The Trump Regime's War with Iran Would Be Far Worse Than Iraq

With an occupant of the White House who is a malignant narcissist, has no knowledge of history, doesn't read and only wants reports on a single page that tell him what he wants to hear, saber rattling and possible war with Iran is a recipe for disaster. Surrounding himself with delusion war mongers like John Bolton only makes the danger to the nation and the lives of our military service members far worse.  Trump - who seemingly like Hitler uses war and military threats and posturing to make up for his diminished manhood - has learned nothing from the Iraq War debacle and the trillions of taxpayer dollars (which would have been better spent on America's infrastructure) squandered in that fiasco.  As a piece in the Washington Post makes clear, a war with Iraq will be far worse than the Iraq catastrophe both in terms of cost, lost lives, and destabilizing America's already tarnished standing in the world. Making matters even worse, the USA could find itself with few coalition partners save for perhaps the toxic and brutal  regime.  Here are article excerpts that ought to terrify sane Americans: 

Judging from appearances, the United States and Iran are worryingly close to conflict. This weekend, only days after the United States dispatched warships and bombers to the Middle East to deter what it deemed Iranian threats, two Saudi oil tankers and a Norwegian ship were damaged in apparent acts of sabotage in the Persian Gulf.

The dispute between a [Trump] U.S. administration led by a tough-talking Republican president [would be führer] and an embattled but antagonistic Middle Eastern power has reminded many observers of the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 — a move that, in the years since, has been widely condemned as disastrous for all involved.

Even some of the characters in this apparent remake are the same: John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, played a key role in President George W. Bush’s buildup to the Iraq invasion as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

Bolton’s actions at the time earned him a reputation as reckless. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif appeared to allude to him on Tuesday, telling reporters that “extremist individuals in the U.S. administration” were falsely trying to blame Iran for the incidents in the Persian Gulf.

[A] conflict with Iran would not simply be a redux of the 2003 war with Iraq. It would be quite different in many ways — and it would almost certainly be substantially worse. Present-day Iran is a significantly different country compared to Iraq in 2003. The way it would fight a war is very different, too.

If nothing else, Iran is simply a bigger country than Iraq was before the 2003 invasion. At the time, Iraq’s population was about 25 million. Iran’s population is estimated to be more than 82 million. Iran spans 591,000 square miles of land, compared with Iraq’s 168,000 square miles.

[T]he Iraqi army had fewer than 450,000 personnel when the invasion began. Recent estimates suggest that Iran has 523,000 active military personnel, as well as 250,000 reserve personnel.

Just as important, however, is Iran’s location. Unlike Iraq, Iran is a maritime power bordered by the Caspian sea to the north and the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the south. It shares land borders with several troubled U.S. allies, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq.

About a third of the world’s oil tanker traffic passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is bordered by Iran and Oman. At its narrowest point, this shipping route is just under two miles wide. Blocking it could lead shipments of daily global oil exports to drop by an estimated 30 percent.

In terms of conventional military strength, Iran is far weaker than the United States. But the country has long pursued asymmetric strategies that could allow it to inflict serious damage on U.S. interests in the region.

Iran’s navy has a real advantage against the United States, too. It doesn’t need big ships or firepower to block off the Strait of Hormuz, for example, but could use mines or submarines to force a halt in trade.

U.S. war games have suggested that speedboat suicide attacks and missiles could be surprisingly effective against the American military.

The invasion of Iraq involved 150,000 U.S. troops, along with tens of thousands from allied nations. The financial cost of the Iraq War was pegged at over $2 trillion in 2013, with about 400,000 people estimated to have been killed between 2003 and 2011.

American military planners know all this. However, the U.S. government cannot say that there are no good options to militarily engage Iran, because doing so would take the threat of military action off the table and diminish the pressure that it hopes to maintain on Tehran. It’s a risky strategy that has even some of America’s closest allies worried.

The US would likely go it alone and the expense in lives and wasted taxpayer funds would make the Iraq disaster pale in comparison. Only a fool would push this agenda, but then again, that's what we have in the White House, a narcissistic, dangerous fool.

Trump’s Takes America Closer to War in Middle East

Apologists for Donald Trump's reckless action in announcing that that America will withdraw from the nuclear deal struck with Iran three years ago are engaging in all kinds of untruths and gyrations to avoid the obvious.  Namely, that Trump's action in trying to abrogate the agreement - an agreement that every other member of the UN security council signed - will (i) serve to further isolate America diplomatically (one of Vladimir Putin's dreams/goals) and (ii) open the way to potential war which will delight the Christofascists who yearn to start armageddon and the neocons who learned absolutely nothing from the Iraq War disaster where America threw away more than a trillion dollars and thousands of military members' lives.  Equally delighted will be military contractors like Halliburton - Dick Cheney must be salivating - and  oil company interest who foolishly believe they might get their hands on Iran's oil reserves.  I am very happy that my son-in-law left the military after his severe injuries in Afghanistan.   While he may be safe, other men and women will likely end up dead or maimed before Trump's misrule is over.  A main editorial in the Washington Post looks at the dangers Trump's actions pose to America and the world.  Here are excerpts:

THE NUCLEAR deal struck with Iran three years ago was far from perfect, but President Trump’s decision to abrogate it over the opposition of our European allies and without a clear strategy for replacing it is reckless and, most likely, self-defeating. Mr. Trump has opened a rift with Britain, Germany and France, who were partners to the pact along with Russia and China, and he has handed Iran’s Islamic regime some unfortunate opportunities.

What he [Trump] did not acknowledge is that international inspectors as well as senior members of his own administration have confirmed that Iran has complied with the accord, which has vastly reduced its stock of enriched uranium and made it extremely difficult for the regime to develop nuclear weapons in the next decade. The president held out the prospect of “a new and lasting deal” that would cover not just nukes but also Iran’s development of missiles and interventions in Middle Eastern wars. But he offered no road map for achieving that ambitious goal.

The first consequence of Mr. Trump’s decision could be conflict with the Europeans. . . . . European governments, which have said they will not renounce the nuclear deal, may fight any U.S. attempt to enforce the restrictions, including with their own sanctions. Having tried and failed to satisfy Mr. Trump’s objections to the agreement without breaking it, they are unlikely to willingly collaborate in a new U.S. attempt to crush the Iranian economy.

Iran and European governments could agree to continue the pact in defiance of Washington. But Iran’s hard-line military and security apparatus, which has always opposed the accord, will press to resume uranium enrichment, restrict inspections or perhaps even race for a bomb. How would Mr. Trump stop such a breakout, short of war? One reason the nuclear deal was struck was a conclusion by the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama that military action was a risky and uncertain means to prevent an Iranian bomb.

Mr. Trump was pushed to exit the deal by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, whose countries are already engaged in low-level wars with Iran. But the chief of staff of Israel’s own army has said that the nuclear deal is “working and putting off realization of the Iranian nuclear vision by 10 to 15 years.” Mr. Trump’s decision could eliminate that grace period . . . .

[Trump] has frequently said that he has no wish for further Mideast wars; his decision has made one more likely.

Let's be clear on something else: neither Netanyahu nor Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman are true friends of America.   Netanyahu suffers from his own form of megalomania and the Saudis, not Iran, remain the main financiers of Islamic extremism across the globe.  Neither cares about the damage done to America and the squandered monies and American lives that Trump may yet cost the nation.

Lessons From the Latest Virginia Shootings: Gun Control Reform is Needed NOW

While much of the far right is obsessing over the race - and sexual orientation - of the shooter in the shocking on air murder of two TV journalists outside of Roanoke, Virginia yesterday, sane people are once again citing the problem that made the murders far more likely: America's insane gun laws that continue to make America like something out of the Old West and an international embarrassment.  The far right loves to bloviate about "American exceptionalism." When it comes to our gun control laws, America is exceptional: exceptionally stupid. A column in the New York Times looks at the ridiculousness of the current gun control laws and things that could be readily done to drastically reduce gun carnage if politicians would grow a spine and stand up to gun manufacturers and the lunatics of the GOP base.  Here are highlights:

The slaying of two journalists Wednesday as they broadcast live to a television audience in Virginia is still seared on our screens and our minds, but it’s a moment not only to mourn but also to learn lessons.

The horror isn’t just one macabre double-murder, but the unrelenting toll of gun violence that claims one life every 16 minutes on average in the United States. Three quick data points:

■ More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

■ More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.

■ American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard professor and author of an excellent book on firearm safety.

Bryce Williams, as the Virginia killer was known to viewers when he worked as a broadcaster, apparently obtained the gun used to murder his former co-workers Alison Parker and Adam Ward in response to the June massacre in a South Carolina church — an example of how gun violence begets gun violence.  

Whether or not Williams was insane, our policies on guns are demented — not least in that we don’t even have universal background checks to keep weapons out of the hands of people waiting to go boom.

The lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition (that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible politically), but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?

Gun proponents often say things to me like: What about cars? They kill, too, but we don’t try to ban them!

Cars are actually the best example of the public health approach that we should apply to guns. Over the decades, we have systematically taken steps to make cars safer: We adopted seatbelts and airbags, limited licenses for teenage drivers, cracked down on drunken driving and established roundabouts and better crosswalks, auto safety inspections and rules about texting while driving.

This approach has been stunningly successful. By my calculations, if we had the same auto fatality rate as in 1921, we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually from cars. We have reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent.

Yet in the case of firearms, the gun lobby (enabled by craven politicians) has for years tried to block even research on how to reduce gun deaths. The gun industry made a childproof gun back in the 19th century but today has ferociously resisted “smart guns.” If someone steals an iPhone, it requires a PIN; guns don’t.

The United States is an outlier, both in our lack of serious policies toward guns and in our mortality rates. Professor Hemenway calculates that the U.S. firearm homicide rate is seven times that of the next country in the rich world on the list, Canada, and 600 times higher than that of South Korea.

We need universal background checks with more rigorous screening, limits on gun purchases to one a month to reduce trafficking, safe storage requirements, serial number markings that are more difficult to obliterate, waiting periods to buy a handgun — and more research on what steps would actually save lives.

Australia is a model. In 1996, after a mass shooting there, the country united behind tougher firearm restrictions. The Journal of Public Health Policy notes that the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.

Here in America, we can similarly move from passive horror to take steps to reduce the 92 lives claimed by gun violence in the United States daily. Surely we can regulate guns as seriously as we do cars, ladders and swimming pools.

Jebbie Bush's Idea of a "Good Deal"

Perhaps I am biased since I have a son-in-law who was seriously wounded in Afghanistan.  But in retrospect, he was one of the lucky ones - he had a miraculous recovery.  He had friends who lost their lives and others who lost multiple limbs.  All for nothing in the grand scheme of things.  Yet Jeb "Jebbie" Bush believes that the Iraq War and the fool's errand launched by his idiot brother and Emperor Palpatine Cheney was overall a good Deal.  The question is, for who - Halliburton and its shareholders like Cheney?  

A reader sent me the above image from a Facebook post that lays out what assholes like Jebbie conveniently forget.   Read it carefully.  It is an indictment against Jebbie and other Republicans who are all too eager to throw away more American lives and to squander billions, if not trillions of dollars, by sending American troops back into the Middle East.

The last think America needs is another idiot Bush in the White House.  Let's hope Jebbie's poll numbers keep falling.

Memorial Day - How to Truly Honor the Fallen

Arlington National Cemetery

On Memorial Day we honor those who died defending our country in the nation's military.  As Wikipedia notes the holiday arose as follows:

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country's armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the American Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans — established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. By the 20th century, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service.

It is truly right that we remember those who gave their lives for defending the country.  However, it is also right that we remember that some gave their lives needlessly in wars that should never have occurred but for politicians and generals who sought political gain and/or to satiate their egos or to justification for military spending.  The most recent of such wars being, of course, the Iraq War fiasco.  A war that was based on deliberate lies and misinformation by the Bush/Cheney regime.  A war that Republicans for the most part refuse to admit was a terrible mistake that threw away thousands of American lives.

The take away for all of this?  That if we truly honor or war dead, we should make we do not allow sleazy,dishonest politicians, the vast majority of which have no military experience and have no family members in the military to  send more of our military to their deaths needlessly.  As a piece in the New York Times notes, the current members of Congress have little connection to the military despite their swaggering and bellicose blather:

As for the current Congress, as the “PBS NewsHour” noted in November: “In all, 97 members of the next session of Congress will have served in the U.S. military. That means less than 18 percent of the new congressional delegation served in the armed forces. 

[Only] 0.4 percent of the American population is active military personnel.”

Furthermore, we are moving toward a society in which the rich and powerful avoid service while those of fewer means sometimes see it as one of only a few options.

We don't need more lives wasted.  Yet the current GOP as always stands ready to rush to war.  A piece in Salon stresses the need to avoid such efforts.  Here are highlights:

The American empire is dying, and the economy is declining. Dysfunction and disrepair define the sick status and mechanized failure of educational, medical and governmental institutions. One in 10 Americans take antidepressants, unemployment and underemployment soar, poverty blights and obliterates inner cities and rural villages alike, 45 million adults are functionally illiterate, and anyone with all but the lowest lucidity can see clearly that the political system operates as bribery for the highest bidder. Given that the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the wealth, it is likely that the extortionists who purchase political representation all shop at the same clothing store.

In an America suffering from increasing infirmity, anything that allows for denial of reality and comforts delusions of superiority becomes essential and central to the national identity. The United States military, with its garish parades and idolatrous rituals of uniform and flag consecration, functions as the final and fading echo of its country’s creed: “We are better than the rest.”

The real religion of America is America, but as the old gods of economic triumph, middle-class stability and cultural achievement begin to die, chances for sacrament become slim. Commentators and Senators were aggrieved to learn that one of America’s favorite ceremonial rites was nothing more than the slick synthesis of public relations and propaganda.  The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that from 2011 to 2014, the Department of Defense paid 14 NFL teams a total $5.4 million, while the National Guard paid 11 teams $5.3 million, to “honor America’s heroes” before football games, and during halftime shows.

[R]arely have I seen any opening or halftime ceremony include veterans in wheelchairs or vets struggling to stand on prosthetic limbs. Living and breathing human beings who come to represent the cold and callous consequences of war are not convenient symbols for American greatness or military adoration. The fact that what many citizens believed was an attempt to celebrate sacrifice was merely moneymaking stagecraft captures the vacuity of “support the troops” slogans. The fact that on the stage those veterans who most need attention and assistance – the wounded, traumatized, homeless – almost never appear captures the hypocrisy.  

[W]ar is now an abstract pride stimulator for Americans. All the troops are heroes, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fought for freedom. It is fun to watch Chris Kyle kill people. The long-term consequences of death, and destruction of American and Middle Eastern lives are irrelevant. War, like football, is now entertainment, and the entertainment is an anesthetic for the pain of American failure. As the late George Carlin said, “We can’t educate our young people, can’t feed our poor people, can’t take care of our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country.”

Joseph Stiglitz calculated the cost of the war in Iraq at $3 trillion. The war in Afghanistan’s bill totals $1 trillion. As the cruelty of American foreign policy makes more veterans with disabilities and psychological trauma, it is medically and morally necessary to continually increase funding for the VA.

Save for Dwight Eisenhower’s too little and too late farewell address in which he warned of the dangers emanating from the “military-industrial complex,” few national officials, Republicans or Democrats, have shown a willingness to confront the cannibalistic Pentagon. So, it proceeds to eat through all the money and resources that might otherwise go to quaint, weird things like schools, hospitals, libraries, trains, buses, and bridges.

If Americans were not so easily frightened by Muslim monsters underneath the bed, and not so eager to celebrate itself with a vision of military supremacy, it might exert enough political pressure on Washington to truly memorialize its dead soldiers by committing itself to not making any new ones. Instead America will settle for bloated and bombastic tribute ceremonies at football games. The Department of Defense is cynical and savvy enough to take advantage of the apathy and ideology of Americans. Otherwise, they would not have offered the NFL millions of dollars.

 I nearly lost a son-in-law in the Afghanistan debacle, so yes, this is very personal to me.  We were lucky that he survived and has healed bodily and mentally.  Far, far too many families were not so lucky.  Meanwhile, think what might have been done with the $3 trillion squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fox News' Laura Ingraham Slams Jeb Bush on Iraq War Statement

Remember how Jeb "Jebbie" Bush is supposed to be the "smart brother"?  Especially in comparison to his idiot brother George W. Bush, perhaps among the worse U.S. President in the nation's history.  First Jebbie said that his top adviser on Middle East policy and affairs is, yes you guessed it, his idiot brother.  Now, Jebbie has said that knowing all that we now know, he would still take America to war in Iraq.  The stupidity of the statement is both frightening and chilling given the American lives that were squandered (not to mention the huge number of Iraqi lives) the financial ruin brought down on the nation.  Jebbie's idiocy was too much even for the propagandists at Fox News.  As Talking Points Memo, Laura Ingraham of Fox News went off on Jebbie and slammed him.  Here are highlights:

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham dropped the hammer on former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) on Monday after the likely presidential candidate said he would invade Iraq again, knowing what we know now.

"You can't still think that going into Iraq, now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do," Ingraham said on her radio show.

"If you do, there has to be something wrong with you," she added. 

Bush made the remark in an interview set to air Monday night, after Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked him if he would have ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, "knowing what we know now." "I would," he said. "And so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody."

This did not fly with Ingraham.

"No Hillary wouldn't!" Ingraham said on Monday. "Hillary wouldn't authorize the war now, if she knew what she knows now."

At one point she began laughing, and doubted that Bush was "his own person" capable of breaking with his brother, President George W. Bush.

The radio host said the exchange did not bode well for Bush if he were to secure the GOP nomination and face off against Clinton and the press.

"You have to have someone who says, look, I'm a Republican but I'm not an idiot! I'm not stupid!" she said. "I learn from the past and I improve myself."

The LAST thing America needs is another Bush in the White House.  The so-called GOP establishment needs to get it collective head out of its ass and make it clear to Jebbie that he is NOT wanted. He needs to go f*ck up something else and leave the country alone. 

The Swaggering Idiot Returns: George W. Bush Seeks to Give Advice on Middle East Mess He Created

To say that I despise George W. Bush is probably an understatement.  He is without a doubt the worse president of my life time - even Richard Nixon may have been better, although it is a close contest.  Having set in motion all of the elements that have given rise to ISIS and destabilized the Middle East, having squandered thousands of American lives and flushed down the toilet billions of taxpayer dollars, the idiot-in-chief is now trying to give advice on Middle East affairs and in the process rehabilitate his horrific legacy.   Oh, and did I mention that he and Dick Cheney authorized war crimes?  The man is nothing short of a blight on America.  Even more scary is that his brother Jebbie wants to be president and is surrounding himself with the same war mongering cretins who got us into the Iraq/Afghanistan quagmire in the first place.  A piece in Salon and another in Vanity Fair look at Bush's outrageous amnesia about the horrors he has wrought.  First these highlights from Salon:

Arguably the best thing George W. Bush ever did for his party was to keep quiet in the years following his presidency. Winning elections in a political environment shaped by Bush’s legacy – a bloody and unpopular conflict in Iraq and a cratering economy – was difficult enough. The last thing Republicans needed was W. out in the public eye smirking and drawling about staying the course. So he exiled himself to the ranch in Crawford and took up painting.

But Bush’s political hermit act couldn’t last forever. His brother’s likely entrance into the 2016 presidential race guaranteed that we’d hear from him sooner rather than later, and it’s only natural that after years of self-imposed silence, Bush would feel the urge to get out there and talk politics again. And so this past weekend, Bush spoke to a Republican donor conference in Las Vegas about the Middle East and served up some harsh critiques of his successor’s foreign policy. It was classic Bush, in that he seemingly refused to consider for even a moment that much of what we’re dealing with in the Middle East are the unintended consequences of his own epic policy failures.

According to a transcript of Bush’s remarks provided to Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin, Bush came down hard on Barack Obama for ruining all the good work he and his administration had done in Iraq . . . 

The “plan” in Iraq had not been working for years, as evidenced by the ever-rising death tolls of American troops and Iraqi civilians. But Bush, as you might recall, was something of a stubborn man, and he stuck with the “plan,” insisting all along that it was working, even as the country fell apart before our eyes. Also, anyone who questioned the “plan” was immediately slimed by Bush, Karl Rove, and/or Dick Cheney as a traitorous, terrorist-appeasing, cut-and-run coward. 

[O]ne could go on and on in this vein. It’s silly to think that Bush would ever cop to the enduring failures of his disastrous Iraq adventure, but he at least had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. Now he’s out there defending the Bush record and letting it be known that he’s very concerned about how all the catastrophes he helped author are playing out.

Vanity Fair echos much of the same and also underscores that Americans need to remember that a Bush brought us these disasters and, by implication that we don't need another Bush to make matters even worse once again.  Here are highlights:

It has been an unbelievable 25 years since George H. W. Bush started us on the adventure that still isn’t over in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are American soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East right now who weren’t even born when Bush the Elder declared the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait to be an intolerable situation and sent roughly half a million Americans halfway around the world to reverse it.

Twenty-five years down the road is not a bad moment to stop and ask, What the heck was that all about? And what did we accomplish for our pains, especially the sacrifices of individual American soldiers?

I’ve never understood how it honors dead and wounded troops to perpetuate mistaken wars, in which their numbers can only increase.

[The] goal, which had democracy spreading from Iraq to Saudi Arabia to Syria and beyond, never came close to being realized. . . . . The Arab Middle East today offers various forms of government. There is “royalty” of dubious provenance, as in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait—generally pro-American but ungrateful and untrustworthy. There are strongmen, but they can be longevity-challenged. Some regimes last weeks, others last decades, and none is a totally reliable ally. Then there is government by no government: the chaos of anarchy punctuated by atrocities in places like Syria, Libya, and much of Iraq. 

Nothing better exposes the disingenuousness (or, at best, the confusion) of America’s motives in the past 25 years than the palpable disappointment of Bush and his administration—notably Vice President Dick Cheney—at not finding weapons of mass destruction.

[I]f the war was a mistake, even an innocent or well-intentioned mistake, any justification for staying on and on has disappeared as well. More than a decade later, why are we still there? Max Boot, writing in Time magazine, used the word “credibility” to explain why we had to stay somewhere we never should have gone. I thought that, after Vietnam, we had pretty much killed that notion. But no, it’s back. 

Where did ISIS come from? What ever happened to the other Middle East groups we used to know? Where is al-Qaeda? How about the Taliban? Does anyone remember the mujahideen? If you do, you’re really showing your age. The mujahideen were the freedom fighters we armed and trained in order to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan—a shrewd bank shot, everyone agreed, until, after the Soviets slunk away, we counted the leftover Stinger missiles in the freedom fighters’ broom closet and realized that many were now in the hands of unfriendly elements. And a lot of the mujahideen had gone with them. 

Twenty-five years of this! And we were almost out of there when ISIS came along, through a door we opened to them in the first place. 

 We do not need another Bush in the White House.  We are still paying the price of having put the Chimperator in the White House.  Even more sadly, thousands of young Americans paid the ultimate price for Bush's swaggering idiocy.  Jebbie needs to NEVER reach the White House.

Jeb Bush - A Reprise of His Brother's Failed Policies

Despite his claims that "he's his own man," the prospect of a third Bush presidency suggests that we'd see a return of the disastrous policies of the Chimperator, George W. Bush, both domestic and in foreign policy.  Sadly, Jebbie has surrounded himself with his brothers past advisers who crafted the debacles most Americans would like to forget.  Worse yet, these advisers still refuse to admit that they were nearly 100% wrong about just about everything.  Do we really want a return to policies that caused so much economic havoc, bankrupted the country, and caused so many deaths?  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what Bush III might bring.  Here are excerpts:

If Jeb Bush is elected president, the United States won’t be on speaking terms with Cuba and will partner more closely with Israel. He’ll tighten sanctions on Iran and urge NATO to deploy more troops in Eastern Europe to counter Vladimir Putin. And he’ll order the U.S. military to root out “barbarians” and “evildoers” around the globe.

Far from running from or playing down the views once expressed by his brother George W. Bush, Jeb Bush is embracing them — and emphasizing them.

It is clear when he calls for closer engagement with Arab leaders to combat the growing threat of the Islamic State. Or when he criticizes President Obama for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq. It is most apparent when he refers to “evildoers” — a formulation used widely by his brother — and argues that the United States needs to engage but doesn’t have to be “the world’s policeman,” a view voiced by his brother that was also embraced by their father, George H.W. Bush.

Bush’s views put him squarely in the middle of GOP consensus on foreign affairs — a consensus that formed as his brother reshaped U.S. engagement with the world. But by endorsing some of his brother’s views, he puts himself at odds with most Americans, who remain wary of the two wars launched during the last Bush presidency.

In recent years, nearly 6 in 10 Americans have believed that the Iraq war was not worth fighting, though Republicans have been slightly more supportive, according to polling by The Washington Post and other organizations. In more recent years, public opinion has similarly turned against the war in Afghanistan.

Early in the exploratory phase of his likely campaign, Jeb Bush unveiled a foreign policy advisory team that reflects the disparate views of GOP thinking on the world. The group includes two former secretaries of state, George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III; two former CIA directors, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden; former attorney general Michael Mukasey; and Paul Wolf­owitz, a former deputy defense secretary and a lead architect of the Iraq war.  

When it comes to Iraq, Bush is mostly supportive of his brother’s legacy there.  “There were mistakes in Iraq for sure,” he said during a speech in Chicago in February. “Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction, it turns out to not be accurate.”

Undeterred by public opinion polls that suggest his views are not shared by a majority of voters, Bush believes that global events might prompt Americans to eventually embrace his thinking. During an appearance in San Francisco in January, he accused Obama of exploiting America’s war fatigue to justify withdrawing U.S. military forces abroad.

Claiming that "intelligence was not accurate" is Jebbie's euphemism for dodging the fact that his idiot brother deliberately lied to the American people.

Is Obama Drinking George W. Bush's Kool-Aid?

Other than perhaps America's bungled intelligence that allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked 73 years ago today and the Vietnam fiasco which began in earnest 50 years ago, perhaps the biggest military/foreign policy mistakes America has made during the last century is the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Anyone with any knowledge of the history of the region and not blinded by American hubris should have known from the outset that these invasions would end in disaster.  Yet, after working to get American troops out of the nightmare Bush/Cheney created, Barack Obama seems headed towards throwing away more American lives and squandering billions more of American tax dollars.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at Obama's moves to commit more American resources to this fool's errand.  Here are highlights:

No one has sounded more determined to extricate the United States from Afghanistan than President Obama. It is “time to turn the page,” he said in May when he announced plans to reduce American forces to 9,800 troops by the end of December, with a full withdrawal by the end of 2016. That goal appeared to be on track — until now. Mr. Obama’s recent turnabout and other developments seem to be sucking America back into the Afghan war, a huge mistake.

First, Mr. Obama authorized a more expansive mission for the American military in 2015 than originally planned. His order would put American troops right back into ground combat by allowing them to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militants. He had previously said that the residual force would be engaged only in counterterrorism operations aimed at remnants of Al Qaeda. The new order also permits American jets and drones to support Afghan military missions.

Already, the number of American troops to remain in Afghanistan after December has been increased by 1,000, up to 10,800. NATO allies are supposed to provide 4,000 troops next year, bringing the total of foreign forces to 12,000 to 14,000. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that any additional American troops above 9,800 are temporary and are merely covering for NATO allies that are still trying to decide how many forces to contribute.  But if NATO fails to contribute sufficient troops, then what?

Mr. Obama seems to be having second thoughts about his Afghan strategy after the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the sudden collapse of the Iraqi army. He may be trying to avoid blame if something similar happens in Afghanistan, where Taliban attacks are on the rise.

But he should resist the advice of military commanders, who are again pushing for broader involvement. They were unable to defeat the Taliban when more than 100,000 American troops were in the country; there is no reason to think that a very limited American force will be more effective now.

One lesson learned over the last 13 years is this: No amount of foreign assistance — not tens of thousands of troops, billions of dollars or unlimited amounts of military equipment — will make any real difference if the Afghans cannot or will not pull together a functioning, relatively uncorrupt and competent government, and take primary responsibility for themselves and their country.

Administration officials are still insisting “the combat mission ends” by the end of this year, but that’s simply not credible. Mr. Obama should stick to his original plan. . . .

Living in an area with a huge military presence, one thing you learn quickly is that military commanders will ALWAYS claim that with more troops and more money they can succeed no matter how much such claims are opposed to objective reality.  Anyone who believes these commanders is a fool - or drinking Bush/Cheney Kool-Aid. 

America's Continued Fool's Errand in Afghanistan

After 13 years, thousands of squandered American lives and billions of wasted dollars, Afghanistan remains a disaster and horrific backwater rivaled only by some of the failed nations in Africa where colonial rule gave way to gross corruption and often a worsening of local economies.   Yet if one listens to statements by politicians and perhaps worse yet, military leaders, they continue the myth that America has accomplished something in Afghanistan and that democracy and societal modernization are just around the corner.   Not only is such blather wishful thinking, its an outright lie.  A column in the New York Times looks at the reality in Afghanistan and what politicians of both parties and the ever eager for war generals prefer Americans not understand.  Here are excerpts:

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, apparently is the only official in Washington who dares speak truth to power. In a Sept. 12 speech at Georgetown University, he said that Afghanistan “remains under assault by insurgents and is short of domestic revenue, plagued by corruption, afflicted by criminal elements involved in opium and smuggling, and struggling to execute basic functions of government.” His comments were largely ignored by the American media, and there was no immediate reaction from the Obama administration.

And yet anything less than a heavy dose of honesty and fresh thinking by Afghans and their Western supporters will almost certainly mean the relapse of Afghanistan into civil war and the emergence of groups even more extreme than the Taliban, as has happened in Iraq and Syria.

Moving from the lengthy U.S. military presence to full Afghan sovereignty was premised on the completion of four distinct transitions. But none has been successfully carried out, despite more than $640 billion in U.S. direct spending in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013.

The most critical transition, the one on which everything else rested, was political. Rather than build state institutions or carry out much-needed electoral reforms, President Hamid Karzai spent his long tenure encouraging a form of crony politics that failed to sap the power of the warlords. He won a second term in 2009, after a vastly fraudulent election. The following year, according to U.N. officials, he asked that the United Nations stop supervising elections in the country, and Washington and NATO went along.

The second promised transition was military. U.S. forces were to hand over security matters to Afghan forces, proving that the new, U.S.-trained Afghan Army would then be able to hold back the Taliban on its own. Yet Interior Minister Mohammad Omar Daudzai told Parliament in Kabul on Sept. 16 that the previous six months had been the deadliest ever for the Afghan police. Today there is fighting in 18 of 34 provinces, Afghan and NATO officials have told me. In many areas, Afghan soldiers are barely able to secure their own bases, much less retake lost territory. Helmand, the critical drugs-producing province in southern Afghanistan, is at risk of being taken over by the Taliban. If it falls, all of southern Afghanistan might too.

The third failed transition has to do with economics.  . . . . here has been little large-scale investment in agriculture or basic industry; instead, the bulk of the economy has focused on servicing foreign troops and on their spending. And now the troops are about to withdraw.

When I first visited Afghanistan in the 1970s, the country was desperately poor, but it was almost self-sufficient in food and had a small yet thriving export trade in fruit, handicrafts, furs and gems. Today, Afghanistan imports much of its food and it produces very few commercial goods. The service economy, which is run by the middle class, has been collapsing, as both educated people and billions of dollars in capital have left the country. 

The fourth contribution expected of the U.S. presence was insulating Afghanistan from foreign interference, which many Afghans fear as much as the Taliban . . . . that, too, has not happened, and the country remains vulnerable to meddling from outside.

2015 is supposed to mark the start of Afghanistan’s “Transformation Decade.” But if the country is to even get to 2015 in one piece, its new leaders must act fast to correct course after the failed transformation of the last decade.

By Givng A Platform to Iraq War Boosters, Is the Press Trying Hide Its Own Blame?

Like a rock but dumber

I am a strong advocate of a free and independent press/media which serves the role of informing the public, keeping the government and elected officials honest, and independently investigating policies and public statements.  It is the role that the Founding Fathers envision for the media.  Sadly, more and more often we see the media merely parroting statements of politicians and demagogues like Tony Perkins and others without ever asking hard questions or challenging statements that can easily be shown to be either untrue or highly questionable.  It was this failure of the press/media that, in my view, allowed the American people to be suckered by the lies of Bush/Cheney and their sycophants.  Now, with Iraq all too predictably falling into chaos, many press/media outlets are providing platforms to the very architects of the Iraq War disaster. It makes me want to scream at the television and yell WTF is wrong with you.  A piece in Huffington Post suggests that what's happening now is the media's attempt to throw a smoke screen around its own culpability in the Iraq disaster.  Here are column highlights:

The bad bout of 2003 déjà vu continued on Sunday when former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week to lecture President Obama about how his policies had allegedly made a mess out of Iraq, as violence there continues to grip the country and threatens to completely destabilize the nation.

Cheney's appearance continues a maddening, week-long stroll down Baghdad memory lane as media outlets rush to get commentary from the people who, 11 years ago, got everything wrong about the Iraq War: The stunning cost, the causalities, the war planning, the intelligence, the sectarian violence.
All of it.

"The neoconservative program cost the United States several trillion dollars and thousands dead and wounded American soldiers, and it sowed carnage and chaos in Iraq and elsewhere," writes Harvard University professor Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy.

The head-scratching question continues to be, why? Why are the discredited "experts" who botched Iraq last time now being a given a platform to comment on the military crisis they helped create? And why are these rejected mouthpieces being given a chance to bash President Obama, someone who opposed the failed war in the first place? 

Why the strange rehabilitation? Here's a hint: People might be forgetting the deep bond that ran between the compliant Beltway media in 2003 and the very same failed Iraq War architects and partisan boosters the press is now turning to for advice. In other words, the Beltway press was part of the Iraq problem then. (They sold us a disastrous war.) So it's not that surprising the press is part of the problem now.

Fact: You can't talk about the Iraq War without addressing the central role the U.S. news media played during the run-up to the invasion, and the fevered and futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction. And that's why the current move to treat failed war sponsors as knowledgeable experts might also be seen as an effort by some journalists to put behind them the massive media missteps that led to the war.

Meaning, the reason the press doesn't think it's strange having the people who got everything wrong about the war on TV today is because so much of the Beltway press got the same things wrong 11 years ago.

[I]t's important to never forget just how much government stenography went on prior to the war in D.C. newsrooms, and just how little daylight existed between the Bush administration and media elites in their ironclad agreement about the need to invade Iraq. Only then does the continued symmetry now on display begin to make sense. 

The current rehabilitation tour brings back painful media memories. Like the fact that during the first two weeks of February 2003, when the debate about the war should have been raging on the public airwaves, of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war just 17 percent expressed skepticism about the looming invasion, according to a FAIR survey.

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department, according to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall. Only 34 stories, or eight percent, were of independent origin.

Investigative journalism has become an unknown concept for many in the media who are either too lazy or too stupid (too many news anchors are selected for their looks, not whether they can think independently) and the nation has paid a horrific price for the media's failure to expose lying politicians and demagogues.  Bush/Cheney is in the running for one of the worse presidential administrations in 200+ years.  Why does anyone listen to Cheney whatsoever.  The man ought to be on trial for war crimes. 

The Idiocy of the GOP/Architects of the Iraq War Continues

The saying goes that those who do not know history are deemed to repeat it.  Typically, the time line involved in the statement spans back for many years.   In the case of far too many in today's Republican Party and in particular among the minions of Bush/Cheney who lied to drag America into war in Iraq, their memories do not extend back even a decade ago.  It is frightening that we are hearing the same justifications for renewed military action in Iraq that led to the fiasco in the first place.  One can only think that these individuals are insane, or in the case of Dick Cheney, they want Halliburton to reap more billions in U.S. tax dollars.  A column in the New York Times puts the idiocy of the position of these people and the costs to date of their past fool's errand in perspective.  One can only wonder why anyone in the legitimate news media - which, of course does not  include Fox News - gives these people a moment of air time or news print.  Here are column highlights:

I’m flinching at a painful sense of déjà vu as we hear calls for military intervention in Iraq, as President Obama himself — taunted by critics who contend he’s weak — is said to be considering drone strikes there.

Our 2003 invasion of Iraq should be a warning that military force sometimes transforms a genuine problem into something worse. The war claimed 4,500 American lives and, according to a mortality study published in a peer-reviewed American journal, 500,000 Iraqi lives. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert in public finance, tells me that her latest estimate is that the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war will be $4 trillion.

That’s a $35,000 tax on the average American household. The total would be enough to ensure that all children could attend preschool in the United States, that most people with AIDS worldwide could receive treatment, and that every child worldwide could attend school — for the next 83 years. Instead, we financed a futile war that was like a Mobius strip, bringing us right back to an echo of where we started.

We might have learned some humility. Yes, the military toolbox is handy and often useful. But one of the most basic lessons of international relations is a frustrating one: There are more problems than solutions. Governments, like doctors, should weigh the principle, “First, do no harm.”

Yet Paul Bremer, the former American envoy in Iraq, argues for airstrikes and even a few boots on the ground. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, likewise, favors military intervention.

Perhaps more surprisingly, so does Senator Dianne Feinstein of California . . . .

The least surprising hawk is Dick Cheney, who in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article with his daughter Liz preserves an almost perfect record of being wrong. From the vice president who himself obtained every possible deferment to avoid Vietnam, who asserted “with absolute certainty” in 2002 that Saddam was making nuclear weapons, and insisted in 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes,” we now have a blast at President Obama for failing to extinguish the continuing throes.

Many Sunnis in Iraq dislike ISIS, but they have learned to loathe and distrust Maliki even more. The way out of the mess in Iraq is for the government to share power with Sunnis and Kurds, accept decentralization and empower moderate Sunni tribes.

If all that happens, it may be reasonable for the United States to back a united Iraqi government by authorizing airstrikes against ISIS fighters. Without that, we simply become an accomplice to Maliki’s intransigence, assisting one party in a civil war.

Unfortunately, it looks as if Maliki is doubling down, revving up his Shiite base rather building a common front. The Iraqi government should be releasing Sunni prisoners as a good-will gesture. Instead, prisoners have been executed by police.

[T]he $4 trillion lesson from the Iraq war is that while our military capabilities are dazzling and sometimes intoxicating, they cannot be the solution to every problem.

Amen!!  As for Feinstein, I can only surmise that the woman has gone senile or is suffering from temporary insanity!

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on the Insanity of the Neocons and GOP

By any objective standard, the War in Iraq was an unmitigated disaster unless, of course, you were/are a Halliburton shareholder like Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Hundreds of thousands of civilian dead, thousands of American service members dead and the U.S. budget blown through the unfunded war.  Moreover, the neocon fantasy that Iraq could become a stable democratic nation has proved to be just that: an utter fantasy.  Yet the neocons and many Republicans are rushing to blame the current fiasco on Barack Obama and utterly disregard the fact that the current Iraq disaster is the direct outcome of Bush/Cheney and GOP decision to lie to the American public and take America into war that lacked any valid justification.  Oh, and did I mention the fact that the geniuses in the Bush/Cheney regime totally ignored the sectarian powder keg that was going to be unleashed?  Andrew Sullivan takes to task the lunatics who got us into the Iraq War and who now want to repeat that disaster.  Here are the money quotes:

What do you do with near-clinical fanatics who, in their own minds, never make mistakes and whose worldview remains intact even after it has been empirically dismantled in front of their eyes? In real life, you try and get them to get professional help.

In the case of those who only recently sent thousands of American servicemembers to their deaths in a utopian scheme to foment a democracy in a sectarian dictatorship, we have to merely endure their gall in even appearing in front of the cameras. But the extent of their pathology is deeper than one might expect.

Most people are aware that relatively few of the architects of a war have fully acknowledged the extent of their error – let alone express remorse or even shame at the more than a hundred thousands civilian deaths their adventure incurred for a phony reason. No, all this time, they have been giving each other awards, lecturing congressmen and Senators, writing pieces in the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, being fellated by David Gregory, and sucking at the teet of the neocon welfare state, as if they had nothing to answer for, and nothing to explain.

it is shocking; it is, in fact, an outrage, a shameless, disgusting abdication of all responsibility for the past combined with a sickening argument to do exactly the same fricking thing all over again. And yes, I’m not imagining. This is what these true know-nothing/learn-nothing fanatics want the US to do.

 Last time, you could ascribe it to fathomless ignorance. This time, they have no excuse. ISIS is not al Qaeda; it’s far worse in ways that even al Qaeda has noted undermine its cause rather than strengthen it. It may be strategically way over its head already. And the idea that the US has to fight both ISIS and Iran simultaneously is so unhinged and so self-evidently impossible to contain or control that only these feckless fools would even begin to suggest it. Having empowered Iran by dismantling Iraq, Kristol actually wants the US now to enter a live war against ISIS and the Quds forces. You begin to see how every military catastrophe can be used to justify the next catastrophe. It’s a perfect circle for the neocons’ goal of the unending war.

The sooner that these people are driven completely from the halls of power - or even near access to power - the better off the nation will be.  What I find equally upsetting is that the neocons care nothing about civilian deaths since, in their minds, non-white, non-Christians do not even count as humans.

 

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.