Category Archives: Iraq

‘Senators Lindsey Graham & John McCain Return To The Scene Of The Crime — Iraq’

Foreign Policy, Iraq, John McCain, Neoconservatism

Daniel McAdams: “Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain have returned to the scene of the crime — Iraq — where the war they demanded has left the country shattered into a million bits with ISIS there to take care of the rebuilding. These two “experts” are forever wrong in their every utterance and policy position — remember how angry McCain became when it was pointed out that he was meeting with terrorists in Syria and telling us they were moderates? — yet the slavish US mainstream media continues to defer to their rotten judgement. Back in Iraq over the weekend, the Senators again pushed the only policy they know — war — demanding a fresh supply of young American meat to be ground up in Iraq and Syria.” … MORE.

RON PAUL: “Before the US-led ‘regime change’ in Libya, Boko Haram were just a poorly-armed gang. Once Gaddafi was overthrown by the US and its NATO allies, leaving the country in chaos, they helped themselves to all the advanced weaponry they could get their hands on. Instead of just a few rifles they found themselves armed with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns with anti-aircraft visors, advanced explosives, and vehicle-mounted light anti-aircraft artillery. Then they started killing on a massive scale. Now, according to the Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram has overtaken ISIS as the world’s most deadly terrorist organization.” … MORE.

Thomas Friedman: Still Consistently Foolish About Everything After All These Years

Intellectualism, Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Rolling Stone is hardly a place for profound ideas, but even they don’t take Thomas Friedman seriously.

I hoped I had heard the last of this fatuous, smug, celebrity journo when, superimposed upon the program of another “gem” of veracity and virtue, Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer, Friedman could be heard venturing, recently, that ISIS appeals to young men because these are “young men who’ve never held power, a job or a girl’s hand and joined ISIS to get all three.”

For once I agree with John Maynard Keynes, who, in preparation for Bretton Woods, was known to have muttered something to the effect that (and I paraphrase), the Americans have all the money; we British have all the brains.

Friedman still persists in rejecting reality. The failed invasions he once cheered have brought this dolt no closer to the realization that, “Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be; that it can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away, legislated away,” or invaded away.

So many body bags later (ours; theirs), and Friedman is no closer to the intuitive understanding that young men need the anchor of a strong, muscular belief system for which they might consider dying. Why do America’s best and brightest sell their souls (and sacrifice lives and limbs) to Uncle Sam? Heroism (perceived or real) is in a man’s nature. You can’t tweak it out of him like an unsightly nose hair. And you can’t replace it, Mr. Friedman, with an iPad or a subscription to Match.com for Muslim singles. The spiritual nullity that is the West is no inspiration to Muslim men (and increasingly not to our own), many of whom want- and need to be engaged in epic battles.

The truly gifted Myron Robert Pauli quips, “Ah yes, I am going to BLOW MYSELF UP and take other people with me because, (1) my job is non-existent and/or sucks (roughly 95 percent of humanity), and (2) I am horny (roughly 95 percent of men). What brilliant insight into Muslim terrorists—as if atheists and Christians and Jews never have sucky jobs and get horny! Such deep thinking conjures movies like ‘Mars Needs Women,’ with the late Yvonne ‘Batman’ Craig.”

Here is our Friedman File spanning over a decade:

In “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (May 29, 2004), Thomas joined “Christopher Hitchens (who, unlike TF, was undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – as they grab the Bush administration’s Iraq bluff and run with it showing their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities; insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.

In “HIS RHETORIC, OUR REALITY,” Thomas is shown to have bastardized an important, modest principle of Judaism to better comport with his political ends (January 26, 2005). Top be fair, Friedman doesn’t know better.

In “Foul Tom Friedman,” Tom sticks to familiar territory: fouling up the meaning of capitalism.

And, in “Obama’s And Abdullah’s Plans for Israel,” Thomas Friedman joins that intellectual giant Wolf Blitzer in uproarious applause for Abdullah bin Abdulaziz’s suggestion that Israel beat a retreat to the pre-1967 borders.

“Mr. Friedman,” notes a reader (hat tip Allen Cogbill), in response to this post, “has such deep ideas that a couple of fellows actually wrote an op-ed generator that generates columns for him. They did a nice job”:

UPDATED: War Whisperer Garry Kasparov (Ahmed Chalabi Dies)

Iraq, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

You have pet whisperers—in our household it’s two parrot whisperers—and you have a war whisperer, that’s Garry Kasparov. The first is a person who “claims to communicate psychically with animals,” but simply uses kindness and patience to induce happiness, and hence compliance, in our companion pets. The second is a clever neoconservative-minded globalist, who ingratiates himself on stupid American media and political elites who share his mindset, and whispers sweet nothings in these asses’ ears, for the opportunistic purpose of bending their will to his.

One war whisperer is chess master Garry Kasparov convincing MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, today, that warring with Putin is a good for America. Another was Judith Miller’s old flame, Ahmad Chalabi, who was an Iraqi conman who fed the New York Times’ mindless Miller, now with Fox News, with misinformation that helped make the war on Iraq happen.

UPDATE: “Ahmed Chalabi died of a heart attack in Baghdad on Tuesday aged 71.” Had he not invited America to invade Iraq, he might have received better medical care. Iraq was quite civilized BB (Before Bush). In Canada we had Iraqi neighbors, who were most certainly NOT refugees.

Patrick Cockburn’s piece about the man is nicely nuanced:

… The accusation made against Chalabi after 2003 was that he had lured the US and its allies into a disastrous invasion of Iraq by fabricating or manipulating evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In time, he became the scapegoat for politicians and journalists looking for somebody else to blame for their own failures and falsehoods.

The charge seemed to me to be absurd because it is the business of the political exile to pass on damaging information, true or false, about the government he or she is trying to overthrow. Only the laziest or most naïve of journalists should have imagined that information put their way by Chalabi – or any other Iraqi exile – was non-partisan. …

UPDATED: Apology Rejected, Tony Blair: Go Jump In The Lake (U2 Zakaria Plagiarizer)

Britain, Colonialism, Democracy, Iraq

Tony Blair has belatedly apologized for helping launch, with buddy Bush, an aggressive, baseless war on Iraq that saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents killed, uprooted and displaced from their ancient homeland. More so than ISIS had those two war criminals guaranteed the decimation of the ancient christian communities in the region. (Don’t worry; a decade from now, y’all will have reached that realization and will apologize to us libertarians). “Blair’s apology,” notes a surprisingly mellow Justin Raimondo, “sounds more like an apologia.”

Idi Amin was considered a war criminal for lesser offenses (plus/minus 300,000 killed). Ditto Bashar Assad. “Iraq war liars,” like former British Prime Minister Blair, “knew then what we know now,” so the man’s flippant, expedient apologies are not to be accepted. People (like this writer and others, many of them in the intelligence community) who sounded the alarm were mocked, derided and worse: fired, libeled, maligned.

Prime Minister Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, July 17, 2003. Etched all over Blair’s address to Congress was the devotion to the “mystic [and, might I add, malevolent] idea of national destiny.” One particularly chilling dictate was this: “I know out there there’s a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, ‘Why me? And why us? And why America?’ And the only answer is, ‘Because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.'”

The tyranny implied in Blair’s maudlin grandiosity should be obvious.

First, the little guy back home ought to be the one calling the shots, not Messrs. Messiah and Company. Second, before Blair joins Bush in rousing the “visionless” middle-class American from his uninspired slumber—The Great Redeemer thinks it’s below contempt to harbor a civilized desire to mind one’s own business and live in peace—he ought to take a look at the little guy back in England. (August 6, 2003)

Had Tony Blair even heard about his British philosophical forerunner, Gertrude Bell?

“Her writings [in the 1920s or thereabouts] about her experiences in the Middle East—particularly in Iraq—continue to be studied and referenced by policy experts in the 21st century.”

AND:

She portrays Iraqis who loathe foreign occupation yet worry about the alternative. She knows that the occupation is unsustainable and ineffective but she cannot contemplate total withdrawal. She recognizes that British colonial control is unworkable and that there must be an Arab government, but she finds the sacrifices and uncertainties hard to stomach. The situation, she concludes, is “strange and bewildering.”

In fact, the West knew in the 1920s what it knows now about Iraq and its propensity for democracy.

UPDATE: U2 Zakaria Plagiarizer. Do they ever get fired? Fareed Zakaria Serial Plagiarizer supported the war in Iraq, like most of America’s punditocracy, has never said a word worth heeding, and now he’s back to speak to the horrors of that invasion. When will the booboisie defect from Fox, CNN, MSNBC (which was not so bad on Iraq but lost the edge with Barack and Hillary’s wars)?

CNN boasts that Zakaria Serial Plagiarizer “asks tough questions of many of the key architects of America’s military intervention in Iraq over the last dozen years. Yes, 13 years after we libertarians were tearing our hair out over the war. Perhaps this useless bore (and his Republican counterparts) will get a Pulitzer.