Wanna see it again? by @BloggersRUs

Wanna see it again?


by Tom Sullivan

I wanted to make a couple more points about a post Digby mentioned the other day.

It’s Saturday. Do yourself a favor and read Matt Stoller’s account of how we got here. Here, being America facing yet another military engagement in the Middle East driven again by petrodollars and “an infantilized deceptive version of American foreign policy.” It whitewashes Saudi and Qatari support for radical Sunni militants to “accomplish aims that their states cannot pursue openly.” Twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission report remain classified (censored, says Stoller) reportedly because they implicate Saudi players in funding the 9/11 attacks. Add to that homegrown propaganda, hysteria, and enforced ignorance in the name of national security and you’ve got an opportunity for Washington to roll out a new branded war, complete with even flashier TV graphics and a more blood-stirring musical theme than the last war’s.
To recap recent history, Stoller writes:

And so, almost immediately after the [9/11] attacks, Saddam Hussein became the designated bad guy and the Bush administration, supported by the entire Republican Party, foreign policy establishment, and a substantial chunk of Democrats (Bill and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, for starters), prepared for war in Iraq. The Bush administration alluded many times to a supposed link between 9/11 and Hussein, which was a ludicrous conspiracy theory, but an acceptable one because it served the interests of the Bush administration and a coddled foreign policy elite. But rather than expose the entire secret deal by which elites conducted a shadow foreign policy through Saudi petrodollars, most journalists told Americans that Saddam Hussein had to go.

And in the PTSD-addled America post-9/11, the administration used secrecy and a lapdog media to play the American public like a fiddle. It was the one thing they were good at, as I illustrated in a 2006 op-ed well after “Mission Accomplished”:

… Vice-President Cheney dismissed those who suggest that overthrowing Saddam Hussein simply “stirred up” terrorists, saying, “They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway.” (In case you missed the connection Cheney repeatedly denies making, Saddam = Osama = September 11th.)
The president weighed in too, admonishing critics to “debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas.” Debating a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq might “embolden” terrorists (read, put troops at risk).
Let’s review: a) Those concerned about emboldening terrorists lack the resolve to put troops at risk against already emboldened terrorists; and b) Those hoping to minimize the risk to troops irresponsibly put troops at risk by emboldening already emboldened terrorists.
It’s like watching close-up magicians at the Magic Castle. This trick is called: “Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.” Wanna see it again?

The doublespeak and reflexive saber-rattling was as mind-numbingly frustrating then as now. The classified state leaves the American public having learned little, and deciding how to address ISIS with the same option it had then: Trust us. If we are to make better decisions regarding ISIS, Stoller writes, we need to have an “adult conversation … about the nature of American power [as] the predicate for building a global order that can drain the swampy brutal corners of the world that allow groups like ISIS to grow and thrive.”