Iraq 2014

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/22/obama-s-kobe-bryant-al-qaeda-flap.html


POLITICS

01.22.14

Obama’s Kobe Bryant-Al Qaeda Flap


A long New Yorker profile of President Obama provides a great deal of insight into how the president and his administration view the undeniable expansion of jihadist groups claiming allegiance to al Qaeda. “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” President Obama said, distinguishing between groups that are “actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland” and those who are “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes.”



Seems the JV team is really stepping up its game.

   
Dick Cheney sits stunned as Fox News turns on him: ‘History has proven that you got it wrong’

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Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night grilled former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who published an op-ed with his daughter Wednesday blasting President Barack Obama over his handling of the crisis in Iraq.

Dick and Liz Cheney wrote in their Wall Street Journal op-ed that “rarely” has a president ever been “so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

On her show, “The Kelly File,” Kelly read that quote to Cheney and said,

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“But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well, sir.”

   Kelly proceeded to fire off a list of Cheney’s claims and pronouncements from his time at the White House that ended up being disputed or outright wrong — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that U.S. soldiers would be “greeted as liberators,” that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes” in 2005, and that extremists would have to “rethink their strategy of jihad” after the U.S. intervention.

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“Now with almost one 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?” Kelly said.

Cheney, who seemed taken aback, defended the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq.

“Well, I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan — uh, Megyn,” Cheney said. “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record. We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. We had a situation where, after 9/11, we were concerned about a follow-up attack. It would involve not just airline tickets and box cutters as the weapons, but rather something far deadlier, perhaps even a nuclear weapon.”

The Cheneys’ op-ed sparked controversy and a snippy dismissal from the current White House on Wednesday, due to Dick Cheney’s role in the Iraq war. As Kelly said in introducing him, he was the

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“the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place.”

Kelly opened her segment by pointing to a particularly harsh response to Cheney’s op-ed from The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman, who wrote there has not been a “single person” who has been “more wrong and shamelessly dishonest” on Iraq than Cheney.

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“The suggestion, then, is that you caused this mess, Mr. Vice President,” Kelly said. “What say you?”

“Well, obviously I disagree,” Cheney said. “I think we went into Iraq for very good reasons.”

He still remains as delusional as ever.  
Time to take a permanent hike,Cheney,Even the Potted Plant News Network isn't buying into your bullshit anymore.

And where, pray tell, did the information come from?  In other words, what caused these "claims and pronouncements" to be made?  Let's cut the crap... they were all based upon "intelligence" (which was mostly bullshit) from the Bush administration.  

I really don't see why you keep posting the same tripe every time the subject comes up... Is that all you have? Give me a frickin' break!

happy jack wrote:

Scorpion wrote:

And where, pray tell, did the information come from?  In other words, what caused these "claims and pronouncements" to be made?  Let's cut the crap... they were all based upon "intelligence" (which was mostly bullshit) from the Bush administration.  

I really don't see why you keep posting the same tripe every time the subject comes up... Is that all you have?  Give me a frickin' break!  

I certainly don’t know where the information came from. You might want to ax Clinton, Albright, Berger, Pelosi, Levin, Daschle, and Kerry.
Or are you trying to tell me that these individuals are so stupid that they took foreign policy advice from the governor of Texas?

Fine. I'll play your mindless game. But when I'm finished, I expect you to admit that the other quotes were based upon the bullshit that the Bush administration was selling.

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"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998"

That's absolutely true.  At the time, Saddam was playing a shell game with the weapons inspectors in Iraq.

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"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

Also true. Same reason.

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"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
--Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

True - Same reason.

Quote :

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
--Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

In 1998, there was no reason to think that he wouldn't, and as I pointed out thrice already, Saddam wasn't cooperating with the weapons inspectors.

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"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton, signed by:
-- Democratic Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others, Oct. 9, 1998

Yep.  Because Saddam wasn't cooperating with the weapons inspectors in 1998.

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"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
-Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

Again... true, for same reason.

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"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
-- Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

No reason to think he wasn't, considering he wasn't cooperating with the weapons inspectors.

In short, none of the quotes from the Clinton years are even remotely relevant...

OK. It's your turn.  What about the statements based upon the "intelligence" provided by the Bush administration?

That was one of the best smack-downs I've seen in a long time.  

What's happening in Iraq shouldn't be a mystery to anyone:



We knew what was gonna happen going in, we knew there were no WMDs, but fuck it, there was Haliburton money to be made!  A couple of thousand dead troops are totally worth a $32 million bonus check and a few billion in no-bid contracts.  'Merica! So predictably, the Sunni's are rebelling against the pro-Shiite government installed in 2005 that hadn't been treating them very well, now that they don't have US backing.  Again, not a surprise, which is why Obama tried to push back the timetable set by Bush, but Iraq refused.  

Conservatives are going into full freakout mode, Fox News is on overdrive, in a desperate attempt to rewrite history and somehow make Obama responsible for all of this.  It's downright psychotic; well beyond Derangement Syndrome.

How US Hawks Created an Arc of Instability in the Middle East.  

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They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East, garrison Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, “drain” the global “swamp” of terrorists, and create a global Pax Americana based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it.

It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.  Just as Rove suggested they would — just as in the summer of 2002, he already knew they would — they acted to create a world in their image, a world they imagined controlling like no imperial power in history.  Using that unchallengeable military, they launched an invasion that blew a hole through the oil heartlands of the Middle East.  They took a major capital, Baghdad, while “decapitating” (as the phrase then went) the regime that was running Iraq and had, in a particularly brutal fashion, kept the lid on internecine tensions.

. . .

It was all to be a kind of war-fighting miracle. The American invaders would be greeted as liberators, the mission quickly accomplished, and “major combat operations” ended in a flash — as George Bush so infamously announced on May 1, 2003, after his Top Gun landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.  No less miraculous was the fact that it would essentially be a freebie.  After all, as undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz pointed out at the time, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” which meant that a “liberated” country could cover all “reconstruction” costs without blinking.

The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful sense that they were building an American protectorate.  So why wouldn’t it be a snap to carry out their ambitious plans to privatize the Iraqi economy, dismantle the country’s vast public sector (throwing another army of employees out of work), and bring in crony corporations to help run the country and giant oil companies to rev up the energy economy, lagging from years of sanctions and ill-repair?  In the end, Washington’s Iraq would — so they believed — pump enough crude out of one of the greatest fossil fuel reserves on the planet to sink OPEC, leaving American power free to float to ever greater heights on that sea of oil.  As the occupying authority, with a hubris stunning to behold, they issued “orders” that read as if they had been written by officials from some nineteenth-century imperial power.

In short, this was one for the history books. And not a thing — nothing — worked out as planned.  You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred.  For those of us in the reality-based community, for instance, it’s long been apparent that their war and occupation would cost the U.S., literally and figuratively, an arm and a leg (and that the costs to Iraqis would prove beyond calculating).  More than two trillion dollars later — without figuring in astronomical post-war costs still to come — Iraq is a catastrophe.

. . .

The arrogance of those occupation years should still take anyone’s breath away. Bush and his top officials remade reality on an almost unimaginable scale and, as we study the region today, the results bear no relation to the world they imagined creating.  None whatsoever.

Doomed from the start.

happy jack wrote:

Scorpion wrote:

 

Quote :

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
--Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

In 1998, there was no reason to think that he wouldn't, and as I pointed out thrice already, Saddam wasn't cooperating with the weapons inspectors.

And why was there no reason to think that he would use those same weapons in 2003?

Because, in 2003, Iraq was cooperating fully with the weapons inspectors. Iraq even turned over their newest missile system to be destroyed.  The weapons inspectors found no other traces of any other weapons,  but the Bush administration ignored the inspection team's findings, ordered them out of Iraq and then started bombing. If the inspectors had simply been allowed to complete their work, the war could have been avoided.

So tell us jack, do you agree with Hillary about Iraq when she said:
"I did get it wrong in Iraq, and it was a mistake,"
or do you agree with Dick Cheney: I'd do it again in a minute" ?

happy jack wrote:

Scorpion wrote:

 

Quote :

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
--Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

In 1998, there was no reason to think that he wouldn't, and as I pointed out thrice already, Saddam wasn't cooperating with the weapons inspectors.

And why was there no reason to think that he would use those same weapons in 2003?

Replying with a question while deliberately ignoring the one originally posed to him. Anyone surprised?

Scorpion wrote:

OK. It's your turn.  What about the statements based upon the "intelligence" provided by the Bush administration?

Scorpion wrote:

Because, in 2003, Iraq was cooperating fully with the weapons inspectors. Iraq even turned over their newest missile system to be destroyed.  The weapons inspectors found no other traces of any other weapons,  but the Bush administration ignored the inspection team's findings, ordered them out of Iraq and then started bombing. If the inspectors had simply been allowed to complete their work, the war could have been avoided.

Yes. Do conservatives not remember the absolutely magical character assassination of Hans Blix? He kept coming back with a "seriously, there's nothing there" and it blew their fucking minds. That really was my first exposure to Fox News working as a pure propaganda machine.

Heretic wrote:

Scorpion wrote:

Because, in 2003, Iraq was cooperating fully with the weapons inspectors. Iraq even turned over their newest missile system to be destroyed.  The weapons inspectors found no other traces of any other weapons,  but the Bush administration ignored the inspection team's findings, ordered them out of Iraq and then started bombing. If the inspectors had simply been allowed to complete their work, the war could have been avoided.

Yes. Do conservatives not remember the absolutely magical character assassination of Hans Blix? He kept coming back with a "seriously, there's nothing there" and it blew their fucking minds. That really was my first exposure to Fox News working as a pure propaganda machine.

This is still their game plan of today. Unless they get the answers that fit into their narrative they explode. They're like a lottery junkie who keeps playing convinced that they will eventually hit the big jackpot and then claiming that it's fixed when they don't.

Whether it's introducing legislation 40 some times to try to repeal Obamacare or scheduling new hearings on Benghazi or whatever newly invented phony scandal for the umpteenth time.

Gone but certainly not forgotten    
Poll: Americans Blame Bush, Not Obama, For Iraq's Current Chaos

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Republicans have hammered President Obama in recent weeks for the unraveling security situation in Iraq, arguing that he should have left some American troops behind in the troubled country. But a poll released Monday found that Americans widely disagree with the GOP.

The latest national survey from Quinnipiac University showed that 58 percent of American voters believe Obama's decision to withdraw troops in 2011 was the right thing to do.

Conversely, 61 percent said that George W. Bush's decision to invade in 2003 was the wrong thing to do. Fifty-one percent of voters blame Bush for the current calamity in Iraq.

Artie60438 wrote:

Gone but certainly not forgotten    
Poll: Americans Blame Bush, Not Obama, For Iraq's Current Chaos

Quote :

Republicans have hammered President Obama in recent weeks for the unraveling security situation in Iraq, arguing that he should have left some American troops behind in the troubled country. But a poll released Monday found that Americans widely disagree with the GOP.

The latest national survey from Quinnipiac University showed that 58 percent of American voters believe Obama's decision to withdraw troops in 2011 was the right thing to do.

Conversely, 61 percent said that George W. Bush's decision to invade in 2003 was the wrong thing to do. Fifty-one percent of voters blame Bush for the current calamity in Iraq.

Yes, I find those Quinnipiac University polls to be astoundingly accurate.



http://www.quinnipiac.edu/news-and-events/quinnipiac-university-poll/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2056

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July 2, 2014

Obama Is First As Worst President Since WWII, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; More Voters Say Romney Would Have Been Better

happy jack wrote:

Obama Is First As Worst President Since WWII, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds;

Too bad historians don't use polls when writing history.
When it comes to being the worst, George Bush easily wins hands down.

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More Voters Say Romney Would Have Been Better

Ooooh, maybe Mittens will run in 2016 against Hillary.
Getting your ass handed to you twice would certainly be quite an accomplishment.

I'm hoping for Rick Perry and Herman Cain.