Category Archives: Iraq

Benghazi Doesn’t Register On The State’s Scale of Scandals

Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Military, Terrorism, War, WMD

Benghazi is a scandal but it is no Iraq. Why, the Benghazi affair doesn’t rise to the level of a scandal compared to the invasion of Libya, which Obama leveled for no good reason. (And Benghazi is no scandal compared to Obama’s health-care nationalization, which will kill many more.) But Republicans love leveling this or the other country occasionally. So not a murmur did one hear from them about Libya.

In case your eyes glaze over when Benghazi is mentioned on Fox News—at least as often as CNN goes on about Donald Sterling and the missing Malaysian plane—a reminder: An American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed). No attempt was made at a rescue, because of an order from high-above to stand down.

Obama’s real scandal is Zero-care, not Benghazi, which doesn’t really register on the American state’s scale of scandals.

As to Bush, Cheney and creepy Condoleeza: Yes, they are war criminals. For perspective, “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE,” published July 16, 2003, is worth a read:

This column informed readers about the Niger lie in March 2003, after Muhammad ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, unceremoniously and politely called the allegation that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa “inauthentic.” It’ll take the mainstream media a few years to work out, but many in the administration (not least Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney) had been sitting on this intelligence since February 2002, when a diplomat called Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA and the State Department to ferret it out.

Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say?

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told the New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

I will not be adjudicating the illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq here afresh. Comments to that effect will be removed from the Facebook Timeline. For a detailed chronicling of that war, I refer readers to the Articles Archive (click the relevant key words). As does Barely a Blog feature a search on the side bar.

Wages Of War Waged By A ‘Good Country’

Foreign Policy, Iraq, War

As was pointed out in “Where’s America’s Right To Referendum, Secession?,” military intervention by the US is considered a good thing by the Bill-O’Reilly school of “thought,” because the US is “a good country.”

Naturally, the American media are not chronicling the wages of a war waged by their “good country,” but Al Jazeera is. Here’s what Iraqi’s must endure daily thanks to the war waged by Bush (who is surely not a “thug” like Putin):

“According to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq [UNAMI], a total of 703 Iraqis were killed and another 1,381 were injured in February. These figures do not include those killed and injured in Anbar province, where 189 were killed and 550 were injured in Ramadi and 109 were killed and 648 were injured in Fallujah.”

A series of deadly attacks in Iraq have killed about 50 people and injured 80, police officials have said.

In one of Friday’s incidents, an explosive-laden tanker was driven into the federal police headquarters in the village of Injanah, 55km north of Baquba, killing 12 people and wounding five, including the head of the federal police, Brigadier General Raghib al-Umairi, and his assistant.

In Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, an attack killed 10 people and injured 27.

AFP news agency reported that a suicide bomber blew himself up at a funeral inside a mosque. Anbar has been the scene of protracted fighting between anti-government fighters and security forces, leading to months of bloodshed and the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

In the Sarha region of Salaheddin, clashes early on Friday led to a series of explosions, including one near an army base, that killed 12 people and injured 13.

In separate incidents, police said gunmen opened fire on an army checkpoint near the city of Samarra, killing two people, while car bombings killed nine and injured 25 in Dibis, a town located near Kirkuk.

Medical officials confirmed the casualties from Friday’s attacks. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the media, according to Associated Press news agency.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks.

MORE.

Who’s The Biggest Liar Of Them All?

Barack Obama, Bush, Iraq, Morality, WMD

In this scribe’s opinion, “Obama’s assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it” is on par only with Genghis Bush’s deceit about the imperative of going to war with Iraq. Pat Buchanan thinks that Obama’s rank lie “now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s ‘Read my lips! No new taxes,’ Bill Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano begs to differ:

… According to Napolitano, President Obama’s lie is the most egregious. “Richard Nixon told a lie about his personal knowledge of a third-rate break-in, burglary. Bill Clinton told a lie about a personal sexual liaison. Barack Obama has told a lie repeatedly, readily, consistently, systematically, over and over again that will affect the wealth, the health of millions of innocent Americans. The first two […] are so insignificant compared to these lies.”
On today’s Your World, Neil Cavuto drew a comparison between Bill Clinton’s denial that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky to President Obama’s assertion to the American public that they could keep their health care plans.

Judge Napolitano weighed in saying that the president “doesn’t have to worry legally about lying.”

“Even though the president and the Justice Department can prosecute people, Americans, who lie to the government, the president and the whole governmental apparatus are free to lie to us,” the judge said.

In terms of sheer economic destruction, I suspect that Obama and Bush are tied in ignominy. Christopher Conover of Duke University estimates that “129 million, or 68 percent of Americans, may not be able to keep their current health care plans once ObamaCare is fully implemented. The study also suggests that 18 to 50 million people will lose their plans altogether.”

More on how Conover arrived at these figures, at The Daily Caller.

UPDATE II: His Highness’s Collateral Damage

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans

“… And if you’re so dead-set against the killing of children that you are willing to send us into yet another conflict, will you guarantee that the 1000-pound Tomahawk missiles that you will heap on Syria won’t kill children—or are they simply your collateral damage?”

These powerful words were delivered by Judge Jeanine (written, no doubt, by her show’s writers), five minutes and 28 seconds into her weekly Opening Statement.

Judge Jeanine was speaking about the thing no Republican cared about during Iraq: collateral damage.

Let us hope that this wonderful, country wide awakening is no brief jaunt, but a return to an America-First, do-no-harm foreign policy.

Photos: Nine Years of War in Iraq.

UPDATED I (9/8): And “Will the murders of those children be less significant than those we go to avenge?” I failed to transcribe Jeanine’s last clincher. This is the sort of sharp logic missing from most tele-commentary.

UPDATE II: In reply to the thread on Facebook: Other than as an economist, Thomas Sowell is unpersuasive. No serious libertarian should take him seriously on issues of just war. Sowell was full-throttle for the war against Iraq.