The gates of hell, brought to you by Dick Cheney and his pals
by digby
Lindsey Graham: “If we take on ISIL and lose, we will unlock the gates of hell.”
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlakeWP) September 11, 2014
Somebody get him a bottle and put him to bed. I’m afraid those gates were unlocked some time ago.
Meanwhile, in the adult corner:
This is the central irony of Obama’s speech—and, it must be said, of his approach. The caution that he has shown, the time that he has taken to reach a decision, are admirable and wise; the course of action that he has set out is, despite its increasing scope, narrowly targeted. (This is no war on terror or on radical Islam.) Even so, as he acknowledged last night, “we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves.” And there is, at this point, little to suggest that Iraqis can do much of anything for themselves but continue their slide into mutual mistrust and retributive violence. The security forces that Obama has now pledged to train, equip, and advise are seen, by many Sunnis, as a force of subjugation; Shiite militias, empowered by the previous Iraqi government and backed by Iran, have terrorized the population we intend to protect. The situation in Syria is less promising still. The anti-Assad rebels there have been unable to keep their weapons out of the hands of ISIS, which does raise the question: which side will we be arming?
In this sense, last night’s peroration—with its ode to American exceptionalism—was beside the point. Not because America isn’t terrific, which it is, or because our “technology companies and universities” aren’t “unmatched,” which they are, but because America’s success in this new and important mission will not depend, in the last analysis, on our values, our strength, or our can-do spirit. It will depend on partners who are at best unreliable and possibly incapable. If they falter, what becomes of the U.S. effort? That question was neither asked nor answered in the President’s speech, but there is always next year.
It’s time for a little reminder of how we got here:
The neoconservative Project for a New American Century laid much of the groundwork for the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Its members received important postings in the White House, Department of Defense and other institutions. But what is seldom mentioned is that PNAC achieved its first great political victory during the Clinton administration when PNAC pushed Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.
In January 1998, the group wrote to Clinton: “[Y]ou have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”
The Iraq Liberation Act, backed overwhelmingly by Democrats and Republicans and signed by Clinton, made regime change in Iraq official US policy and set the course for the eventual invasion and occupation.
Also keep in mind the fact that the highly influential PNAC strategy document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses was really no more than a warmed over version of the Cheney-Wolfowitz strategic defense document of 1992 that was rejected by … well, everyone. They never gave up. They never do.
It was this malign neoconservative influence that set everything in motion in Iraq and we are still paying the horrible price for that today. Al Qaeda existed apart from Saddam and would have been a threat regardless. But don’t forget that the same people who pushed to invade Iraq for more than a decade forgot to put terrorism on its long list of threats. They always assumed that state power was the problem and they couldn’t have been more wrong. As usual. And now we are mired in the Middle East even more deeply than before as the whole place burns down and nobody knows what’s to take its place.
The entire political establishment bears responsibility for this — largely because they panicked after 9/11 and completely surrendered their good judgement and common sense. (That seems to be the reflexive response, unfortunately.) Still it’s important to recall just who it was that planned and schemed and strategized for well over a decade to get the US militarily enmeshed in the region so deeply that it could never get out.
This supremely confident group of failures is still out there, braying about American exceptionalism and the threat of the boogeyman coming to kill us all in our beds. And their influence is now fully woven into the national security state to the extent that nobody knows where they end and everyone else begins anymore. But it doesn’t change the fact that they have always been wrong about everything, going all the way back to the 1970s when they were wrong about the Soviets and wrong about everything else. There has never been a more dangerously misguided faction in American politics. And yet, they just keep keeping on.
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