All Praise Belongs To George Dubya And His Pals!
By Fazal M. Kamal
20 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Innumerable people including pundits of all hues in the US are asking one simple question repeatedly: What should the Obama administration do on the current worsening situation in Iraq? The answer, as has often been said quoting the inimitable Bob Dylan, is blowing in the wind. And the answer is also absolutely simple: Everyone should offer resounding thanks to George Dubya. And while at it, they should also praise his pals Anthony “Tony Bliar” Blair, Dick “Teflon Heart” Cheney, Donald “Never short of a response” Rumsfeld and similar other beings. Thanks to the leadership provided by the then president of the United States, today Iraq is what it is now.
That’s no mean achievement. It’s nothing to be scoffed at. It is, after all, Mission Accomplished. Finally. It’ll be apt to quote commenter Shamus Cooke at this point merely to explain where they surely must be placed in the pantheon of historic attainments: “The secular nations of Iraq, Libya, and Syria were virtually free of terrorism before U.S. military intervention, and now they’re infested. The war on terror has done nothing but destabilize the Middle East, create more terrorists, and drain the U.S. economy of billions of dollars it could have otherwise used towards jobs and social programs.”
While there’s a rising crescendo against military intervention in Iraq and numerous petitions are being signed by hundreds of thousands of citizens to exert pressure on the US government to refrain from sending in troops or bombing regions of that country (like this from Credo: "Mr. President: Don’t bomb Iraq. Americans elected you in 2008 in no small part because of your principled opposition to the U.S. unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq. Don’t double down on George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion and make his failed war your legacy on foreign policy") the Republican leadership would of course like to see yet another American misadventure mainly because it’d hang around the neck of President Obama.
As this debate heats up it’s worth noting that even a person like televangelist Pat Robertson, whose sage words aren’t always necessarily of a reasonable nature, has recently commented, “And so to sell the American people on weapons of mass destruction, he had WMD and was getting [concentrated uranium] yellowcake out of Africa and all of that, it was a lot of nonsense…We were sold a bill of goods, we should never have gone into that country!...As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he held those warring factions in check, and he contained those radical Islamists….Fix it, no? It’s too late to fix it. It’s unfixable. Those simmering animosities have been there for centuries.”
In spite of the evident facts---with all that’s been going on in Iraq and with the extremists gaining ground easily mainly because the state’s armed forces have thought it better to run than fight---it’s at the very least mystifying that all of those talking heads who got everything wrong when George Dubya decided to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly had built an armory of WMDs are unabashedly again yelling that the US should march into that quagmire. This also despite the obvious reality that the present administration in that country is a failed entity not merely because its members are inept and inefficient but because they are corrupt and more interested in policies that divide rather than unite a nation.
The real apprehension here, on the other hand, is that President Obama often falls for the provocations of the rightwing nuts who want the president to prove---repeatedly---that he has the acumen to be a “strong military leader.” One such provocateur, among a large number of them, is Senator John McCain. To give the reader an idea about this politician let me quote a few lines from David Ferguson’s article in The Raw Story: “…you angry, corn-teethed fossil. You’ve never met a foreign conflict that didn’t require MOAR U.S. TROOPS, have you? … you’re not consistent at all about anything that might score you some political points and get you on TV!..You’re like a jumped-up rich boy with no real capital of his own who’s bellied up to the blackjack table blowing every single penny of his wife’s money just to catch that fleeting winner’s high….Or, as TBogg so eloquently observed, ‘Hush you guys. The guy who thought Sarah Palin would make a good vice-president is explaining to us what we should do in Iraq’.”
Given that this is the class of persons---which includes House Speaker John Boehner who recently had the chutzpah to state that while the ISIS troops are taking over Iraq the president is napping---there should be little cause for the Obama administration to feel knuckled into displaying its military ability and strength with any reckless adventurism. In this context Iraq War Veteran and member of the US House of Representatives Tulsi Gabbard said, “It makes no sense for us to consider going back there and getting involved in what truly is a religious civil war. What real difference would (air strikes) make on the ground? And secondly, is it in the best interests of the United States to do that? I would say that those questions are not being answered in a compelling way that would cause me to support that.”
Another aspect of the extant scenario that deserves a modicum of attention is the role of the major parts of the US media establishment. The first time almost all of them dramatically failed to do their fact-checking and instead scarfed down everything that was offered to them by the Bush administration and especially by its defense secretary. Subsequent exposure to the truths should have provided them with a few takeaways. Apparently though, not all sections are so inclined. And these embrace such news heavyweights as the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN even though a recent poll shows 74 percent of voters oppose a military intervention.
In a fascinating piece in the Daily Kos Jon Perr says, “In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President Bush, ‘You break it, you own it.’ Eleven years later and five years after Dubya ambled out of the White House, Iraq remains broken and he owns it. But that's not the only maxim George W. Bush and his allies should have learned from their debacle in Iraq.”
He then enumerates ten lessons from Bush's Iraq disaster: 1. Don't Fight Wars on the Cheap. 2. Don't Uncork Bottled Up Sectarian Divisions. 3. Al Qaeda Thought It Was Better to Fight Us There. 4. Sectarian U.S. Allies Can't Be Bought, Only Rented. 5. Don't Hitch the U.S. Wagon to the Wrong Strongman. 6. The Enemy of Our Enemy is Not Our Friend. 7. U.S. Forces Should Never Be Deployed Permanently in a Civil War Zone. 8. Regime Change is a Recipe for Disaster. 9. Democracy Promotion Can't Come from the Barrel of Gun. 10. Preventive War is an Idea Whose Time Has Never Come.
“The fundamental lesson here,” states John Tierman, executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, “-- though much more needs to be explored -- is that the root of our blunders is the heavy reliance on military solutions, whether invading countries, imposing sanctions, arming proxies, or propping up authoritarians. …If we and they don't grapple with this failure of common sense, the catastrophe will continue to unfold.”
All indications are that neither the vicious civil strife in Iraq nor the contentious debates in the United States will settle soon or lead to anything constructive. It’s more possible that that unfortunate country will find some settlement after splintering into three parts. Nevertheless, it’ll be appropriate to conclude by quoting MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “I will never understand how a president so limited in his ability or sense of history as George W. Bush, a vice-president as uncharismatic as Dick Cheney, or a band of unelected ideologues could so screw this country to the wall of history as the band that ran things in the early years of this century.”
And the mystery lingers.
The writer has been a media professional, in print and online newspapers as editor and commentator, and in public affairs, for over forty years
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