“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
“No Substitute For A Saudi-Iranian Dialogue”: Blame These Two Countries, Not The United States, For The Current Crisis In Iraq
There is plenty of blame to go around for the current mess in Iraq, but reprimanding Washington, Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will solve nothing. The real fault should be assigned to those actors who, despite having tremendous influence and real leverage over the majority of the Iraqi antagonists, have so far decided not to intervene politically. That’s Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A dialogue between the Iranians and the Saudis is desperately needed not just to stop Iraq’s bleeding and prevent another full-blown civil war, but to extinguish at least the major Sunni-Shi’ite fires throughout the Middle East that are fueling this violence and chaos.
This is not a naive call for putting an end to an old and fierce rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran and to an historic feud between the two biggest branches of Islam. That’s just not going to happen. Instead, this is a realistic invitation for two regional heavyweights who, for better or worse, speak for the majority of Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East, to negotiate a path out of this catastrophic situation. Call it arms control, dialogue, or cooperation. The bottom line is that they need to sit down and talk about ways to manage or stabilize their regional competition by agreeing to hard rules that would benefit both, otherwise Arab League chief Amr Moussa’s nightmare scenario of the gates of hell opening in the Middle East will turn into a reality.
In Iraq, Al-Maliki is a big part of the problem, but he is a problem that the Iranians (along with the Americans) created and can easily solve. Saudi Arabia knows that Al-Maliki is Iran’s man in Baghdad, so the first item on the hypothetical Saudi-Iranian negotiating agenda is a new power-sharing arrangement in Iraq that removes Al-Maliki and reintegrates the Sunnis into political life. Because the Shi’ites are the majority in Iraq, the balance of power will always tilt in their favor, but this doesn’t have to translate into Sunni exclusion and Shi’ite domination (as it has been the case under Al-Maliki), and the Iranians and the Saudis can negotiate that.
In Bahrain, Yemen, and Lebanon, similar realistic bargains can take place. Iran should have no business fomenting unrest in Saudi Arabia’s backyard: in Bahrain by supporting radical segments of the opposition there, and in Yemen, where Iran is suspected of sending arms to the Houthi rebels. In Lebanon, while Iran will not instruct Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons (it’s much more complicated than that), it certainly can influence the powerful Shi’ite group’s future in ways that can help it address the concerns of Lebanon’s Sunni players (and Christians and Druze), the most relevant of whom are allied with Riyadh. And even inside the Saudi Kingdom, Iran should reassure Saudi Arabia that it has no intentions of stirring trouble in the Eastern Province, which is predominantly Shi’ite.
Syria will be the toughest nut to crack. The Saudi-Iranian differences there are most acute. Saudi Arabia has spent a vast amount of material resources to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Iran has had to incur even heavier costs to do the exact opposite. At present, Iran seems to have the upper hand in Syria, but the conflict is anything but stable and Saudi Arabia has not said its final word yet. Progress on the other regional issues could help pave the way for some sort of deal that cuts Saudi losses, caps Iranian gains, and preserves major Saudi and Iranian security interests in the country, including the defeat of extremist elements that are associated with ISIL and Al Qaeda.
As the United States mulls its options in Iraq, the smartest thing it can do is encourage, with the help of Britain, France, and Russia, the Iranians and the Saudis to announce a summit for high-level, comprehensive political talks between their leaders.
This is the most important conversation that should be happening today in the Middle East, and we are not too far from it. Today, there is an open invitation from Saudi Arabia to a dialogue with Iran, but Iran has yet to respond. Instead, it seems to be more interested in brokering deals with Washington in Vienna by offering security cooperation in Iraq. A potential U.S.-Iran meeting in Vienna could produce tactical gains but it is absolutely no substitute for a Saudi-Iranian strategic dialogue.
By: Bilal Y. Saab, Senior Fellow for Middle East Security at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security: The New Republic, June 16, 2014
“Dick Cheney, Did You Really Want To Go There?”: He Was Wrong In Every Prediction He Made About The Iraq War
The infinitely valuable Yiddish word chutzpah is defined as “shameless audacity” or “impudence.”
It’s singularly appropriate for the astonishing op-ed from former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. It’s not every day that a leader of the previous administration suggests that the current president is a “fool” and accuses him of intentionally weakening the United States.
“President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch,” the Cheneys write. Are they charging our president with treason? “President Obama,” they write, “is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”
Squandered our freedom?
“Only a fool,” they say, “would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.” As if this is what Obama is doing — and as if it weren’t the invasion Cheney so passionately supported that vastly strengthened Iran’s hand long before Obama took office.
The Cheney polemic would be outrageous even if our former vice president’s record on Iraq had been one of absolute clairvoyance. As it happens, he was wrong in almost every prediction he made about the war.
On March 16, 2003, days before the war started, Cheney sat down with the late Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press” for what still stands as the most revealing of the prewar interviews. Cheney was adamant that “to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.”
“We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he famously said and proceeded to play down the very sectarian divisions that are plaguing the country now. Russert asked: “And you are convinced the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy?” Cheney replied quickly: “They have so far.” He went on:
“If you look at the opposition, they’ve come together, I think, very effectively, with representatives from Shia, Sunni and Kurdish elements in the population. They understand the importance of preserving and building on an Iraqi national identity. They don’t like to have the U.S., for example, come in and insist on dealing with people sort of on a hyphenated basis — the Iraqi-Shia, Iraqi-Sunni — but rather to focus on Iraq as a nation and all that it can accomplish as a nation, and we try to be sensitive to those concerns. I think the prospects of being able to achieve this kind of success, if you will, from a political standpoint, are probably better than they would be for virtually any other country and under similar circumstances in that part of the world.”
Ah yes, regime change would work out just fine — better than fine. “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad,” Cheney had told the Veterans of Foreign Wars seven months earlier. “Moderates throughout the region would take heart.” Plus a bonus: “Our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” This was the war that would cure all that ailed us.
Thanks to the Cheney op-ed, we can see how Obama’s hawkish critics are out to create a double standard. Whenever they are called out for how mistaken they were about Iraq in the first place, they piously lecture against “relitigating the past” and say we must instead look forward. At the same time, many of them feel perfectly free to trash the president in extreme and even vile terms.
I am all for looking forward and trying to find an approach that squares the many contradictions we face: of needing to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria while also pushing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to stop pursuing anti-Sunni policies that are empowering the forces we need to turn back; of being on the same side as Iran in Iraq’s current emergency but on opposite sides over Syria; of wanting to avoid steps that will make things worse while not being paralyzed; and of not plunging into the middle of a Shiite-Sunni civil war while trying to stop the region’s descent into chaos.
Obama sees these contradictions and says he won’t act rashly. You don’t have to agree with Obama’s every move to prefer his prudence to the utter certainty that “we will be greeted as liberators” and to a habit of underestimating the costs of military action.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 18, 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
“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
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 