Iran Might Be America’s Enemy, But Saudi Arabia Is No Friend

Will Trump sell out America's true interest for the sake of the Saudis?

It is beyond frustrating that in general, America never learns from past mistakes or history.  This problem is multiplied ten fold with the Trump/Pence with a cretin when it comes to knowledge of history in the White House whose twin motivations are thrilling his toxic, knuckle dragging base and satiating his ego, when not engaging in corruption to enrich himself at public expense. Nowhere at the moment is this more evident that bellicose talk of war with Iran at the ultimate behest of the nation that furnished the vast majority of the 9-11 hijackers and which has done more to fund Islamic extremism than any other nation.  I refer, of course, to Saudi Arabia, America's false ally.  Making the situation even more disturbing is Trump's boast that the American military - which was unable to fully subdue and create lasting regime change in Iraq, a much smaller and poorer country - is ready to take on Iran.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous case of amnesia and flawed analysis.  Here are excerpts: 

In 1987, an Iraqi warplane attacked an American Navy frigate, the Stark, on patrol in the Persian Gulf. Accepting Saddam Hussein’s explanation that the attack, which killed 37 sailors, had been an accident, American officials promptly used the episode, which came at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, to ratchet up pressure on Tehran. The incident provided the impetus for what became a brief, and all but forgotten, maritime war between the United States and Iran.

Last week, someone — precisely who remains to be determined — attacked two oil refineries in Saudi Arabia. American authorities have been quick to blame Iran, and the possibility of a violent confrontation between the two countries is once again growing. Before making a decision on whether to pull the trigger, President Trump would do well to reflect on that 1987 episode and its legacy.

Back then, the United States had become involved in the very bloody and seemingly interminable Iran-Iraq war, which Hussein had instigated in 1980 by invading Iran. As that war turned into a brutal stalemate, President Ronald Reagan and his advisers persuaded themselves that it was in America’s interests to come to Iraq’s aid. Iran was the “enemy,” so Iraq became America’s “friend.”
 The principal beneficiary was Hussein, who wasted no time in repaying Washington by invading and annexing Kuwait soon after his war with Iran ground to a halt. Thus did America’s “friend” become America’s “enemy.”

The encounter with Iran became a precedent-setting event and a font of illusions. Since then, a series of administrations have indulged the fantasy that the direct or indirect application of military power can somehow restore stability to the gulf.

In fact, just the reverse has occurred. Instability has become chronic, with the relationship between military policy and actual American interests in the region becoming ever more difficult to discern.

In 2019, this now well-established penchant for armed intervention finds the United States once more involved in a proxy conflict, this time a civil war that has ravaged Yemen since 2015. Saudi Arabia supports one side in this bloody and interminable conflict, and Iran the other.
 [T]he United States has thrown in its lot with Saudi Arabia, providing support comparable to what the Reagan administration gave Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. But American-assisted Saudi forces have exhibited no more competence today than did American-assisted Iraqi forces back then. So the war in Yemen drags on.
 Concrete American interests in this conflict, which has already claimed an estimated 70,000 lives while confronting as many as 18 million with the prospect of starvation, are negligible. Once more, as in the 1980s, the demonization of Iran has contributed to a policy that is ill advised and arguably immoral.

[N]either side deserves support. Iran may well qualify as America’s “enemy.” But Saudi Arabia is not a “friend,” regardless of how many billions Riyadh spends purchasing American-manufactured weaponry and how much effort Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman invests in courting President Trump and members of his family.

The conviction, apparently widespread in American policy circles, that in the Persian Gulf (and elsewhere) the United States is compelled to take sides, has been a source of recurring mischief. No doubt the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran poses a danger of further destabilizing the gulf. But the United States is under no obligation to underwrite the folly of one side or the other.

Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so by recognizing that Saudi Arabia’s folly need not be our problem.

The GOP's Hypocrisy on France

Remember how Republicans used to malign France and "Old Europe"?  Everything from France's health care system - one of the most cost efficient in the world - to liberal ideas to the decline of religiosity was open to attack and parody.  Now, a vast case of amnesia has seemingly set in as Republicans attack Obama for not attending the weekend march in Paris or at least not sending a high ranking American as a representative.  Perhaps it was a mistake, or maybe it was better not to give Islamic terrorists a chance to say America orchestrated the whole thing.  That's something open to debate.  What's not open to debate is the hypocrisy of suddenly French loving Republicans.  A column in the Washington Post takes deserved note of the hypocrisy overload.  Here are highlights:

There is a certain je ne sais quoi in conservatives’ criticism of the Obama administration over last week’s terrorist attack in France. 

A decade ago, Republicans in Congress were renaming French fries “freedom fries” and French toast “freedom toast” because of that country’s refusal to support the Iraq war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld belittled the “old Europe” French, President George W. Bush mocked an American reporter for speaking French to the French president, and conservative critics called the French “weasels,” “appeasers” and worse. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was ridiculed by the Bush administration for being “too French” and looking French, and his fluency in French was a liability in the campaign.

And now, that very same Monsieur Kerry, the secretary of state, and his boss, President Obama, are being condemned by conservatives for . . . not being nice enough to the French.
Quelle horreur!
 
The cause célèbre this time is the failure of the Obama administration to send anybody of higher rank than the U.S. ambassador to attend Sunday’s march in Paris showing solidarity against the terrorists.

“Our president should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies,” proclaimed Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican agent provocateur from Texas.

Fox News’s Greta van Susteren said the absence was “embarrassing” and that “Obama should not have snubbed Paris.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — like Cruz a would-be presidential contender — declared it “a mistake not to send someone.” (For the record, neither Cruz nor Rubio attended the march.)

Largely absent from this condemnation of the American government’s slight of the French were the French themselves. French President François Hollande said Obama had been “very present” in the response to last week’s attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish market. 

Officials I spoke to said it was a simple screw-up: They didn’t understand how significant the event would be, with leaders of some 40 countries in attendance.

But the notion that Kerry, of all people, was slighting the French is a bit incroyable. The son of a diplomat, Kerry has close family in France and learned the language at a Swiss boarding school. After the initial massacre in Paris last week, he addressed the shooting at an appearance with the Polish foreign minister, in both English and in French. French TV channel TF1 said that Kerry’s “poignant statement in French” would “go down in history.”

Not too long ago, Kerry’s Francophilia earned him ridicule. Tom DeLay, a House Republican leader, would greet crowds by saying, “Hi. Or, as John Kerry would say, ‘Bonjour.’ ”

But now Kerry is being called insufficiently pro-French . . . The conservatives are guilty of a bit of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in criticizing the Obama administration for snubbing a people they not long ago called cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The Daily Press Is Schizophrenic on Gay Marriage

Personally, I am starting to think that the editorial board of the Daily Press is schizophrenic.  Or that it suffers from group amnesia.  How else to describe the editorials unleashed lambasting Attorney General Mark Herring for refusing to defend Virginia's unconstitutional same sex marriage ban.  The editorial board would have preferred that Herring ignore judicial decisions handed down AFTER last November's state wide elections that significantly changed the legal landscape not to mention key language in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Windsor that eviscerated the very arguments put forth by former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to defend Virginia's anti-gay discrimination.  Now, in the wake of the ruling in Bostic v. Rainey, the same editorial board commends U.S. District Court Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen for striking down the same same sex marriage ban that it wanted Herring to defend.  Either the ban is unconstitutional - which it is - or it is not.  You cannot have it both ways.  Here are highlights from the more recent editorial which acts as if the prior ones had never been written:

Today, the [Marshall-Newman] amendment teeters on the edge of irrelevancy, undone as much by legal argument as by changing public opinion.

The latest blow came last week when a federal judge struck down the law, but stayed the ruling pending further appeal. As supporters of marriage equality, we were pleased with the decision and maintain that eliminating such a discriminatory provision puts Virginia on the right side of history.

Like many states across the South, the commonwealth adopted its same-sex marriage law to reflect the Biblical definition of traditional marriage. But when it comes to government, marriage is a contract, not a sacrament. It should be grounded in law, not in scripture.

Defining marriage as only between a man and a woman uses sexual orientation to discriminate against one group of Americans. It says heterosexual couples alone should be entitled to file joint tax returns, have visitation rights in hospitals or be a spouse's beneficiary.

Lesbians and gays cannot enjoy those benefits because they do not have access to a marriage license. If they are married in a state recognizing same-sex marriage, those unions are not recognized here.

In her Wednesday ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen concluded the law violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides that states may not deny "any person" the "equal protection of the laws." The clause, adopted in 1868, mirrors the limitation on federal government our Founding Fathers placed in the Fifth Amendment.

Yet, in going a step further, the judge tied this lawsuit to the groundbreaking 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down a law barring individuals of different races to be married in the commonwealth. It's a powerful argument with resonance here.
Nor can jurists like Judge Wright Allen set aside precedent set by higher courts. By all accounts, the judge here is religious and might otherwise embrace a traditional definition of marriage. But the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last year on the Defense of Marriage Act contributes to a growing body of law favoring equality over marriage protection.

This case will continue its legal journey, next to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and possibly after to the U.S. Supreme Court.

We continue to believe eliminating discrimination from the Constitution would be the best and most fair outcome for the commonwealth. We hope to see that realized.

So jurists such as federal judges cannot ignore rulings by higher courts but attorney generals not only can, but must according to the Daily Press.  The editorial board needs to get its head out of its ass.

GOP Amnesia: U.S. Wasted Billions Rebuilding Iraq

With the Congressional Republicans whining incessantly about the budget deficit which they try to hang on Barack Obama, they conveniently have amnesia when it comes to the billions of dollars squandered on the Iraq War and the so-called nation building that followed (they also have amnesia on the role that the Bush tax cuts played in exploding the deficit).  Countless needless deaths, waste, corruption and incompetency seem to be the main hallmarks of the Iraq fool's errand launched by Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  An article in Think Progress looks at some of the sums of money that might just as well have been heaped in a pile and set afire for all that they did not accomplish.  Here are some highlights:

As the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq approaches, the body charged with overseeing Iraq’s reconstruction has issued its final report, capping a tale of spending far too much money for very little results.

Appointed in Oct. 2004, over a year into War in Iraq, the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) was charged with being a watchdog over the use of funds provided for rebuilding the Iraqi state after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Those reconstruction and stabilization efforts wound up costing nearly $60 billion — or about $15 million per day — with up to $10 billion of that amount wasted, according to SIGIR Stuart Bowen.

The examples provided of fraud and abuse of the system are staggering both in number and nature. Among the most telling boondoggles is an $108 million waste-water treatment facility in Fallujah, Iraq that will be completed eight years over schedule. Once finished in 2014, it will only service 9,000 homes and require an additional $87 million from Iraq to provide service to the rest of the buildings in the city.

In terms of outright abuse, Iraqis and Americans alike were culprits, with one former Iraqi Defense Minister’s squandering $1.3 billion.  .  .  .  . former U.S. Army Major John Cockerham was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison for siphoning off millions of dollars from reconstruction projects by accepting bribes from various contractors.

The majority of Bowen’s lessons learned provided to Congress deal extensively with the completely unprepared way in which the United States chose to rebuild Iraq.  Bowen gives seven ways to better perform rebuilding operations in the future.  .  .  . 

Many of those suggestions belie the cavalier attitude struck by Republicans at the beginning of the war in 2003, despite a near complete lack of planning by the Bush administration to provide for rebuilding Iraq. “Each day it gets better,” then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in May 2003 of the reconstruction efforts. Rumsfeld also insisted that “the bulk of the funds for Iraq’s reconstruction will come from Iraqis” in October of that year. $60 billion later, Iraq has proved to be nowhere near the “cakewalk” predicted by George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman predicted in 2002.

The GOP lies about the real sources of the nation's deficit are brazen to say the least.  The GOP voted for and approved all of the Bush/Cheney disasters that continue to haunt us to this day.  Yet the GOP demagogues now pretend to be the GOP is party of fiscal restraint that will save the country.  Would that they had shown some fiscal restraint and not taken the country to war needlessly a good portion of the nation's debt would not now exist.