“Their Own Genre Of Stupidity”: On Iraq, Let’s Ignore Those Who Got It All Wrong
At noon today, President Obama issued his first statement on the deteriorating situation on Iraq. “This is not solely or even primarily a military challenge,” he said. “The United States will do our part, but understand that ultimately it’s up to the Iraqis as a sovereign nation to solve their problems.”
Obama left the door open to unspecified “actions,” but repeated that the Iraqis themselves had to seize the opportunity that the years of American effort gave them.
This will no doubt be greeted by the President’s opponents with something akin to apoplexy. They will be arguing that in fact the problem does have a military solution, that the U.S. can solve it, and that whatever is happening, everything would be better if we applied more force.
We have now reached the rather ironic situation in Iraq where we find ourselves allied with Iran in an effort to save the corrupt and thuggish government of Nouri al-Maliki, while the army we spent eight years training falls apart. I’m not going to pretend to have unique insight into Iraqi politics (I’d suggest reading Marc Lynch, for starters, as a way of getting up to speed on what has led to this point).
But there are few people who understand Iraq less than the Republican politicians and pundits who are being sought out for their comments on the current situation.
As you watch the debate on this issue, you should remind yourself that the most prominent voices being heard are the very ones who brought us the Iraq War in the first place, who promised that everything was simple and the only question was whether we’d be “strong” and “decisive” enough — the same thing they’re saying today. They’re the ones who swore that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, that he had a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that the war would be quick, easy and cheap, that since Iraq was a largely secular country we wouldn’t have to worry about sectarian conflict, and that democracy would spread throughout the region in short order, bringing peace and prosperity along with it.
We can start with the man on every TV producer and print reporter’s speed dial, John McCain. McCain does provide something important to journalists: whatever the issue of the moment is, he can be counted on to offer angry, bitter criticism of the Obama administration, giving the “balance” every story needs. The fact that he has never demonstrated the slightest bit of understanding of Iraq is no bar at all to being the most quoted person on the topic.
For context, here’s a nice roundup of some of the things McCain said when he was pushing to invade Iraq in the first place. When asked if Iraqis were going to greet us as liberators, he answered, “Absolutely.” He said, “Post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is going to be paid for by the Iraqis” with their oil wealth (the war ended up costing the American taxpayer upwards of $2 trillion). And my favorite: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along.”
The conflict between Sunnis and Shiites is the central dynamic of the Iraq conflict, of course. Yet today, the media once again seek out John McCain’s wisdom and insight on Iraq, which is kind of like saying, “Jeez, it looks like we might be lost — we really need to ask Mr. Magoo for directions.”
Of late, he has a habit of walking out in the middle of briefings where he might actually learn what’s going on so he can head to the cameras and express his dudgeon. His current genius idea is for the administration to rehire David Petraeus and send him to Iraq, where he’ll…do something or other. He showed his deep knowledge yesterday by saying “Al Qaeda is now the richest terrorist organization in history,” apparently unaware that ISIS, the group sweeping through Iraq, is not in fact the same thing as Al Qaeda.
And the rest of the neocon gang is getting back together. Here’s Lindsey Graham advocating for American airstrikes — and I promise you that if the administration does in fact launch them, Graham will say they weren’t “strong” enough. Here’s Max Boot saying that what we need is just short of another invasion of Iraq: “U.S. military advisers, intelligence personnel, Predators, and Special Operations Forces, along with enhanced military aid, in return for political reforms designed to bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together.” Former Bush administration official and torture advocate Marc Thiessen is appalled that Barack Obama squandered George W. Bush’s glorious Iraq victory.
And Bill Kristol, who may have done more than any single person outside the Bush administration to make the war a reality, and whose predictions and assessments about the war were so spectacularly wrong they constituted their own genre of stupidity? He’ll be on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, so he can enlighten us about what’s really going on.
We’re facing yet another awful and complex situation in the Middle East where we have a limited set of options, and none of them are good. But whenever you hear anyone say that the answer is simple and that being “strong” is the key — as one conservative after another will no doubt be saying in the coming days — don’t forget what happened the last time the country listened to them.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 13, 2014
“Are Our Memories Really So Short?”: It’s Impossible To Reconcile Members Of The Bush/Cheney Team Pretending To Have Credibility
Politico published a piece over the weekend about President Obama’s challenges in Iraq, which was otherwise unremarkable except for a quote about midway through the article.
“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 blase,” 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.”
The piece added that Feith would, true to form, like to see the White House deploying a “residual force” to Iraq.
That Feith disagrees with the Obama administration hardly comes as a surprise, but what was striking about all of this is the context of his criticisms: Politico presents Feith’s condemnations as if they have value. Indeed, Feith is presented to readers as a credible voice whose assessments of U.S. policy in Iraq have merit.
The article never mentions, even in passing, that Feith was a national laughingstock during his tenure in the Bush/Cheney administration, getting practically everything about U.S. policy in Iraq backwards. General Tommy Franks, the former Commander of the U.S. Central Command, once famously referred to Feith as “the dumbest f***ing guy on the planet.”
And yet, there Feith is in Politico, taking shots at Obama, without so much as a hint that news consumers may – just may – want to take his perspective with a healthy dose of skepticism, given his humiliating track record.
Of course, my point is not to pick on Politico alone. It’s not the only major news organization that’s stumbled into familiar mistakes. Take the major Sunday shows, for example.
Bill Kristol, for example, was on “This Week” yesterday, sharing his criticisms of Obama’s handling of Iraq – and no one laughed in his face. On “Meet the Press,” viewers saw Paul Wolfowitz. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made not one, but two Sunday show appearances, popping up on “Face the Nation” and “State of the Union.”
When most media professionals reflect on the period preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there’s a general consensus that it was not American journalism’s finest hour. News organizations needed to be skeptical, but weren’t. Reporters needed to push back against dubious sources, but didn’t. Nearly everyone in the business realized that we’d all have to be better next time.
Over the weekend, then, it was hard not to wonder: are our memories really so short?
More broadly, it’s nearly impossible to reconcile members of the Bush/Cheney team pretending to have credibility. Feith is an easy target, but he’s hardly the only one: Dick Cheney is offering guidance to congressional Republicans on, of all things, foreign policy; Donald Rumsfeld still shows in face in public and is sought after in GOP circles; and Condoleezza Rice presents herself as a successful former official.
The political world never fully came to terms with the scope and the breadth of the Bush/Cheney failures. In more ways than one, we’re still dealing with the consequences.
Update: Regina Schrambling reminds me that Paul Bremer has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s another piece of a twisted mosaic.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 16, 2014
“All The Usual Suspects”: As Iraq Implodes, Neocons Still Have No Plan Except ‘Blame Obama’
Divided between neoconservative ultra-hawks and libertarian isolationists, today’s Republican Party is hardly a steady influence on American foreign policy. But there is one thing that can be reliably expected from every right-wing faction in Washington: Whenever disaster threatens, they eagerly cast blame on Barack Obama – and utter any falsehood that may be used to castigate him.
As the failed state of Iraq strains under attack from a jihadist force – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – all the usual suspects are popping up on the Senate floor to denounce the president. Ignoring more than a decade of miserable history in which most of them played ignominious parts, these politicians now claim that if only the president had listened to them, the current disaster would have been averted somehow.
“Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right,” said the Arizona senator, praising himself and his South Carolina sidekick. “Our failure to leave forces on Iraq is why Sen. Graham and I predicted this would happen.”
Nobody with a functioning memory can take such arguments seriously.
By the time our troops left Iraq at the end of 2011, the war had inflicted such immense damage on our military and our communities that Americans were in no mood for further misadventures. Not since Vietnam had a ruinous policy come so close to breaking America’s armed forces. The fiscal damage was equally serious – trillions of dollars in current and future costs, mostly borrowed from China. The American people wanted out.
Even had we wanted to stay, however, the Iraqis no longer desired our presence – as they had made absolutely clear in their electoral choices and their subsequent negotiations with both the Bush and Obama administrations over keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. It was Bush who signed the Status of Forces Agreement in December 2008 that set a deadline of January 1, 2012 for the departure of all U.S. forces – unless the Iraqis negotiated and ratified a new deal to maintain our troops there.
No such deal was ever made, however, because the Iraqis wanted our troops out – even the tiny force of roughly 3,000 advisors that Obama hoped to provide. He was left with no choice because the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to grant legal immunity from prosecution to any U.S. troops. Imagine what McCain and Graham would have said had Obama decided to leave American officers and troops vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment by local Iraqi warlords – especially when such an incident inevitably occurred.
So when Republican senators leap up and start barking about Obama’s refusal to leave troops on the ground, they either don’t remember what actually happened or – sadly but more likely – hope to deceive this country’s amnesia-addled voters.
Neither McCain nor any of the other trash-talking statesmen on the Republican side has much useful advice to offer the president. They say we shouldn’t have pulled our troops out, but they sure don’t want to send them back in. Drop some bombs on the jihadist camps, they suggest – knowing very well that won’t do much to clean up this horrific mess.
Still they insist on talking about Iraq, loudly and constantly, as if someone else created the mess and they have the answers. They need to be reminded just as loudly that it is their mess and they still have no idea what to do.
Americans should try to remember how this happened – even if the disgraced figures who promoted the invasion of Iraq will never accept responsibility for squandering trillions of American dollars, thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives for what could most charitably be called a massive, irreparable blunder. Never mind the nonsense about the weapons of mass destruction – which nobody has yet found there, by the way. Absolutely none of the predictions about Iraq by the neocons in and around the Bush administration proved accurate. None of their strategies provided real development or security. And all of their grand schemes for regional stability and democracy simply crumbled.
Instead of serving as a sturdy bulwark against extremism, the Shia-dominated government of Iraq immediately allied itself with the neighboring mullah regime in Iran. The curse of sectarian warfare, famously dismissed by William Kristol as a chimera, has exploded into a continuous catastrophic reality that threatens regional security and may create a fresh haven for terrorism.
It is hard not to wonder why anyone still listens to McCain, Kristol, and company — especially on this grave issue. But if they insist on serving up blame, let them step up first to accept their overwhelming share.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 13, 2014
“Eaten By The Tiger”: Eric Cantor And The Tea Party Purge
In 1961, John F. Kennedy said: “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”
In November of 2010, Eric Cantor said: “The Tea Party are … an organic movement that played a tremendously positive role in this election. I mean, certainly, it produced an outcome beneficial to our party when you’re picking up at least 60-some seats.”
Yes, Republican leaders happily rode the Tea Party tiger when doing so was convenient. Now, Cantor has fallen to the very forces he and his colleagues unleashed and encouraged. After an electoral earthquake that shocked the party’s system, the GOP’s top brass will be scrambling to figure out what lessons they should draw.
Unfortunately, they’ll probably absorb the wrong ones. Rather than taking on the Tea Party and battling for a more moderate and popular form of conservatism, they are likely to cower and accommodate even more.
Because immigration was a central issue used against Cantor by David Brat, the insurgent professor who defeated him by 11 points, the immediate betting is that House leaders will once and for all declare immigration reform dead for this session of Congress. Governing is likely to become even less important, if that’s possible, to House Speaker John Boehner. Just holding a fearful and fractious GOP caucus together will become an even greater preoccupation.
It might usefully occur to some Republicans that Cantor was not their party’s only incumbent challenged by the Tea Party in a primary on Tuesday. In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham overwhelmed six Tea Party challengers, securing 57 percent of the vote and avoiding a runoff.
While it’s true that Graham did what he could to satisfy his party’s ultras — for long stretches, it seemed that not a day went by when he didn’t use the word “Benghazi” — he did not, as Cantor did, twist this way and that on the immigration question. On the contrary, Graham defended his support of immigration reform and his vote for a bipartisan Senate bill.
We’ll never know if Cantor would have done better if he had held steady on the subject. What we do know is that sending out campaign literature bragging about a news story that declared him “the No. 1 guy standing between the American people and immigration reform” did nothing to placate or persuade those who were out to defeat him.
Republicans who simply want to keep tacking right to maintain their power should also note that if the Tea Party helped mobilize support for them in 2010, it now threatens to reduce the party to a right-wing sect.
The movement is very good at organizing its own, but it is doing little to attract new voters the GOP’s way. If anything, the party’s rightward drift is pushing people out. In December 2010, 33 percent of Americans told Gallup’s pollsters they considered themselves Republicans. Last month only 24 percent did. Although the turnout was up in the Brat-Cantor race, participation has been low in most of this year’s Republican primaries.
Appeasing the Tea Party could create a vicious cycle: the more the party is defined by a hard core, the easier it will be for the most conservative voters to dominate it in primaries involving only the most ardent.
Cantor actually showed signs of understanding this. He gave speeches, including his “Making Life Work” address in February 2013, that at least acknowledged the need to address the practical worries of Americans who are not particularly ideological and don’t wave “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.
Politicians, he said, needed to respond to citizens’ “real-life concerns.” These included such basics as “where can you find an affordable home in a good neighborhood to raise your kids?” and “which health care plan can I afford?” and “will the children make it through high school and get into a college of their choice, and if so, can you afford it?”
Yet Cantor may have been most comfortable on safe conservative ground. He tried to start a practical policy conversation but did not take bold next steps to modify the direction the party took in 2010.
What the Tea Party giveth, the Tea Party taketh away. Its energy in 2010 was directed against President Obama and helped Cantor become House majority leader. Now its sights are set on purifying and purging the Republican Party. But purges, as Cantor has learned, are painful. They can also be dangerous to a party’s long-term well-being.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 11, 2014
“The Midterm Manifesto”: Senate Republicans Want The GOP To Make All Sorts Of Promises It Can’t Keep
Senate Republicans may be about to make the same mistake they often do when attempting to outline a platform: proposing policies that are impossible to implement.
Politico reports that a bloc of Senate Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham, “is agitating for party leaders to unveil a policy manifesto” that would explain to voters what the GOP would do if it took the majority in the midterm elections. This is yet another sign that the Republican Party realizes it needs a new political strategy, now that Obamacare has rebounded. A new “Contract With America”—the party’s midterm platform in 1994, on which this 2014 manifesto would be modeled—could prove successful at the polls.
But as a governing strategy, this manifesto will only make legislating more difficult if the GOP takes the Senate. That’s because Republicans have a bad habit of overpromising.
In 2012, Mitt Romney promised a mathematically impossible tax-reform plan to lower all rates by 20 percent and cut the corporate rate, making up the revenue by closing unspecified tax preferences. When House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp released his tax reform plan in February, he attempted to cut rates and consolidate the tax code, but struggled to make up the lost revenue, eventually creating a top rate of 35 percent, implementing a bank tax, and taxing a percentage of capital gains as ordinary income. Republicans predictably ran away from Camp’s reasonable plan.
Marco Rubio has proposed reforming the federal government’s antipoverty system. But his plan is mathematically impossible: He proposes increasing benefits for childless workers, keeping them unchanged for everyone else, and not increasing the deficit. He has yet to release legislative language for the plan, but those three goals are irreconcilable.
It’s hard to imagine what Senate Republicans could unite behind that would appeal to most of the party. If tax reform ends up in a Senate Republican policy manifesto, it will only reinforce the impossible Republican standard of drastically lowering rates and eliminating tax preferences to avoid increasing the deficit. This is exactly what Representative Paul Ryan did in his budget this year, where he reiterated his support for two tax brackets with rates at 10 and 25 percent. Camp tried to do that, but came up short. The dual-rate structure simply doesn’t raise enough revenue. As the likely replacement for Camp as chair of Ways and Means, Ryan now has made tax reform very hard to accomplish.
Undoubtedly, the midterm manifesto would propose replacing Obamacare—but replace it with what? Senators Tom Coburn, Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch unveiled the Patient CARE Act in January, which actually had a lot in common with Obamacare. It didn’t earn much support among the GOP for that reason. What plan could Senate Republicans unite behind that does more than just repeal Obamacare?
Will the platform contain a balanced budget amendment, as Newt Gingrich and House Republicans included in their “Contract with America”? Republicans would face stiff Democratic opposition to such an amendment, but the GOP may also have to answer how they would close budget deficits if the amendment somehow became law. They certainly wouldn’t increase revenue. Instead, it would require even steeper spending cuts—$1.2 trillion more than even Paul Ryan envisioned in his budget. The Ryan budget already takes such a huge cut from programs for low-income Americans that it is hard to see how another $1.2 trillion in cuts wouldn’t need to come from defense spending or Social Security. Those are two areas Republicans don’t want to touch.
All this speculation may be moot. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has yet to offer an opinion on the proposed manifesto, according to Politico, while John Cornyn, the Senate minority whip, argued against it. “Even if we have a good election, President Obama is still going to be president,” Cornyn said. “I don’t think we should be in the business of overpromising.”
If only the party took that advice more often.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, May 27, 2014
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