo. But now his daughter is taking her Obama contempt so far that she’s bucking her dad’s neocon friends and resisting the president’s Syria plans.
Cheney’s turnaround is pretty striking. She was a co-founder of the neocon group Keep America Safe, along with always-wrong war-lover William Kristol. TNR’s Marc Tracy has detailed Cheney’s long list of statements backing action against Assad going back to 2007. As an assistant secretary of state she tried to use funds for regime change in Syria and Iran. Just last month, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin (who’s in the running to share Kristol’s title of “always wrong”) listed Cheney as among the rising Republican stars who would buck “the isolationist trend in our party and in the country itself.” But now, running in a state that’s skeptical of more foreign interventions, she’s siding with the isolationists.
Cheney downplays the extent to which she’s split from former GOP allies. “The press will try to portray this Syria debate as a battle between wings of the Republican Party,” she told the friendly right-wing audience. “Don’t believe them.” But in fact there is a split in the GOP, and Cheney is putting herself on Team Rand Paul.
Except she’ll never get to Washington to join Team Rand Paul. Trailing Sen. Mike Enzi by 30 points in recent polls, she sounded a little unhinged in her Jackson Hole remarks, comparing herself to Winston Churchill standing up to Adolf Hitler – although it wasn’t clear who is playing the role of Hitler, Enzi or Obama – and accusing congressional Democrats and Republicans of lying about the depredations of Obamacare. She promised to abolish the EPA, the IRS and the Department of Education.
Cheney also went on a rant against the Jackson Hole News & Guide – the only paper covering her remarks Tuesday – for reporting on the $220 fine she had to pay for misrepresenting her address to get a fishing license.
“Newspapers are dying, and that’s not a bad thing,” she said. “We’re not depending on the Jackson Hole News & Guide to get the news out. We’re depending on ourselves. We’re going to go over their heads.” Cheney then said if each supporter talked to 10 friends about her, they wouldn’t need the newspaper. An audience member then singled out the News & Guide reporter in the crowd, and Cheney supporters refused to be interviewed afterward. Friendly!
That’s the old Cheney charm. Also this past week she got in a fight with her sister Mary when she came out against gay marriage in order to hit the conservative Enzi from the right. The normally quiet Mary Cheney, who is married to her longtime partner Heather Poe, hit her sister back:
“For the record, I love my sister, but she is dead wrong on the issue of marriage,” she wrote.
Even Dick Cheney has come out in support of gay marriage, citing his daughter’s relationship. Poor Liz can’t even find the courage to join the rest of her family. And it’s sad, because she’s opening the rift even though she has almost no chance of unseating Enzi.
But bashing Obama gets her back on the same page as her father, so family holidays may not be so tense after all.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, September 4, 2013
“Reality Check”: Assad’s Use Of Chemical Weapons Is Truly Depraved
“We categorically reject even the idea of using chemical weapons … against our own people,” Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad said this week. “This is crazy, morally this is absolutely unacceptable, and no Syrian … from the government will do it.”
Despite those comments, overwhelming evidence indicates the regime of Bashar al-Assad has deployed chemical weapons on the battlefield in Syria.
The most recent — and by far the most devastating — occurred on August 21, when thousands of people were gassed while they slept in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta.
To realize how depraved it is to use nerve agents on innocent civilians, consider that the attack was “third large-scale use of a chemical weapon in the Middle East and may have broken the longest period in history without such an attack.”
That fact is currently being lost as Congress begins debating whether to approve limited military action in response to the Syrian government’s actions.
Yet that’s the thrust of the Obama administration’s argument.
“Bashar al-Assad now joins the list of Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein [i.e., other rulers who] have used these weapons in time of war,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC on Sunday. “This is of great consequence to Israel, to Jordan, to Turkey, to the region, and to all of us who care about enforcing the international norm with respect to chemical weapons.”
The “threat” of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — nuclear, biological, or chemical — is real, but one of the reasons people are hesitant to advocate a U.S. strike is because the threat of “WMDs” were used as a pretense to hasten the oust Hussein.
The Iraq war notwithstanding, history provides insight into the wickedness of chemical weapons use. That, in turn, informs why the international community has been proactive about neutralizing that threat.
In World War I poison gas was arguably the most feared of all weapons as several countries released more than 1.3 million tons of chemical agents — ranging from simple tear gas to mustard gas — and killed 90,000 men.
The gas, released in open air, spread with the speed and direction of the wind. The same thing happened outside of Damascus on August 21.
By World War II Nazi Germany had developed deadlier gasses and then took air out of the equation by releasing nerve agents in gas chambers. The effect was catastrophic — the largest chambers could kill 2,000 people at once — since the concentration of chemicals is highest in small spaces.
The horrors of the World Wars, as well as the more recent example of Iraq causing 60,000 chemical weapons casualties in their war with Iran in the ’80s, explain why the Obama administration would be aggressively proactive about their use in Syria.
Furthermore, there is the added danger of Syria’s chemical WMDs falling into the hands of extremists who would hesitate much less before wreaking chemical havoc on a part of the world.
That’s why there has been a persistent fear throughout the Syrian conflict that Assad would transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based terrorist group and Iranian proxy that has more than 60,000 rockets pointed at Israel.
Syria and it’s allies have insisted that Assad is not crazy enough to deploy WMDs on his people. On Friday Russian President Vladimir Putin said it would be “utter nonsense” for Syria’s government to provoke opponents with such attacks.
But overwhelming evidence indicates that he did just that. Now it’s just a matter of what the international community is going to do about it.
As Obama asked “every member of Congress and every member of the global community” on Saturday:
“What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?”
By: Michael Kelley, Business Insider, September 1, 2013
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