The GOP Pretends That 9/11, ISIS and Iraq Were Not the GOP's Fault

With the run up to the 2016 presidential elections in the offing and increase focus on foreign policy issues thanks to the Iran nuclear arms agreement, the GOP is again sabre rattling and in the process striving to make Americans forget that 9/11, ISIS and the Iraq fiasco all trace back to the bungling and fabricated facts of the Bush/Cheney regime that were all happily rubber stamped at the time by Congressional Republicans.  Clues were ignored that might have prevented 9/11, the Iraq war was based on deliberate lies, and the rise of ISIS is the result of Bush/Cheney's failure to have an post war plan to address the poisonous influences of Islamic extremists and Sunni/Shiite hatred.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP effort to whitewash history and lead America into yet another debacle that will squander lives and again bankrupt the country.  Here are excerpts:

T]the trajectory of resurgent international conflict during Obama’s second term—epitomized by ISIS, though not limited to it—has already infused the 2016 election with much higher levels of foreign policy concern. If 2012 was all about trying to blame Obama for not adequately fixing Bush’s spectacular domestic economic catastrophe, then 2016 is shaping up—at least in part—to be about blaming him for not adequately fixing Bush’s spectacular foreign policy catastrophe, either.

At the moment, Obama’s historic nuclear deal with Iran is center stage, but the much more widespread geopolitical problem typified by (though not limited to) ISIS has a much more pervasive political influence. Case in point: the emergence of ISIS, with its provocative spectacles of violence have unexpectedly renewed American’s willingness to send troops to fight overseas, completely forgetting that this was precisely bin Laden’s reason for 9/11 in the first place: to lure the U.S. into a “holy war” with Islam. Election year dynamics being what they are, there’s no telling how badly this could turn out.

So before we go off and blow several trillion dollars recruiting the next wave of terrorists, perhaps it would be a good idea to reconsider what we did the last time around.

Republicans, naturally, want to blame the rise of ISIS on Obama, which is absurd. Three extremely foolish actions undertaken by Bush were absolutely crucial for the emergence of ISIS: First, by responding to 9/11 as an act of war, rather than a crime, Bush gave al Qaeda and its future ISIS off-shoots the holy war and the status of holy warriors they so desperately craved, but could never attain on their own. Second, by invading Iraq—which had nothing to do with 9/11, and was actually a counter-weight both to al Qaeda (ideologically) and to Iran (both theologically and geo-strategically)—Bush destabilized the entire region, creating a tinder-box of multifaceted incentives for sectarian violence.  Third, by disbanding Iraq’s Sunni- and Bath-Party-dominated army, Bush both ensured an intense power struggle and civil war in Iraq (with vastly more power in Iran-friendly Shiite hands) and provided Sunni terrorist ideologues with hardened, experienced military command personnel.

The combined effect of all three Bush actions was to turn Iraq into a virtual hell—along with various portions of several other countries as well.  America had one 9/11, one massive loss of 3,000 innocent civilian lives, and that was enough for us to lose all sense of proportion, restraint, and good judgment. Why should the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan respond any better?  . . . around 400 Iraqi, Afghani, and/or Pakistani civilians have died for every American who died on 9/11 . . . It puts the total dead in in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at around 1.3 million, roughly two orders of magnitude more than most Americans realize.

Given how heavily the drums of war have been beating lately, this is a timely reminder what a huge role Bush’s post-9/11 response played in creating the current violent conditions throughout the region and beyond.

The U.S. authorities have kept no known records of such deaths. This would have destroyed the arguments that freeing Iraq by military force from a dictatorship, removing Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and eliminating safe-havens for terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas has prevented terrorism from reaching the U.S. homeland, improved global security and advanced human rights, all at “defendable” costs.   However, facts are indeed stubborn. Governments and civil society know now that on all counts these assertions have proved to be preposterously false.

[T]he estimates of U.S. military casualties were strikingly accurate, while the estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties were wildly under-estimated—by at least a factor of 7, and probably more like 70.  Clearly, if Americans had had anything close to a realistic view of the war, their level and intensity of opposition would have skyrocketed—as might their expectations of terrorist blowback, as well. There was nothing defendable about the costs involved—which is why those costs had to be hidden. Tragically, as the new report makes clear, the media itself has been deeply implicated in hiding the true cost of war in its most brutal form—the extent of lives lost.

“The numbers relayed by the media (previously 43,000 and now 110,000) should in themselves be terrifying enough, as they correspond to the annihilation of an entire city’s population. But apparently they are still perceived as tolerable and, moreover, even easy to explain given the picture of excessive religiously motivated violence,”

The original pretexts for going to war quickly turned out to be spurious, and from then on only the “liberation of the country from a violent dictatorship” and the “democratization” and “stabilization” of Iraq remained as justification for the war and occupation. This picture, laboriously constructed with the help of the media, is of course impossible to reconcile with the many hundreds of thousands of war casualties.

Perhaps, if we think of how America rallied behind George Bush after 9/11, and we think of 400 9/11s (or maybe “only” 200 9/11s) being suffered through since by the people whose countries we’ve invaded, perhaps then the horrific, barbaric savagery of ISIS might begin to become comprehensible—not, of course, excusable, but comprehensible, meaning something we can figure out and respond to effectively. More importantly, if we actually understood how we got where we now are, we might begin to figure out how to get out, get someplace else, someplace better.  The question of how to get someplace better has been staring us in the face at least since 9/11. It’s high time we began to face up to it.

Otherwise, we will simply be repeating the same foolish response to 9/11 that bin Laden was counting on.

Failed GOP policies created the disaster in the Middle East.  Therefore, more GOP advice that wants to compound the disaster further should be the last thing anyone sane listens to.