Category Archives: Iraq

Megyn Kelly’s Come-Back

Iraq, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, War

If I have underestimated Megyn Kelly of “The Kelly File,” it is not for lack of trying not to. I moved from enthusiasm to disappointment in short succession, as it became clear Kelly’s hour on Fox News had degenerated into a smarter, prettier version of Bill O’Reilly’s “The Factor”: Rah-rah for every single form of false jingoism imaginable.

However, Kelly often surprises. She certainly rattled the vampiric Dick Cheney:

MEGYN KELLY to Dick Cheney: “In your op-ed, you write as follows: ‘Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.’ But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well, sir. You said there were no doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said after our intervention, extremists would have to “rethink their strategy of jihad.” Now with almost a trillion dollars spent there with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”

MORE.

Is Laura Ingraham Dissociating From The ‘War Party’?

Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Neoconservatism, Republicans, War

Is broadcaster Laura Ingraham prepared to entertain the fact that her passionate populism may also require that she reject the War Party’s recreational wars? “Congressman Gutierrez,” she said on ABC’s Power House, “is closer to the Republican grassroots on this issue [Iraq], than the Republican leaders are. He’s on to something.”

What did Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez say?

“We shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place,” he said. “I voted against the incursion in Iraq. They said we would be welcomed as liberators; we weren’t. They said it was going to be paid for; it wasn’t. We should never have been there. This is a centuries-old fight between Sunnis and Shia.”

On The Ground In Iraq

Iran, Iraq

Patrick Cockburn offers a cogent, matter-of-fact account of the latest developments in Iraq:

Iran is moving to stop the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) from capturing Baghdad and the provinces immediately to the north of the capital.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is taking a central role in planning and strategy in Baghdad in the wake of the disintegration of the Iraqi army in the country’s north, an Iraqi source has told The Independent.
With the Iraqi army command completely discredited by recent defeats, the aim of the IRGC is to create a new and more effective fighting force by putting together trustworthy elements of the old army and the Shia militias. According to the source, the aim of the new force would be to give priority “to stabilising the front and rolling it back at least into Samarra and the contested areas of Diyala”. The Iraqi army has 14 divisions, of which four were involved in last week’s debacle, but there is no sign of the remaining units rallying and staging a counter-attack. MORE…

On June 11, Cockburn wrote: “Iraq Crisis: Capture of Mosul Ushers in the Birth of a Sunni Caliphate”:

The capture of Mosul by Isis means a radical change in the political geography of Iraq and Syria. Moreover, the impact of this event will soon be felt across the Middle East as governments take on board the fact that a Sunni proto-caliphate is spreading across northern Iraq and Syria.
The next few weeks will be crucial in determining the outcome of Isis’s startling success in taking over a city of 1.4 million people, garrisoned by a large Iraqi security force, with as few as 1,300 fighters. Will victory in Mosul be followed by success in other provinces where there is a heavy concentration of Sunni, such as Salahuddin, Anbar and Diyala? Already, the insurgents have captured the important oil refinery town of Baiji with scarcely a shot fired by simply calling ahead by phone to tell the police and army to lay down their weapons and withdraw.
These spectacular advances by Isis would not be happening unless there was tacit support and no armed resistance from the Sunni Arab community in northern and central Iraq. Many people rightly suspect and fear Isis’s bloodthirsty and sectarian fanaticism, but for the moment these suspicions and fears have been pushed to one side by even greater hatred of Iraq’s Shia-dominated government.
This may not last: Iraqi government officials speak of a counterattack led by special “anti-terrorist” forces that are better trained, motivated and armed than the bulk of the Iraqi army. It may be that the Kurds will use their peshmerga troops in Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces to drive back Isis and create facts on the ground in areas often rich in oil, in Kirkuk and Nineveh provinces. A successful counter-offensive could happen but the failure of the Iraqi army to retake Fallujah, a much smaller city than Mosul, in the six months since it fell in January does not bode well for the government. If the Isis advance takes more towns and villages, then the territory lost to the government may become too large to reconquer.
But Isis too has its weaknesses: in the past it has isolated itself by its fierce determination to monopolise power, impose fundamentalist Islamic norms and persecute or kill all who differ from it. MORE …

The Military, The Mission And The Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Economy, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Military, Reason

Again and again one hears it repeated that our “brave men and women of the military,” having sacrificed for Iraqi “freedoms,” must be furious to see the gains they made squandered. Thus, goes the argument made by Stewart Varney (for example) of Fox Business, today, more resources must be committed forthwith in order to redeem the original (misguided) commitment of men, money and materiel to Iraq.

This is the sunk-cost fallacy, as explained by the Skeptic’s Dictionary:

When one makes a hopeless investment, one sometimes reasons: I can’t stop now, otherwise what I’ve invested so far will be lost. This is true, of course, but irrelevant to whether one should continue to invest in the project. Everything one has invested is lost regardless. If there is no hope for success in the future from the investment, then the fact that one has already lost a bundle should lead one to the conclusion that the rational thing to do is to withdraw from the project.
To continue to invest in a hopeless project is irrational. Such behavior may be a pathetic attempt to delay having to face the consequences of one’s poor judgment. The irrationality is a way to save face, to appear to be knowledgeable, when in fact one is acting like an idiot.