Mohammed bin Salman: America's New Saddam Hussein

Maddeningly, America rarely seems to learn from past mistakes and seems doomed to repeat past fiascoes.  The Vietnam War should have been a start warning for the USA not to launch the Iraq War, yet war mongers like Dick Cheney - who had avoided service in Vietnam himself - blindly pushed the hapless George W. Bush to launch yet another disastrous war that has squandered trillions of dollars and cost countless lives not to mention setting the stage for the disaster that is today's Middle East.  A column in the Washington Post looks at another disaster that the USA and most western nations are repeating and draws the parallels between the West's earl support of Saddam Hussein and Saudia Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman.  Simply having a perceived common enemy does NOT make one your ally, especially if that alliance requires deliberate blindness to human rights abuses and atrocities. Today's supposed expediency sets the stage for tomorrow's nightmare.  Here are column highlights:

Once upon a time, there was a brutal and reckless dictator of an oil-rich Arab country who, despite his well-documented excesses, was stroked and supported by the United States and other Western governments. His crimes were terrible, went the rationale, but he was modernizing his country and he was holding the line against Islamist jihadism and Iran. Anyway, there was probably no alternative.

The ruler heard that message. He concluded that, as long as he kept supplying oil and opposing Iran, he was free to butcher his opponents and bully his neighbors.

His name, of course, was Saddam Hussein. The bet made on him by the United States and its allies directly led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and from there to the “endless wars” in the Middle East that are now almost universally bemoaned by the West’s foreign policy establishment.

And yet, 30 years later, those mandarins and the politicians they report to are blindly repeating the mistake. They are saying they abhor the blatant crimes of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, including the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the torture and imprisonment of women seeking greater rights. They see his bombing campaign in Yemen as a war-crime-ridden disaster.

Yet, at the summit of the Group of 20 in Osaka, Japan, a week ago, they cheerfully clustered around him. Not just President Trump but also prime ministers and presidents from the big European democracies. And not just them but also the leaders of India, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have received Mohammed bin Salman warmly in the past six months.

Ask them why, and you get an all-too-familiar response: The crown prince, who is also known as MBS, is the best chance for modernization in Saudi Arabia. He’s fighting the Islamist extremists, and he’s allied with us and with Israel against Iran. The alternatives to him are worse.

[U.N. special investigator] Callamard conducted a five-month investigation into Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last October. On June 19, Callamard released a powerful report making the case that “Mr. Khashoggi has been the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia responsible” — and that Mohammed bin Salman was almost certainly complicit in the operation and in its subsequent coverup.

Callamard’s report called for a halt to the closed Saudi trial of 11 lower-level operatives blamed for the murder, and for an independent investigation by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, or the FBI. The report also called for sanctions to be imposed on Mohammed bin Salman and his foreign assets “until and unless evidence is provided and corroborated that he carries no responsibility for this execution.”

At the G-20 summit, Trump met Mohammed bin Salman for breakfast and declared he was doing “a spectacular job.” Later, [Trump] the president answered a question about Khashoggi by saying there was no “finger directly” pointing at the crown prince — though both Callamard’s report and a CIA assessment have done just that.

Trump notwithstanding, she is counting on justice to come from the United States. “I think this is the only place where political accountability is going to work,” she said during a meeting at The Post.

There is still some hope of that: Legislation pending in the House would require the director of national intelligence to report on those responsible for the Khashoggi murder, and would require a visa ban to be applied to them. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to consider other bills this week. But as long as Trump is president, Mohammed bin Salman is unlikely to face direct U.S. sanction . . .

Like Saddam Hussein before him, Mohammed bin Salman has concluded that he is immune. Women he ordered tortured are still in prison. His planes are still bombing Yemen. And he is taking the first steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Because Western governments do not stop him now, they will have to do it later — when the cost is likely to be far higher.

Those who do not know history - or, in this case, who choose to ignore it - are doomed to repeat it, often with even worse consequences down the road.  Saudi Arabia is NOT America's ally and MBS is no friend to decent moral people. 

Donald Trump’s Favorite Dictators

There are many things to fear about Donald Trump one of the most troubling of which is his apparent love for heinous dictators which suggests that he can see himself in such a role should he win the White House in November (should that happen, I will seriously move to confirm my dual citizenship and have an escape route in place).   Besides being a very sick narcissist, Trump seems to revel in authoritarianism - something that excites equally loathsome evangelical Christians.  And as with all things Trump, The Donald never can keep his mouth shut and keep his thoughts to himself.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's favorites from a list of villains in history.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s regular praise for authoritarian governments and dictators has come under fresh scrutiny this week following his latest laudatory comments about the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose human rights abuses and support for international terrorism made him a top enemy of the United States for decades.

“He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good,” Trump said during a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday evening. “They didn’t read them the rights — they didn’t talk, they were a terrorist, it was over. 

The remarks have revived worries among Republican lawmakers and members of the party’s foreign-policy establishment, many of whom have become increasingly despondent over Trump’s loose and threatening rhetoric on international relations. Many critics in both parties also say that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee is laying out an alarmingly dark worldview that should give voters serious pause.

“This follows a disturbing trend of Trump relating to the way brutal tyrants executed policy in their countries. I do think that there’s something dark about Trump’s view of the world,” said Republican strategist Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush aide who has played an active role in the anti-Trump movement. “When a person running for president continually compliments brutal, undemocratic dictators and their methods, I think it’s fair to have some concerns that those are methods that they might be interested in deploying if necessary.”

He [Trump] also spoke dismissively in December about Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds: “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy. ‘Oh he’s using gas!’ ”

Trump has also repeatedly praised Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “strong” leaders “unlike what we have in this country,” citing the control they have over their people. When Putin complimented Trump last year, Trump called it “a great honor,” . . . “Trump’s past comments on this were overshadowed by other crazier, wackier, more offensive things, but it stood out yesterday,” Miller said.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has endorsed Trump, distanced himself forcefully from the candidate’s Hussein comments. “He was one of the 20th century’s most evil people. He was up there. He committed mass genocide against his own people using chemical weapons,” Ryan said on Fox News Channel late Tuesday.

Among other Republicans, Trump’s staunchest backers offered a full-throated defenses while others kept their distance Wednesday.

Trump’s free-wheeling rhetoric on foreign policy has presented tangible problems for his campaign, which has struggled to court respected foreign-policy minds. Many fear that their professional reputations would be damaged if they joined the Trump operation.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s latest remarks on Hussein. But in a March presidential debate, Trump was confronted over similar comments by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who pressed him on his positive remarks about authoritarian governments in China and Russia. Tapper asked Trump about his assertion in a 1990 Playboy interview that the Chinese government massacre of students in Tiananmen Square “shows you the power of strength.”

 There's more in the piece.  The take away? Be VERY afraid.

Clinton Aide Slams Jeb Bush on Iraq Statements

It takes real nerve - or perhaps stupidity - for Jeb Bush to try to criticize Hillary Clinton for the debacle in Iraq that was launched by his cretin brother George W. Bush, a/k/a the Chimperator on this blog, with no real plan for what would happen in the aftermath.  As readers will recall, Jebbie's idiot brother and Emperor Palpatine Cheney claimed that the Iraqi people would hail Americans as liberators, etc., etc.  None of that, of course happened.   Worse yet, many predicted the catastrophe that ultimately happened.  Despite all of this, Jebbie is now trying to blame Hillary for the rise of ISIS when in fact, it was the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Sunni versus Shiite violence that actually gave rise to ISIS.  A piece in The Hill looks at a response directed to Jebbie's lies and nonsense.  Here are excerpts:

A senior policy aide for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday accused former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush of making a “bold attempt to rewrite history and reassign responsibility” on the Middle East.

 

Bush is expected to link Clinton to the growth of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in a speech later Tuesday.

 

“It’s curious that Gov. Bush is choosing Iraq as the place he wants to engage the foreign policy debate,” Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s senior policy adviser, told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.

“We’ve seen similar things from other Republican candidates — they cannot be allowed to escape responsibility for the real mistake here. They might hope we all forget but the American people remember.”

 

Sullivan accused the administration of George W. Bush, Jeb’s brother, of sending in too few troops, pushing out Sunnis that later became radicalized and adding to Iranian influence within the Iraqi government. 

 

He added that Bush, not President Obama, set the withdrawal date for U.S. forces in Iraq.

 

“It’s simply wrong to assert that ISIS arose from the vacuum after American troops left,” he said.

 

“ISIS grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq, and where did AQI come from? It didn’t exist before the invasion. It emerged in no small part as a result of President Bush’s failed strategy, and it gained strength by signing up former Sunni military officers, officers from the very army the Bush administration disbanded.”

 

Like his idiot brother, Jebbie is a lying douche bag.  Do we really want the brother of arguably one of America's  worse presidents in the nation's history in the White House - especially when he refuses to renounce his brother's errors that wasted thousands of American lives and billions and billions of dollars?

CIA Briefer Admits Bush and Cheney Lied to American Public on WMD Intelligence

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell is sworn in as he testifes before the House Intelligence Committee. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

With Jeb "Jebbie" Bush already suffering severe political turbulence over the failed policies of his idiot brother, now George W. Bush's CIA briefer has admitted on national television that Bush and Dick Cheney knowingly lied to the American public about weapons of mass destruction  in Iraq.  And Jebbie is already on record that he sees his lying brother as his "go to adviser" on Middle East policy.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at the CIA briefer's admissions.  Here are excerpts:

For a dozen years, the Bush-Cheney crowd have been trying to escape—or cover up—an essential fact of the W. years: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants misled the American public about the WMD threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the way to the invasion of Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and the rest, this endeavor is fundamental; it is necessary to protect the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. Naturally, Karl Rove and other Bushies have quickly tried to douse the Bush-lied-us-into-war fire whenever such flames have appeared.

[N]ow there's a new witness who will make the Bush apologists' mission even more impossible: Michael Morell, a longtime CIA official who eventually became the agency's deputy director and acting director. During the preinvasion period, he served as Bush's intelligence briefer.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball on Tuesday night, Morell made it clear: The Bush-Cheney administration publicly misrepresented the intelligence related to Iraq's supposed WMD program and Saddam's alleged links to Al Qaeda.

Host Chris Matthews asked Morell about a statement Cheney made in 2003: "We know he [Saddam Hussein] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Here's the conversation that followed:

MATTHEWS: Was that true?

MORELL: We were saying—

MATTHEWS: Can you answer that question? Was that true?

MORELL: That's not true.

MATTHEWS: Well, why'd you let them get away with it?

MORELL: Look, my job Chris—

MATTHEWS: You're the briefer for the president on intelligence, you're the top person to go in and tell him what's going on. You see Cheney make this charge he's got a nuclear bomb and then they make subsequent charges he knew how to deliver it…and nobody raised their hand and said, "No that's not what we told him."

There's the indictment, issued by the intelligence officer who briefed Bush and Cheney: The Bush White House made a "false presentation" on "some aspects" of the case for war. "That's a big deal," Matthews exclaimed. Morell replied, "It's a big deal."

And there's more. Referring to the claims made by Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials that Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda, Morell noted, "What they were saying about the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda publicly was not what the intelligence community" had concluded.

Maureen Dowd: The Need Remember the Iraq War Was Launched based on Lies

As Jeb "Jebbie" Bush tries to extricate himself form the fiasco he created by stating that he would have invaded Iraq as his idiot brother did, other Republican candidates are striving to couch the issue in "what we knew then and what we know now."  In short, they want the public to forget that the war was justified and launched based on deliberate lies and fabrications.  Stated another way, the war was the result of failed GOP policies and the sinister actions of GOP elected officials and their advisers.  Maureen Dowd has a column in the New York Times that reminds us that we must not be duped into believing the GOP revisionist history.  Here are excerpts:

IT isn’t about what we know now.  It’s about what we knew then.

It is simply not true, as Republican presidential aspirant Scott Walker said on Friday, that “any president would have likely taken the same action Bush did with the information he had.”

That’s not giving enough credit to W. and his frothing band of Reservoir Dogs.

It took a Herculean effort of imagination, manipulation and deception to concoct “the information” that propelled the invasion, occupation and destruction of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Aside from the Blair poodle and the Coalition of the Willing-to-Overlook-Counterfeit-Claims, our allies tried to warn us. You know you’re in trouble when the Germans tell you that you’re too militaristic.

The Saudis thought Saddam was a monster, but, according to a Saudi official, they sent top emissaries to urge W. against war. Prince Saud, the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar, the ambassador in Washington, told the president that Saddam had assured them that he would allow the inspectors in. The Saudis explained what should have been obvious to the foreign affairs neophyte in the Oval Office: Saddam, who was writing romance novels, listening to Frank Sinatra and reading Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” was simply blustering like any Arab despot would, trying to deter Iran with a big imaginary cache of W.M.D.

Everyone paying attention after 9/11 knew that the Bush crew had crudely and cynically switched villains, diverting America’s fury and fear from Osama, whose address was unknown, to Saddam, a reliable Bush family punching bag. They used patriotism like brass knuckles.

Karl Rove, who once thought the war would help build a Republican empire at home, still defends it.

But, as Senator Rand Paul bluntly argued last weekend while visiting a San Francisco tech company, America was better off with Saddam in power.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, told the Concord Monitor that it was a “fair assessment” to say Iraq was better off under Saddam.

Jeb had barely finished insisting that he was his own man before he voluntarily shackled himself to W., putting several members of his brother’s war-torture-and-Katrina tarnished brain trust on his advisory list and telling a group of financiers in New York that W. was his top adviser on the Middle East!! :(

The 62-year-old was schooled on W.’s deadly Middle East legacy by a 19-year-old University of Nevada student, Ivy Ziedrich, who explained to the would-be leader of the free world that ISIS — which is gobbling up more and more pieces of Iraq — was not the virulent spawn of President Obama’s policies, but of his brother’s.

And consider this: Jeb hasn’t even been asked any questions yet about W.’s dark contributions on waterboarding, the deficit and the near-total collapse of the American economy.

The "War on Terror" - The Making of a Disaster

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their sycophants promised Americans that they would wage a "war on terror" that would keep America safe, reduce Islamic extremism, and build a democracy and stable government in Iraq.   That promise has turned out to be just as big of a lie as the ones used to take America to war in Iraq.  Lies that have ultimately unleashed the ongoing disaster in the Middle East which makes one long for a return of the so-called "threats" of Saddam Hussein.  Unbridled extremism and horrific violence are now the norm in the Middle East and some fear that violence could come to America and/or Europe.  A column in the New York Times looks at how things got to their current frightening state.  Fundamentalist religion is, as always, part of the toxic mix.  Yes, Obama has made mistakes, but the entire deadly disaster was set in motion by Bush/Cheney.  Here are column excerpts:

What went wrong? The United States and its allies did not go to war to eradicate Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan only to face — after the expenditure of so much blood and treasure — a more proximate terrorist threat with a Qaeda-like ideology. The “war on terror,” it seems, produced only a metastasized variety of terror.

The curtain, it seemed, had fallen on America’s post-9/11 trauma. Then, a little over three years after Bin Laden’s death, ISIS overran the Iraqi city of Mosul and the world woke up to the radicalization through the festering Syrian war of another generation of Muslims; youths drawn to the slaughter of infidels (as well as Shiite Muslims) and the far-fetched notion of recreating an Islamic caliphate under Shariah law. When a hooded ISIS henchman with a British accent beheaded Foley last week, the new threat acquired urgency at last.

The list of American errors is long: Bush’s ill-conceived and bungled war in Iraq; a failure to deal with the fact that two allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, have been major sources and funders of violent Sunni extremism; an inability to seize opportunity in Egypt, home to nearly a quarter of the world’s Arabs, and so demonstrate that Arab societies can evolve out of the radicalizing confrontation of dictatorship and Islamism; a prolonged spate of dithering over the Syrian war during which Obama declared three years ago that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside” without having any plan to achieve that; a lack of resolve in Syria that saw Obama set a red line on the use of chemical weapons only to back away from military force when chemical weapons were used; an inability to see that no one loves an Arab vacuum like jihadi extremists, and a bloody vacuum was precisely what Obama allowed Syria to become; and inattention, until it was too late, to festering sectarian conflict in a broken Iraqi society left to its fate by a complete American withdrawal.

The chicken that came home to roost from the Syrian debacle is called ISIS. It is not Al Qaeda. But, as the journalist Patrick Cockburn has noted, Al Qaeda “is an idea rather than an organization, and this has long been the case.”

ISIS grew through American weakness — the setting of objectives and red lines in Syria that proved vacuous. But the deepest American and Western defeat has been ideological. As Hussain said, “If you don’t have a concerted strategy to undermine their narrative, their values, their worldview, you are not going to succeed. Everyone in society has to take on the challenge.”

Want to Screw Iran? Give it Iraq

Since the post World War I division of the Middle East by the European powers, the region's artificial nations have been more or less in constant chaos on one level of another.  The few periods of "stability" have largely stemmed from brutal dictators who for a time could keep the lid on ethnic and religious hatreds and rivalries.  Indeed, one of the few nations in the region with a true historic identity is Iran which still dreams back to the days of glory of the Persian Empire.  Despite the ranting delusions of war criminal Dick Cheney and his fellow neocons, no amount of American blood and money will fix the problems in Iraq.  Thus, one perverse proposal: give Iraq to Iran and destabilize Iran.  Think I am kidding?  Here are excerpts from a piece in The Daily Beast that looks at the perverse logic:

Back in the George W. Bush administration’s darkest days occupying Iraq, I ran into a guy who was about as close to Bush as you could get without being Bush himself. We were at one of those Davos cocktail parties where you can barely hear what you are saying yourself, much less what’s being said to you. But I wanted to press this guy on all that had gone wrong in Iraq, especially the fact that the mullahs of Iran were gaining so much power and influence on the American dime.
“All that blood and treasure and we might as well have handed Baghdad to Tehran on a platter,” I shouted.

The Bush clone looked at me—and I don’t know if this was just an off-the-cuff kiss-off, or a half-considered bon mot, or some perverse quasi-serious notion of his (not speaking for the president, of course)—but what he said was, “If you really want to fuck Iran, let ‘em have Iraq.”

[T]he idea stayed with me as one of those notions that is so logical, yet so outside the box, that nobody ever will take it seriously.  Well, now, maybe we should.


It's time the Iraqi Pottery Barn rule—“you break it, you pay a trillion dollars for it"—applied to someone else. And Iran's a very good candidate.

The people of the United States have done all that they should do, giving their lives, their taxes and their sacred honor to try to set straight the mess created on the basis of bad intelligence, bad judgment and bald lies.

One of the supreme ironies in the tragedy playing out before us now is that the Iranians were supposed to be so much smarter than we were in dealing with the region. Ask 'em, they'll tell you. Neighboring nations often hold each other in contempt, but the Persian view of Arabs—"lizard eaters," as the saying goes—is beyond the Aryan Iranian pale.

Again and again we were told by sundry Middle East experts that the wise mullahs had every interest in maintaining a stable Iraq. And maybe the wise ones did. But they were not the ones who went into action.

The consequences of this devastation in the Fertile Crescent are almost incalculable for the people, for the land, and for the ancient history that is rooted there. But, much as we might mourn the losses, why should the United States be in the business of trying to hold it all together now?

Let's see: There is a humanitarian argument, yes. There is probably an oil argument, as always in the Middle East. But the only argument that holds any real weight with the American people is that terrorists will make the newly self-declared caliphate in the ISIS-conquered lands a base of operations against the United States. You remember the old Bush-era slogan that helped get us into Iraq in the first place? "We've got to fight them over there (Iraq) so we don't have to fight them here (meaning, say, Kansas)."

Think again. There's a risk to the U.S., yes. But very little of the ISIS ethos has to do with hitting the Freedom Tower or the Capitol Dome. It's all about slaughtering Shiites, like, you know, the Iranians.

Did I mention the nuclear negotiations with Iran? No. What's striking about them now is their irrelevance.  All along, the atomic minuet with Tehran has been built on assumptions—ours and theirs—that are, as it turns out, erroneous.

Misguided U.S. Invasion Spawned Current Disaster

As lunatics like John McCain shout that American troops need to return to Iraq and/or blame Obama for recent events, saner minds have connected the dots - a task that truly isn't difficult - and lay the blame for today's disaster in Iraq where it really belongs: at the feet of Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney and their minions who lied to the American people and launched the nation on a fool's errand 11 years ago.  Not only was the invasion ill planned, but not apparent thought was ever really given to the issue of what happen after Saddam Hussein was toppled from power.  Meanwhile, thousands of young Americans lost their lives for ultimately nothing and America went a go way towards bankrupting itself.  Yet the GOP seemingly still hasn't learned.  A piece by Agence France-Presse reprinted in The Raw Story should be mandatory reading for everyone in Congress.  Here are article excepts:

The rise of Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Iraq can be traced to America's invasion of the country more than a decade ago, as it left a power vacuum and unleashed sectarian bloodletting, experts said Friday.

With television footage of Sunni extremists sweeping across Iraq this week, critics of former president George W. Bush's decision to invade in 2003 said the onslaught offered yet more proof of the war's disastrous fallout.

Neoconservatives who backed Bush's decision touted the war as a way to build a model for democracy in the Middle East. Instead, it has fueled an explosive Sunni-Shiite divide that is still sending shockwaves through the region, experts said. 

For University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole, events in Iraq are "an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad."  "There was none," said Cole, an outspoken opponent of the invasion.

But by occupying and "weakening" Iraq, the Bush administration ironically created conditions that allowed Al-Qaeda "to take and hold territory in our own time," he wrote.

The late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was long painted as an arch-enemy by the United States, but more than ten years since US-led forces toppled his regime, his era appears relatively stable and innocuous compared to the virulent threats now engulfing Iraq and causing alarm in Washington.

Saddam's fall opened the door to an emboldened Iran extending its reach across the region, a Shiite-led government that has alienated Sunnis and helped give birth to Al-Qaeda linked extremists now entrenched in Iraq and Syria, analysts said.

 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had foreseen a fiasco from the outset.

"We warned long ago that the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well," Lavrov said Thursday.

Without referring to Bush by name, Lavrov said the situation in Iraq has been "deteriorating at an exponential rate" ever since the Americans ousted Saddam.  Other commentators blamed the Bush administration for the wholesale dismantling of Baghdad's entire government apparatus without building an alternative.

"There's plenty of room for finger-pointing for the debacle in Iraq. Let's not forget the disastrous decision to start the war in 2003 as the place to begin finger-pointing," Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former CIA officer, told AFP.

As for McCain, if he thinks America "won" in Iraq, then I guess he thinks we "won" in Vietnam.  The man needs his head examined.
 

A Fake PhD Played the Neocon Fantasy World and Hijacked The Syria Debate

One of my constant criticism of the far right and the Christofascists is their love of "experts" who in fact have no legitimate credentials.   Indeed, FRC, CWFA and AFA are notorious for their fake experts who have no background on issues on which they pontificate despite the lofty titles they are given.  As long as one is saying what these extremists want to hear and playing to their prejudices, you can become an overnight sensation and have credibility where none is merited.  Think Progress looks at the manner in which Elizabeth O’Bagy, a supposed PhD expert on Syria duped the pro-war Neocons and Republican members of the U. S. Senate.  The problem is that Ms. Bagy is no PhD and she played people for fools by saying what they wanted to hear.  I never cease to be amazed how people who ought to know better never bother to check out credentials.  Here are highlights from the Think Progress story:

Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy, Syria expert, made quite an impression on Senator John McCain. During Senate hearings, the former Presidential candidate quoted at length from her recent Wall Street Journal op-ed painting a rosy picture of a mostly secular, pro-Western anti-Assad insurgency.

“John, do you agree with Dr. O’Bagy’s assessment of the opposition?,” the Senator asked the Secretary of State John Kerry. “I agree with most of that,” he replied. 

Except Dr. O’Bagy wasn’t actually a doctor. Her PhD was fabricated, a lie she told her employers at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), an influential neoconservative-aligned think tank, to get hired. Ironically, it ended up being the lie that got her fired Wednesday. This postmodern reenactment of the Icarus myth also provides a bizarrely informative window into the way that Washington’s foreign policy sausage gets made.

O’Bagy got her start last year, when she interned for ISW’s Iraq portfolio while completing a Master’s in Arab Studies at Georgetown University.  . . .  Several media outlets have repeated this account as fact in their write-ups of O’Bagy’s firing, all maintaining that she is still in the process of completing a Georgetown doctorate.

This is almost certainly false. Either O’Bagy was at one point enrolled a PhD program and dropped out, or she has been lying the entire time. Some evidence points to the latter.  . . . . She is not listed as a PhD student on the Government department’s website. She does not exist in the university directory. A search of the entire Georgetown website turns up only one hit, a congratulations notice for her Master’s graduation.

However O’Bagy acquired her contacts, the work they helped her produce was influential and widely respected. Over the course of roughly a year, she went from a graduate student and intern to a pundit making regular appearances on Fox News and being published in Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and well, The Wall Street Journal. She was promoted to Senior Analyst and then to Syria Team Lead at ISW, and had become known as a go-to expert on the Syrian rebels among foreign policy experts. But the closer Icarus flew to the sun, the faster the wax on her feathers began to melt.

Regardless, O’Bagy’s rise and fall is yet more evidence that the talented people who populate America’s media and policy apparatus never seem to quite fully internalize: never, ever lie about something someone else can prove you wrong about. You’re going to get caught.

Andrew Sullivan has some telling, put dead on point comments about the Neocons and the far right:

The Kagans – so many you can barely keep track of them – are a particularly Washington clan. Like other neocons – the Podhoretzes and Kristols come to mind – the family occupies various posts and play assorted roles in advancing the idea of US global hegemony, constant interference in other countries (but never Israel!), and warfare. They played a key part in deceiving much of official Washington – wittingly or not – about the situation in Iraq, and thereby bear responsibility for the catastrophe that followed. Their “surge” subsequently failed to achieve what it was designed for: getting a multi-sectarian government with lower levels of mass violence in Iraq. You can see how utterly divorced from reality that pipe-dream was by just reading the news reports daily of the low-burning civil war there every day.

So is anyone surprised they were duped again? Zack Beauchamp (former Dishtern) gives a great account of the sorry story of how the woman who became one of the more conspicuous advocates for full-scale entry into another Middle East civil war was not what she said she was. Elizabeth O’Bagy lied to Kimberley Kagan about her doctorate and Kagan never checked it out before putting her Institute for the Study of War on record behind it.

It’s a classic example of how dubious actors with vague backgrounds can ascend so rapidly in Washington as long as they are parroting one faction’s preferred version of the truth. This isn’t unique to the neocons, of course. But since they currently hold the world record in being duped and duping others on matters of war and peace, the fact that this is still happening – especially after the lies and bullshit that occurred before the war in Iraq – is instructive that these people never learn.

These were the people touting Chalabi, remember? These were the people telling us there was no serious sectarian issue in Iraq under Saddam and a civil war was highly unlikely if we invaded. These were the people dismissing the notion in advance that we did not have enough troops to secure the country. These were the people – once trapped in their own delusional universe – that sanctioned grotesque and endemic torture of prisoners as a way to get out of it.

It sickens me to see this same propaganda machine wheeled into action again, and to see Washington take it seriously. But it heartens me as well that this unreliable person and demonstrable liar has been exposed. May she be the first of many.

Which brings us back to the question of why does anyone listen to these people who have proved to be so demonstratively wrong much less supposed "experts" that no one has vetted?

Peacock Generals and the Ongoing Betrayal of Our Troops

While I have been a long critic of the military disaster in Afghanistan - and I truly opposed Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney's lie based war in Iraq - I like so many others have been remiss in not doing more to wake people up to the urgent need to withdraw ALL of our troops now.  The carnage and wasting of young lives goes on unabated and for absolutely nothing in the longer term.  Sadly, until my son-in-law's severe wounding, I simply failed to pay sufficient attention. Saving face for incompetent generals and loud mouth sabre rattling politicians doesn't justify a single lost life.  Yet America continues to throw away the lives of our troops:

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.
Killed were: Sgt. Channing B. Hicks, 24, of Greer, S.C., and Spc. Joseph A. Richardson, 23, of Booneville, Ark.
They died Nov. 16, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device and small arms fire. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan. 

And then there's this:

A Marine from New Prague, Minn., was killed Sunday during combat operations in Afghanistan, according to family members and media reports.
Lance Cpl. Dale Means, 23, died Nov. 18 of injuries inflicted by an improvised explosive device, according to the New Prague Times.

These deaths are happening almost daily.  And why are these young men and sometimes women dying?  For bullshit like this?

HERAT, Afghanistan -- Women in Converse sneakers jog untrammeled -- if still in full, flowing chadors -- in this western Afghan city's biggest park, enjoying freedoms rarely witnessed in the rest of Afghanistan.

Rich businessmen, refugees for a few days of "picnic" from more violent Kandahar, pull on apple-scented shisha pipes like lotus eaters in the pagodas of the local pleasure garden. Unwary for once of kidnappers or suicide bombers, they punctuate the night with hoots of laughter.

It is enough to make one sick.   But there's more.  It's our narcissistic, peacock generals who in truth haven't been able to lead our troops to real victory since World War II.  Oh yes, there was the first Iraq War under the Chimperator's father, but there we saw flat terrain and an overwhelming force take on the far out classed troops of Saddam Hussein.  It wasn't even a real contest, especially viewed in hindsight. All we have seen since Vietnam has been American might going down to defeat in guerrilla wars that traditional battle plans simply cannot handle.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the strutting peacocks who have overseen the debacles.  Here are highlights:  

FASTIDIOUSNESS is never a good sign in a general officer. Though strutting military peacocks go back to Alexander’s time, our first was MacArthur, who seemed at times to care more about how much gold braid decorated the brim of his cap than he did about how many bodies he left on beachheads across the Pacific. Next came Westmoreland, with his starched fatigues in Vietnam. In our time, Gen. David H. Petraeus has set the bar high. Never has so much beribboned finery decorated a general’s uniform since Al Haig passed through the sally ports of West Point on his way to the White House. 

I would propose that every moment a general spends on his uniform jacket is a moment he’s not doing his job, which is supposed to be leading soldiers in combat and winning wars — something we, and our generals, stopped doing about the time that MacArthur gold-braided his way around the stalemated Korean War.

And now comes “Dave” Petraeus, and the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. No matter how good he looked in his biographer-mistress’s book, it doesn’t make up for the fact that we failed to conquer the countries we invaded, and ended up occupying undefeated nations. 

The genius of General Petraeus was to recognize early on that the war he had been sent to fight in Iraq wasn’t a real war at all. This is what the public and the news media — lamenting the fall of the brilliant hero undone by a tawdry affair — have failed to see. He wasn’t the military magician portrayed in the press; he was a self-constructed hologram, emitting an aura of preening heroism for the ever eager cameras.

[H]e did a lot of good things, like conceiving of the idea of basically buying the loyalties of various factions in Iraq. But they weren’t the kinds of things that win wars. In fact, they were the kinds of things that prolong wars, which for the general had the useful side effect of putting him on ever grander stages so he could be seen doing ever grander things, culminating in his appointment last year as the director of the C.I.A. 

THE problem was that he hadn’t led his own Army to win anything even approximating a victory in either Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s not just General Petraeus. The fact is that none of our generals have led us to a victory since men like Patton and my grandfather, Lucian King Truscott Jr., stormed the beaches of North Africa and southern France with blood in their eyes and military murder on their minds.

The generals who won World War II were the kind of men who, as it was said at the time, chewed nails for breakfast, spit tacks at lunch and picked their teeth with their pistol barrels. General Petraeus probably flosses. He didn’t chew nails and spit tacks, but rather challenged privates to push-up contests and went out on five-mile reveille runs with biographers.

His greatest accomplishment was merely personal: he transformed himself from an intellectual nerd into a rock star military man. The problem was that he got so lost among his hangers-on and handlers and roadies and groupies that he finally had his head turned by a West Point babe in a sleeveless top.

If only our political leadership, not to mention the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies, had known how quickly and hard he would fall over such a petty, ignominious affair. Think of how many tens of thousands of lives could have been saved by ending those conflicts much earlier and sending Dave and his merry band of Doonesbury generals to the showers.

A harsh assessment?  Most definitely, but none the less all too true.  Obama needs to wake up NOW and get our men and women out of Afghanistan.

Witch Hunts Continue Against Iraqi Gays

The USA has spent billions and billions of dollars and squandered thousands of American lives on the Chimperator's fools errand in Iraq. This "investment" was supposed to remove Saddam Hussein and create a democracy in Iraq where freedom would extend to all. Except apparently if one is gay. Gays continue to be hunted down and killed by both Islamic extremists and by government forces - and American tax payers are funding this travesty. True, the Christianists likely support the extermination of gays, but I suspect most Americans do not want to be bankrolling murder and torture of civilians. The photo at right is that of a gay victim of Iraqi police torture - take a good look: that's American tax money at work in Iraq. And of course, "fierce advocate" Obama remains silent. UK Gay News has the details. Here are some highlights:
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LONDON, June 22, 2010 – There is growing concern that the Iraqi government is stepping up a witch-hunt against gays and lesbians in the country after a police raid on a Karbala safe house, the London-based Iraqi LGBT said at the weekend.
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Last week, twelve police officers are reported to have burst into the safe house, and then violently beat up, and blindfolded the six occupants sheltering there before bundling them off in three vans. According to a source who witnessed the raid, the police also confiscated computer equipment before burning down the house, the London group said in a statement.
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According to reports reaching London, one of the arrested people has turned up in hospital. However, nothing is known about the whereabouts of the other five individuals, which include two gay men, one lesbian and two transgender people. It is feared they may have been taken to the Interior Ministry in Baghdad, where, it is reported, many gay people have been tortured and executed in the last two years.
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Government forces have previously sized people particularly at roadblocks and handed them to militias who have then tortured them and their bodies have later been found.
None of the previous occupying powers have taken any action or delivered any criticism for these atrocities.
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“Since the fall of Saddam, militias loyal to Shi’a clerics Grand Ayatollah al Sistani and Muqtada al Sadr, both of whom have called for homosexuals to be put to death, have been only too keen to carry out their leaders’ wishes,” the group says.
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“Over 720 LGBT people have disappeared or been murdered, many of whom have been tortured to death. “There is strong evidence that the government is colluding with these militia groups, by rounding up known homosexual and transgender people.”

Saddam Hussein's Rule 'Better' for Gay Iraqis

In yet another story that is a sad testimony on the American occupation of Iraq, the BBC is running a story that looks at the fact that for gay Iraqis, life was far better under Saddam's secular dictatorship than under the puppet government put in place by the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney. Indeed, freedom of religion appears to have decreased as Islamic fundamentalists have been unleashed to spread religious based hate and intolerance across the country - providing a glimpse of what Christianist rule would look like in the USA if the Christian Right are not defeated politically. And Bush and Cheney are proud of their "accomplishments"? Here are some story highlights:

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There has been so much news of death and destruction from Iraq that the position of sexual minorities is rarely touched on in the mainstream media. But stories of torture and murder of gay Iraqis, particularly men, have been emerging in the gay press for several years.

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Some say the violence has intensified in the past few months. Others say killings run into the hundreds and have been going on since 2003.

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What is clear, and confirmed by separate evidence from various human rights groups, is that some gay men have been subjected to appalling violent abuse. One young Iraqi, Amil (not his real name) recalled the death of a friend: "They found out he was gay and they killed him and they chopped him like a lamb, it was awful."

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Another man (who wished to remain anonymous) revealed to Scott Long from the New York-based Human Rights Watch, how his partner was kidnapped and killed. . . . "We found his body the next day dumped in the garbage, his throat cut out, his genitals cut off."

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All the LGBT Iraqis interviewed for Gay Life After Saddam maintained that life was easier for them when Saddam Hussein was in power, from 1979 to 2003. Some spoke fondly of an underground gay culture that flourished before the war in Baghdad.

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I am left again pondering whether or not the world might not be better off without religion all together when I read stories such as this one.

Tortured and Killed in Iraq for Being Gay

We've done posts on this issue before, yet the murders of gays in Iraq continue and worse yet the USA which continues to bankroll the current Iraqi puppet government seems to be totally indifferent to the ongoing deaths. The so-called "Golden Rule" of he who has the money sets the rules obviously is not being applied by the Obama administration. Amnesty International and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are on top of the issue, but the USA is missing in action - yet again - offering more proof that LGBT lives mean little to the current administration other than opportunities fro flowery rhetoric not backed by action. Here are some highlights from ABC News:

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Two gay men were killed in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, and police confirmed they found the bodies of four more men, all killed during a 10-day period after an unknown Shiite militia group urged a crackdown on homosexuals in the country.

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The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs believes as many as 30 people have been killed during the last three months because they were -- or were perceived to be -- gay. In a letter to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the human rights group Amnesty International called for "urgent and concerted action" to end the violence against the gay community, the group reported on its Web site.

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Homosexuality is prohibited almost everywhere in the Middle East, but conditions have become especially dangerous in recent years for gays and lesbians, as religious militias have become more powerful since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. . . . "Two young men were killed Thursday. They were sexual deviants. Their tribes killed them to restore their family honor," an Iraqi army member who did not want to give his name told ABC News.

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Two gay men were found elsewhere in Sadr City, alive but bearing the scars of severe torture. They were beaten, their chests showed signs of cigarette burns, and when police found them they were rushed to the hospital. They had been sodomized with iron bars, sources said. Other men said they had had their chests slashed and their nipples cut off.

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The irony is that such murders were much more rare under the overthrown regime of Saddam Hussein. Welcome to Iraqi democracy US style. Oh, and as for fundamentalist religion - both Islamic and Christian - it continues to be one of the greatest force for evil in the world. How many lives would not have been needlessly lost over the centuries but for religious based hate and evil?

Amnesty International Condemns Iraqi President

It is a sad state of affairs that the Obama administration and the U. S. State Department appear to be utterly indifferent to the unrestrained murder of gay Iraqis that are taking place at present. Both seem unwilling to demand that their Iraqi puppets take action and stop the travesty. Thus, it is good to see that Amnesty International is calling attention to the blatant murders that are taking place and going after Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki personally for allowing the bloodshed. Candidly, I find Maliki and his government to be pretty worthless and content to suck off the tit of the American taxpayers. It is a damning situation when gays had better protections under Saddam Hussein than they do now. Here are highlights from Pink News:

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Amnesty International has taken the unusual step of writing to Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki to demand "urgent and concerted action" by his government to stop the killings of gay men in the country. Although confusion has led to conflicted reports over the numbers being killed, Amnesty believes the murders have been carried out by militiamen and relatives of the victims, after being incited by religious leaders.

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According to the Independent, Amnesty's letter to Mr Al-Maliki accuses his government of failing to condemn the killings publicly or to investigate the murders. It also suggested that evidence shows police are encouraged to target gay men and calls for officers who incite homophobic attacks to be "held to account and either prosecuted or disciplined and removed from office".

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Amnesty International is calling on Nouri al-Maliki to condemn all attacks on members of the gay community, publicly, unreservedly and in the strongest terms possible." Writing for PinkNews.co.uk in February, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell claimed: "Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, homophobia and the terrorisation of LGBT people has got much worse.

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"The western invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended the tyrannical Baathist dictatorship. But it also destroyed a secular state, created chaos and lawlessness and allowed the flourishing of religious fundamentalism. The result has been an Islamist-inspired homophobic terror campaign against LGBT Iraqis." "Queers are being shot dead in their homes, streets and workplaces," he added.

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"Even suspected gay children are being murdered. They killers claim to be doing these assassinations at the behest of the 'democratic' Iraqi government, in order to eradicate what they see as immoral, un-Islamic behaviour."

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Once again, religious fundamentalism of all stripes and cowardly politicians are proving to be a main force of evil in the world.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Do Kill

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Do Kill" is the title of a new article in Newsweek magazine that looks at the horrific plight of gays in Iraq. Despite the US military presence, it appears to be open season for randomly ceasing and executing gay Iraqis who appear to have fared far better under the regime of Saddam Hussein notwithstanding all its brutality. What is happening to gay Iraqis is symptomatic of what happens when religious based fanaticism is allowed to run unchecked and/or creep into the civil laws. Unfortunately, the Chimperator's puppet government doesn't even want to acknowledge the atrocities taking place. Sadly, the mentality of the Iraqi death squads that are rounding up and killing gays is not exclusive to Islamic fundamentalist based on some of the comments to the article posted by American Christianists. As I had said before, I believe that too often religion - be it Christianity or Islam - is a malignant force for evil. Here are some highlights from Newsweek:

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When militiamen from the Mahdi Army came by the compact, two-story stone home in the Doura neighborhood of Baghdad, they weren't looking for Sunnis to harass. They were hunting gays. "Bring us your son's cell phone," one ordered the middle-aged man who came to the gate. They wanted to check if his son, Nadir, had been calling foreigners . . . This time they left, but vowed to come back if they found any evidence he was gay--or was talking to undesirable foreigners. Now that Iraq's sectarian war has cooled off, it's open season on homosexuals and others who infuriate religious hardliners.

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Iraqi authorities scoffed at the subject--when not scolding a reporter for even asking about it. Some of NEWSWEEK's own local staff were wary of the story. Virtually no government officials would sit for an interview. And the United Nations human-rights office, which has a big presence in Iraq, dodged the subject like a mine field.

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[T]he policy in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's rule was "don't ask, don't tell." But that has changed. Iraqi LGBT, the London NGO that Nadir works for, says more than 430 gay men have been murdered in Iraq since 2003. For the country's beleaguered gays, it's a friendless landscape. Many officials say they feel that in a country at war, there are more pressing concerns than gay rights.

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Saif, one of the older residents at an Iraqi LGBT house, recalls Saddam's repressive but secular regime wistfully. "Those were the most beautiful days of our lives," he says. "The fall [of Saddam] was the worst thing to happen." . . . . Most people seem to prefer that the subject just go away. A written request for an interview at the Legal Section of the Ministry of Human Rights was greeted with a suggestion to delete the word "gays." A sympathetic senior government official warned that a direct request to talk to a minister about gays could result in a short conversation.

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Insisting that gays are just a few undesirable perverts who "should be killed"--as one Iraqi who works in journalism put it--encourages an atmosphere of impunity no matter the offense. Killing gays becomes "honorable." And raping them is OK because it isn't considered a homosexual act--only being penetrated or providing oral sex is.

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Ali Hili [who secured asylum in Britain] says the government, security forces, judiciary and religious establishment are complicit in terrorizing gays.

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As I indicated, the mentality of some in this country is little better. Illustrative of the comments posted by Christianist on the Newsweek article is this one which basically supports what is being done to gays in Iraq. Why do I think this jerk is a McCain supporter? Here's his comment (the misspellings are his):

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Posted By: bobomack @ 08/27/2008 8:52:32 AM
Comment: Being gay is an unnatural act, although gays seem to glamorize their experience. The attraction 2 people of the same sex feel for eachother is against God's laws. Permitting gays to marry one another, as well as allowing gays to flaunt their homosexuality in public weakens any countries infastructure. Gays who adopt or raise children are sending the wrong message to our young people, and our society is weakened because of it. The Bible spells it out for us, It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Homosexuality is a scourge on our society, and being gay is an obomination that needs to be punished as the crime it is.

Was America Complicit in Some of Saddam's Crimes?

This column on the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lionel-beehner/was-america-complicit-in-_b_59494.html) and the books it references raise serious questions about the manner in which Saddam Hussein was tried and quickly executed. Did he deserve the death penalty - in my opinion, clearly yes. However, during much of the 1980's Saddam's biggest supporters were in Washington, D. C., when he was courted and assisted as a counterbalance to Iran after the fall of the Shah (whose supposed misdeeds paled compared to Saddam's or those of the mullahs how now run Iran). Here are a few highlights:

The trial of Saddam Hussein ended in disarray and disaster. Who can forget the grainy footage of hooded henchmen taunting the former dictator as he approached the gallows? The most cataclysmic moment in many Iraqis' lives was reduced to a thirty-second clip on YouTube. But while the ending to that sorry chapter in Iraqi history will be long remembered, its beginnings have been too often overlooked.

The answer, suggests Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group and author of the new book, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halbja. There were fears in Washington that politically damaging information might be unearthed about America's role propping up Saddam during the 1980s. "Once Saddam's regime was overthrown," he recently told Ken Silverstein of Harper's Magazine, "the Bush Administration made sure that instead of an international (or even a mixed Iraqi/international) tribunal, a purely Iraqi tribunal was established under strict U.S. control, with statutes written, essentially, in Washington." The perceived miscarriage of justice had a disastrous effect on Iraq, not to mention the larger global effort to try dictators and other war criminals. "The tribunal's evident partiality," Hiltermann continued, "along with other serious procedural problems, undermined its credibility and thereby also undermined the cause of justice and stability in postwar Iraq."

So what was Washington trying to hide? Donald Rumsfeld, as special envoy to President Reagan, visited Baghdad twice, in 1983 and in 1984, and met with Saddam Hussein ostensibly to reaffirm American support for Iraq against the Iranians during their eight-year war. According to a March 2005 article by Ari Berman in The Nation, Washington supplied Baghdad with landmines while "American companies, with the government's approval, sold the chemical agents used against Iranian troops and Iraq's own Kurdish population." Or as Hiltermann puts it, "Rumsfeld reassured the Iraqi leadership that it had broad latitude in prosecuting the war against Iran, including by using poison gas. Along with the Reagan administration, he thereby helped build up a state that terrorized its own citizens and turned a tinpot dictator into a tyrant threatening the region."

Do not forget who else was in the Reagan administration - the Chimperator's daddy. Might he have had something to hide as well?