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“Just Do As I Did”: Did Donald Rumsfeld Counsel President Obama To Lie So As To Create The Justification For Bombing Syria?

Every now and then, one sees something happen right before one’s eyes that defies the laws of time, space, reality and reason. Such a moment occurred yesterday during a truly remarkable appearance by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Neil Cavuto’s Fox Fox Business News program.

During the interview, Rumsfeld appeared to criticize the Obama Administration for failing to present a supportable argument as to why an attack on Syria is in our nation’s best interest.

“There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation,” said Rumsfeld.

On the surface, it would appear that Rumsfeld’s criticism was meant to remind the President that—before tossing in those Tomahawk missiles—he needs to present the American people (who largely oppose any American involvement in Syria) with a solid explanation as to why it is in our nation’s best interest to become involved with the Syrian civil war.

I actually agree with the substance of Rumsfeld remarks on their face. While there is nothing to confirm that President Obama has yet to make a decision to take military action in Syria, it is important that the public know all of the facts and be privy to the administration’s thinking should the President ultimately decide to become embroiled in yet more Middle East madness.

However, I say that I agree with Rumsfeld’s remarks “on their face” because I find it nearly impossible to believe that the one time Secretary of Defense would dare to offer such a remark—given his own stunningly horrendous track record on the subject—unless he had  another motive entirely in offering such advice to the President—a motive I would likely not agree with in any way whatsoever.

When one has led one of the most heinous conspiracies in modern American history—a conspiracy to create such a justification for war out of whole cloth and lies for the purpose of tricking the country into supporting an unnecessary invasion—I don’t think it unreasonable to expect that this individual should forever waive the right to advise presidents, politicians or the local street sweeper on such matters. This is particularly true when that individual’s efforts to fabricate and sell a justification for war has led to the death, disfigurement or disability of thousands of Americans while wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

Donald Rumsfeld is the perfect embodiment of such an individual and he must know it—so much so that it would seem inconceivable that a man who has committed the crimes against his fellow Americans that Donald Rumsfeld has committed could possibly have the hubris to appear on TV to advise a sitting president on the importance of justifying military action.

That is, unless Rumsfeld had something very different in mind.

Maybe Donald Rumsfeld was attempting to send President Obama a very different message—if you can’t provide the country with a fact-based, valid justification for bombing Syria in retribution for the Assad government’s gassing its own citizens in the dead of night, then do as I did and get busy creating enough facts to make it look good.

After all, who knows how to fabricate a justification for war better than Donald Rumsfeld?

In case you’ve forgotten, here are but a few of Rumsfeld’s greatest hits—

As recounted by former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, the first order of business during the Bush Administration’s very first national security meeting was toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. According to O’Neill, the discussion was  “all about finding a way to do it. The president saying, “Go find me a way to do this.”

Bush didn’t need to tell Donald Rumsfeld twice. The record is all too clear that the Secretary of Defense gladly took up his boss’s challenge and went looking for a story he could sell to the country in order to take out Saddam Hussein.

When the 9-11 attacks happened, Rumsfeld saw his opportunity.

Before long, we were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he would use against American interest if we failed to topple his regime. Of course, no such weapons have ever been located.

Then we were introduced to the lie purporting that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium-rich yellowcake from Nigeria in furtherance of his plans to create atomic weapons to be used against American interests—despite ample, proven factual evidence that this was never the case.

And, of course, the greatest hit of them all, Rumsfeld and friends sought to convince us that Saddam was somehow behind the 9/11 attack despite it being crystal clear to the Department of Defense and the remainder of the government that this was never the case.

While the record is clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney sought to tie Saddam to the 9-11 attack within hours of the first plane slamming into the World Trade Center, many supporters of Rumsfeld continue to claim that this was never the case. Yet, the proof of this effort has always been available for all to see, memorialized in writing in the March 18, 2003 letter from President Bush to Congress seeking authorization to use force against Iraq.

“(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

So outrageous is the notion that Donald Rumsfeld would appear on television and presume to offer his counsel on the importance of the administration setting forth a legitimate case to engage in military action before doing so, one struggles to understand how the irony and stomach churning result of Rumsfeld’s appearance could possibly escape him or anyone else.

Accordingly, a sane individual is left to conclude that either Donald Rumsfeld is either the most despicably clueless man in America—a real possibility, I grant you—or that he was trying to tell the current occupant of the White House to do as he did—if you want to go to war, just lie.

Either way, Donald Rumsfeld has no standing nor right to speak a word on the subject of justifying military action unless it is to provide the nation with a full confession of his own terrible sins. To presume otherwise is an unspeakable offense to the American public, particularly when it comes to those who lost loved ones in a well-packaged, falsely justified and wholly unnecessary war based solely on Donald Rumsfeld’s lies.

 

By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, August 29, 2013

August 30, 2013 Posted by | National Security | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Thank You And Goodnight”: My Fellow Americans, Barack Obama Is The President, Not An Action-Movie Hero

Sometimes it appears that everybody in Washington yearns for an action-hero president to make them feel important. That’s never more apparent than during a crisis like the Syrian civil war President Obama stands accused of “dithering” about.

Of course, his chief journalistic accusers are columnists Maureen Dowd and Charles Krauthammer, of the New York Times and Washington Post respectively. Dowd turns everything into a movie scenario. She wrote a column about George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier stunt that’s almost too embarrassing to quote.

“Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone,” Dowd wrote. “He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around.”

Sure, there was mockery in Dowd’s Top Gun take on Bush’s “joystick politics,” but hero worship too. Here’s how her imaginary flyboy summed up America’s adventure in Iraq: “Aggression breeds patriotism, and patriotism curbs dissent. Aggression has made Democrats cower, the press purr and the world quake. Aggression—you mark my words—will not only save humanity, but it will soon color all the states Republican red.”

So how did that work out?

Ten years later, Krauthammer thinks things would have worked out better if the U.S. still had troops occupying Iraq—the better to menace Iran and Syria too, formerly Saddam Hussein’s job. Obama, he opines, “simply does not understand that if America withdraws from the scene, it creates a vacuum that invites hostile outside intervention. A superpower’s role in a regional conflict is deterrence.”

Also known as perpetual war in the Middle East.

Even Bill Clinton famously piled on, which is what set Dowd off. At a public forum in New York, he explained that Obama risked looking “like a total wuss” if he blamed opinion polls showing that 80 percent of Americans oppose U.S. intervention in Syria for his own indecisiveness. Clinton said that presidents sometimes have to act, “and hope to God you can sell it.”

It’s not clear that Clinton spelled out exactly what a take-charge guy like himself would be doing in Syria—which may be a good thing, given his wife’s key role in the Obama administration’s wait-and-see policy.

Indeed the former Secretary of State’s pronouncement at a 2012 conference in Istanbul that dictator Bashar al Assad needed to leave Syria contributed mightily to the White House’s predicament. Taking sides in a sectarian civil war while refusing to get involved wasn’t terribly clever. That Clinton reportedly urged Obama to arm anti-Assad Sunni rebels makes the diplomatic blunder no less egregious.

Now that the Syrian dictator, with Russian and Iranian assistance, seems on the verge of defeating his enemies, President Obama has agreed to provide small arms to rebel groups—something unlikely to prove decisive.

Asked how he imagined Syria after Assad, a rebel commander told the New York Times’ Bill Keller “maybe Somalia plus Afghanistan.” In short, chaos and slaughter, a horrifying prospect to the crusading editor, who nevertheless thinks Obama needs to get the U.S. more deeply involved in deciding which mob of Syrian religious fanatics gets to massacre its enemies.

Perhaps sensitive to criticism, President Obama gave an extraordinarily frank interview to CBS’s Charlie Rose. “This argument that somehow had we gone in earlier or heavier in some fashion,” he said, “that the tragedy and chaos taking place in Syria wouldn’t be taking place, I think is wrong.”

In essence, the president argues that there are no good options in Syria and never were. Would establishing a no-fly zone, for example, mean bombing Damascus? What about civilian casualties? And what happens if chemical weapons stored there get hit?

“Unless you’ve been involved in those conversations,” he said, “then it’s kind of hard for you to understand the complexity of the situation and how we have to not rush into one more war in the Middle East.”

In other words, no Barack Obama doll to match the official “TOP GUN George W. Bush 12-Inch Action Figure in Flight Suit” available from Amazon.com. Also, however, no 10-year occupation of Syria, no thousands of American dead and hundreds of billions of dollars lost in the desert.

Instead, Daniel W. Drezner argues in Foreign Policy, Obama’s stalling constitutes a kind of cynical realpolitik American presidents can’t openly admit: “[t]his is simply the United States engaging in its own form of asymmetric warfare.  For the low, low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East.”

Here’s what Obama ought to say, a friend wrote recently: “My fellow Americans. I don’t give a rat’s [posterior] who wins the civil war in Syria. And neither should you. Thank you and good night.”

In effect, he has.

 

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 26, 2013

June 27, 2013 Posted by | Foreign Policy | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Not All Interventions Are Imperialist”: On Syria, The Left Should Not Forget History

The most vocal opposition to President Barack Obama’s promise to send arms to the Syrian rebels is coming from the political left—to which I normally would consider myself allied. Writing in the Huffington Post, M. J. Rosenberg calls it a return to “19th century imperialism.” John Nichols writes in The Nation that “the notion that the Syrian mess is an American problem, or that the United States can or should choose a favorite in the fight, is highly debatable.” Similar statements can be found in Mother Jones and In These Times.

The left’s opposition to American intervention is Syria is not tactical or prudential. These authors are not arguing that intervention is futile because the rebels have already lost or because al Qaeda has penetrated the opposition or because the war has become a proxy contest in the Middle East. These are legitimate tactical concerns, but the left’s opposition is based on principle, not tactics. It says that the United States should not engage in interventions at all. The most common reference point is George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But Rosenberg also groups Obama’s intervention in Syria with the interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan (in the early 1980s and after September 11), and Libya.

I think this position is wrong.  By identifying Obama’s impulse in Syria with Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada or Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the left rules out any possibility of a benign intervention for humanitarian or for worthy geopolitical ends. I also think this position is contrary to the traditional stance of the American and European lefts toward foreign civil wars or wars of independence. That, of course, doesn’t show the position is wrong; but it does suggest that these leftists are betraying their own, and my, historical ideals.

What is happening in Syria is different from, say, what was happening in Iraq in early 2003, the Dominican Republic in 1965, or Grenada in 1983. The Obama administration is not using a supposed threat to American interests to intervene unilaterally and impose its will on a country that is relatively at peace, nor is it intervening (as it did in Guatemala or Vietnam) to back an unpopular regime against a rebellion. American intervention in Syria most closely resembles intervention in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The U.S. is acting with other countries, and it is not trying to impose its own rule or to prop up a client regime.

In Syria, there is a civil war going on, and there is a reasonable moral case for backing the rebels against the government. The war began with the Assad regime brutally suppressing peaceful democratic reform protests. The war has already taken as many as 120,000 lives. Assad forces have laid waste to major cities.  Some dictators retain a lingering loyalty to their nation and its people, but Bashar Al Assad appears engaged in a war of personal survival. It’s not genocide, but a patria-cide—and belongs on the list of crimes against humanity that other nations should not tolerate.

My own position reflects the historical stance of the American and European left going back to the American and French revolutions. The left in the United States and Europe repeatedly pressured sympathetic governments to defend liberty and independence internationally. Nichols, following the lead of other anti-interventionists on the left and right, quotes John Quincy Adams from 1821 saying that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But it’s worth looking at the context in which Adams made that statement. A whole variety of movements, editorial pages, and politicians, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were urging Adams to back the Greek struggle for independence against the Turks and Latin American countries’ struggles against Spanish rule. There were a few hotheads calling for the U.S. Navy to steam into the Aegean, but the bulk of proposals, and the ones that concerned Adams, were for recognition or for sending emissaries to the Greeks or Latin Americans. But Adams rejected any initiative.

Over the next 150 years, the left in the U.S. and Europe has urged support for the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Spanish Republicans in the Civil War, the African National Congress in apartheid-era South Africa, and independence for Algeria, Vietnam, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa.  Henry Wallace—recently held up by Oliver Stone as a paragon of the left—supported American intervention in the Korean peninsula in 1950. Until recently, the left has always drawn a distinction between these kind of interventions and interventions aimed at buttressing imperial or neo-imperial rule. So the left opposed intervention in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Iraq. But operating in the shadow of these fiascos, much of the left today has refused to back any intervention. That has included Syria today, the Balkans in the mid-1990s, and, incredibly, the attempt to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991.

I remain perplexed about what the United States can do to help the Syrian rebels. I am not a military expert, and I don’t know what is involved in setting up a no-fly zone. I think that whatever we do, we have to do with other countries. And I believe that we have to avoid any commitment to policing a post-Assad Syria. These are reservations that the Obama administration seems to share. But I have no doubt that we should try to do something to rid the world of the Assad regime. And I say that as a card-carrying member of the American left.

By: John B. Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 22, 2013

June 24, 2013 Posted by | Foreign Policy | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Regrettable Indeed”: John McCain’s Allies In Syria Are Suspected Terrorist’s Who’ve Sworn Allegiance To Al Qaeda

A couple of weeks ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was stressing his position for U.S. policy in Syria: the senator wants the U.S. to provide Syrian rebels with extensive support, including “heavy weapons.” ABC’s Martha Raddatz reminded the senator that some of these Syrian rebels are terrorist who’ve sworn their allegiance to al Qaeda.

McCain said it’s a “legitimate” question, but he wants to support them anyway. After all, he said, “there aren’t that many” terrorists among the Syrian rebels he wants to give “heavy weapons” to.

Just two weeks later, McCain quietly traveled to Syria, and his office distributed photos from his visit to news organizations. One image, in particular, has generated some unexpected attention.

Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims.

The photo, released by McCain’s office, shows McCain with a group of rebels. Among them are two men identified in the Lebanese press as Mohamed Nour and Abu Ibrahim, two of the kidnappers of the group from Lebanon.

McCain’s office insists the senator was not aware that he’d met with Nour and Ibrahim — if they are, in fact, the men in the photograph — and they had not been identified as such during his trip. The spokesperson added that if McCain had unknowingly met with kidnappers, “that is regrettable.”

It is, indeed.

McCain’s office went on to tell BuzzFeed that it “would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms.”

And to be clear, I don’t think anyone has suggested McCain is somehow sympathetic towards kidnappers. Rather, the point is the senator is eager to provide extensive resources to Syrian rebels, but he may not fully appreciate who his new allies are.

McCain added some additional thoughts on the subject last night.

When [Anderson Cooper] asked McCain how weapons would be prevented from falling into the hands of extremists, the senator said extremist fighters compose a small fraction of Syria’s rebel forces: 7,000 pro-al Qaeda fighters from the al-Nusra front among some 100,000 insurgents.

“Every single day, more and more extremists flow in … but they still do not make up a sizable portion,” McCain told Cooper. “We can identify who these people are. We can help the right people.”

Maybe, maybe not. But whether McCain can say with certainty who the “right people” are is very much in doubt.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2013

May 31, 2013 Posted by | Foreign Policy, National Security | , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Avoiding A Costly Military Enterprise”: Republicans Wrong About Every Foreign Policy Conflict Of The Last Few Decades

Late last week, with tenuous evidence emerging of the Assad regime possibly having used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expressed his ongoing frustration with the Obama administration. “I’m worried that the president and the administration will use the caveats as an excuse to not act right away or to not act at all,” he told Fox News.

McCain’s not the only Republican who feels this way — the fact that President Obama may look for “excuses” not to use the U.S. military to intervene in an another Middle Eastern country is a growing point of conservative consternation, as opposed to relief. On “Fox News Sunday,” Brit Hume sounded pretty disappointed when he described Syria as “a costly military enterprise of the kind that this president now seems to loath to undertake.”

As if that were grounds for criticism.

On the same program, Bill Kristol went further:

“This is not a president who wants to start another war, that’s the way he sees it. I think it’s totally irresponsible for the American president to have that. Nobody wants to start wars, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

I’m not entirely sure “you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do” is a sensible principle for U.S. foreign policy as it relates to launching yet another war in the Middle East, but Kristol seemed rather confident in his position. And it’s not like Kristol has a tragically awful track record on these issues, right?

And on “Face the Nation,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went just a little further still.

“[F]our things are going to happen if we don’t change course in Syria. It’s going to become a failed state by the end of the year. It’s fracturing along sectarian/ethnic lines. It’s going to be an al Qaeda safe haven.

“The second thing, the chemical weapons, enough to kill millions of people, are going to be compromised and fall into the wrong hands. And the next bomb that goes off in America may not have nails and glass in it.”

Yep, it sure sounds like Graham believes the U.S. has to intervene in Syria or we’ll face a chemical weapon attack on American soil. The “smoking gun as a mushroom cloud” argument didn’t go away; it just evolved.

For his part, John McCain, making his ninth Sunday show appearance of the year — the most of anyone in the country — now believes President Obama is to blame, at least in part, for the Assad regime’s offensives.

“What has happened here is the president drew red lines about chemical weapons thereby giving a green light to Bashar Assad to do anything short of that — including scud missiles and helicopter gunships and air strikes and mass executions and atrocities that are on a scale that we have not seen in a long, long time,” McCain said.

The senator, who has the misfortune of being wrong about nearly every foreign policy conflict of the last few decades, added that he does not want the U.S. to invade Syria, but prefers to give “assistance” to rebels fighting the Assad regime.

Many of those same rebels, it’s worth emphasizing, have already pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, a detail McCain generally prefers to overlook when he argues we should give them resources and weapons.

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 29, 2013

April 30, 2013 Posted by | Foreign Policy, Republicans | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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