In a new op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, cowritten with his daughter lame Lizzie, the former vice-president gives President Obama a major scolding on Iraq. Dick Cheney is one of the major assholes that got us into Iraq based on lies originally. The Cheneys accuse, Obama of a grave mistake by not stepping up to ISIS earlier. As dirty Dick and Liz phrase it, "Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change." America's enemies, they write, "are emboldened and on the march." Obama "abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory." How crazy is this old fool? This kind of talk and lies used to attack the President is what emboldens the enemy and stir up the right wing fanatics that follow the Cheneys.
And without a hint of self-awareness: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." The Bush administration was wrong on weapons of mass destruction, wrong on Saddam Hussein's ties to 9/11, wrong on just how hard democracy-building in Iraq would be. Wrong on the aluminum tubes, wrong on the yellow cake, wrong om everything. George W and Rummy and Cheney and Bremer and all the neo cons should have been drummed out of the public conscience. As this bunch tries to rewrite history to hide their failures they disrespect the valor of the service by our troops, especially the thousands and thousands dead and wounded.
There's obviously a lot to say when you're talking about an op-ed written by a guy who helped oversee an Iraq War that a majority of Americans think was a mistake now acting as the voice of wisdom and reason. And there's a lot to be frustrated by when that op-ed doesn't really address the larger circumstances that have led Iraq to its current crisis, outside of suggesting that al-Qaida in Iraq had been "largely defeated" by the end of the Bush administration. The piece doesn't even mention the name of Obama's White House predecessor.
Be aware of the highjinks and folly of one old war dog named John McCain. McCain cannot remember from one day to the next what his positions were. John McCain has not recovered from being beat for the presidency by Obama and it doesn't look as if he will ever get over the defeat.
Paul Bremer reacts after a shoe is thrown at him at an event organized by the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society in London. (Feb 2013)
While giving a speech at an event organized by the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society in London, former U.S. civil administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer was confronted by the legacy of the human catastrophe he had helped facilitate during
his tenure in that country. In an incident, an Iraqi man in the crowd who stood up to address the panel and said that he had been forced to flee Iraq after “the U.S. destroyed my country” threw both his shoes at a seemingly stunned Bremer before being removed from the event. In the commotion afterward he can be heard to yell “You fucked up my country, you destroyed the country. Fuck you and fuck your democracy.” After regaining his composure and suggesting that the Iraqi man “improve his aim if he wants to do things like that,” Bremer addressed the quieted crowd by saying, “If he had done that while Saddam Hussain had been alive he would be a dead man right now.” Upon hearing Bremer’s words of proud reassurance, the gathering of neoconservative think-tank intellectuals burst into applause — a moment emblematic of the arrogance that legal impunity has generated for the architects of one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century. For Bremer — who often refers critics to “the Iraqi people” when questioned over the country’s monumental cost in human suffering during his civil administration — to be confronted by one of those very same Iraqis and still maintain his hubristic defiance is indicative of his moral bankruptcy and that of the neoconservative movement for which he remains an esteemed representative.
his tenure in that country. In an incident, an Iraqi man in the crowd who stood up to address the panel and said that he had been forced to flee Iraq after “the U.S. destroyed my country” threw both his shoes at a seemingly stunned Bremer before being removed from the event. In the commotion afterward he can be heard to yell “You fucked up my country, you destroyed the country. Fuck you and fuck your democracy.” After regaining his composure and suggesting that the Iraqi man “improve his aim if he wants to do things like that,” Bremer addressed the quieted crowd by saying, “If he had done that while Saddam Hussain had been alive he would be a dead man right now.” Upon hearing Bremer’s words of proud reassurance, the gathering of neoconservative think-tank intellectuals burst into applause — a moment emblematic of the arrogance that legal impunity has generated for the architects of one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century. For Bremer — who often refers critics to “the Iraqi people” when questioned over the country’s monumental cost in human suffering during his civil administration — to be confronted by one of those very same Iraqis and still maintain his hubristic defiance is indicative of his moral bankruptcy and that of the neoconservative movement for which he remains an esteemed representative.
In a legitimately meritocratic society governed by the rule of law, it would be reasonable to expect that after presiding over an unmitigated strategic and humanitarian calamity such as the Iraq War neoconservatives such as Bremer would face legal charges or at least devastating career repercussions that would exclude them from taking part in public discourse — but regrettably this has not happened to a great degree. While it is true that former Bush administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo and Dick Cheney have been subject to criminal charges in countries around the world from Germany to Malaysia, many of those most prominently associated with the neoconservative movement in America are still making an impact pushing the same policies of aggressive military action and disregard for the rule of law that they were a decade ago. Figures such as John Bolton, Elliot Cohen and Bremer’s former spokesman, Dan Senor, can still be found in the public sphere peddling the same criminally disastrous political ideology that killed and made refugees out of millions in Iraq while costing the United States trillions of dollars, thousands of soldiers’ lives, and much of its moral and political legitimacy in the Middle East. The stated refusal of the Obama administration to “look back” at past transgressions has in many ways made possible the repetition of such crimes at a particularly crucial moment as the U.S. crafts a policy to confront an alleged nuclear program in Iran. In what would seem to be a case of history repeating as farce, the same neoconservative hawks who cynically pushed claims about weapons of mass destruction are publicly singing the exact same tune today about Iran and trying to resurrect the same aggressively militaristic ideology.
Bremer himself, formerly the effective vice-regent of Iraq during its military occupation, is perhaps the most visceral example of a man whose ability to escape legal sanction for his actions has engendered a sense of hubris that could potentially one day
again make him as damaging to the United States and the world as he was nearly a decade ago. After a tenure as Coalition Provisional Authority administrator over the country where he disastrously dissolved the Iraqi army, lost billions of public dollars to corruption and graft, presided over the destruction of the country’s museums and cultural history, ordered the muzzling of civilian newspapers, oversaw the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, and granted legal immunity to American contractors who would later take advantage of it to commit wholesale public massacres of Iraqi civilians, Bremer returned to life in the United States without facing censure for the monumental disaster his tenure had created for the Iraqi people nor for his role in grievously mismanaging American strategic interests in the region. Upon returning to private life, Bremer would say of the
war that he helped facilitate that “Iraq is a better place” and that the consequences of the invasion and occupation were “absolutely worth it.” Stating that Iraq was, in his opinion, peaceful, Bremer also made several other disastrously incorrect predictions including that the country would have a stable and sovereign government in place for a handover of power by 2004. While he cynically portrayed a positive picture of development and progress in the country of which he was the effective governor, his spokesman would tell journalists that “off the record, Paris is burning.”
Bremer’s own worldview gives insight into the callousness with which he viewed his role as well as the civilian population he was administering. While the Bush administration proclaimed that the invasion had been an effort to liberate Iraq, Bremer stated his position regarding Iraq that: “We’re going to be running a colony almost.” After evidence of his own incompetence and brutality toward Iraq during his administration began to mount and commensurate hostility toward U.S. presence in the region began to build, he would attribute his own perceived blamelessness in the situation – as the self-described colonial
administrator of a militarily occupied country – to the fact that “These people hate the United States not for what we do, but for who we are and what we are.” Today, in addition to being a vocal critic of the Obama administration and frequent guest
speaker at neoconservative think-tank events, Bremer is an advocate of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis and warns of the need to confront growing Muslim populations in Western countries. Proudly unremorseful for his central role in the biggest American foreign policy disaster of the past generation, Bremer today lives peacefully free from the threat of legal blowback for his actions and has, incongruously enough, become known for producing oil paintings of nudes and landscapes of the New England countryside from his home in Vermont.
From time to time the bubble of self-assurance and hubris that wealthy and powerful individuals manage to build for themselves are burst by those who are the victims of their excesses. The Iraqi man who threw his shoes at Bremer in London, like the millions of other Iraqis who were killed, maimed or forced to leave their homes as refugees – as well as the thousands of American soldiers and their families who paid the ultimate price due to the war and occupation Bremer helped prosecute –
represent the nameless and usually voiceless victims of unchecked official criminality. While there may be some degree of fleeting emotional satisfaction in seeing an ostensible war criminal such as Bremer publicly humiliated, until the American government decides to formally “look back” at the crimes of the “War on Terror” era, real justice will remain elusive and the very real possibility of a replay of its worst transgressions will continue to exist.
Paul Wolfowitz, Cops to Failure
The former deputy Pentagon chief, Paul Wolfowitz, a driving force behind the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, has conceded that a series of blunders by George W. Bush’s administration plunged Iraq into a cycle of violence that “spiralled out of control”.
In an interview with The Sunday Times to mark the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, he said there “should have been Iraqi leadership from the beginning”, rather than a 14-month occupation led by an American viceroy and based on “this idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them”.
He accepted that too many Iraqis were excluded by a programme to purge members of the ruling Ba’ath party, that the dissolution of the Iraqi army was botched and that the “biggest hole” in post-war planning was not to anticipate the possibility of an
insurgency.
“The most consequential failure was to understand the tenacity of Saddam’s regime,” he said.
Wolfowitz, 69, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington since he stepped down as World Bank president in 2007, has a somewhat diffident manner but he became animated as he reflected on the lead-up to the invasion and its aftermath.
He portrayed the Bush administration as deeply divided and he was fiercely critical of Colin Powell, the then secretary of state.
It was “outrageous” and “a joke” for Powell — who reportedly used to speak of a “Gestapo office” at the Pentagon — to have suggested that the case for the Iraq War was concocted by Wolfowitz and a cabal of fellow neoconservatives within the Bush
administration, he said.
“I don’t think I ever met with the president alone. I didn’t meet with him very often. Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it. And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”
Wolfowitz called for Saddam’s overthrow during the 1991 Gulf War and was the first senior official to advise Bush, days after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, to seek regime change in Iraq.
He denied that he was “the architect” of the Iraq invasion. “It wasn’t conducted according to my plan.”
His desire, he said, was to train Iraqi exile troops to take part in the invasion and then avoid the “illusion” that Americans could run the country better than Iraqis. “Most Americans needed a translator, which in itself was a terrible weakness because translators were either vulnerable to assassination or they were working for the enemy.”
Wolfowitz’s familiar shock of greying hair — mocked by Michael Moore in the anti-war documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which uses
footage of him trying to smooth it down with spit before a television appearance — is now almost white.
But he believes it is still too soon to pass judgment on the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq, which began 10 years ago this week.
“We still don’t know how all this is all going to end,” he said. “With the Korean War , it is amazing how different Korea looks after 60 years than it looked after 10 or even 30.”
The Iraq counterinsurgency strategy implemented in 2007, two years after Wolfowitz had left the Pentagon, was “impressively successful in a relatively short space of time”, even though the situation “had spiralled out of control and we’d had sectarian war”.
There would have been a high price to pay for inaction over Saddam, he insisted. “We would have had a growing development of Saddam’s support for terrorism.
“We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”
Wolfowitz lambasted those who accuse Bush of lying about Iraq. The conclusion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was “the consensus judgment of the intelligence community” and of most Democratic senators — “Hillary Clinton certainly was one of them”.
He added: “The falsehood that the president lied, which by the way is itself a lie, is so much worse than saying we were wrong.
A mistake is one thing, a lie is something else.”
Ahmad Chalabi
Before the invasion, Wolfowitz was an admirer of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile who has since broken with the US government.
Asked if he thought Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress is said to have supplied much of the information to US intelligence that prompted the invasion, had been straight with America, Wolfowitz replied: “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us. They all had their agendas.”
By implication, Wolfowitz is critical of the US military, some of whose generals suggested sending in as many as 300,000 troops.
“I don’t want to get into the finger-pointing business but we had sort of forgotten everything we learned 30 years before about counterinsurgency . . . this was not the kind of war you win by overwhelming force.”
His biggest fear now is that war weariness will prompt America to abandon Iraq and leave Syria’s rebels to their fate, just as the Shi’ite rebels in southern Iraq were allowed to be crushed by Saddam in 1991.
“If those rebellions had succeeded, we would never have had that second [Iraq] war . . . that is the lesson we should be applying in Syria today.
“Instead, somehow people are afraid to do anything to help the Syrian rebels lest we end up with an invasion and occupation of Syria. But that isn’t on the table.”
Over the years, Wolfowitz has quietly visited grievously wounded troops at Walter Reed military hospital outside Washington as well as the families of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Asked whether the deaths and injuries of troops weigh on him, he paused before responding: “I realise these are consequential decisions. It’s just that they’re consequential both ways.
“I don’t want to start to reopen this whole debate about 9/11 and what our overall response was and the fact that we haven’t been hit again.
“But at the core of it to me is we faced a very serious threat, the Supreme Court affirms Rumsfeld’s immunity from torture lawsuit. I
think we’ve done remarkably well at preventing a recurrence.”
Supreme Court affirms Rumsfeld’s immunity from torture lawsuits (June 2013)
U.S. military officials who engaged in ordering or carrying out the torture of individuals in custody can now rely upon an across-the-board legal defense that protects them from being sued for committing what amounts to an international crime, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling on Monday.
The court affirmed an earlier ruling by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which held in 2012 that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could not be sued for personally approving torture techniques used against prisoners held during the
Bush administration’s terror war.
The earlier ruling was so broad that it applied to all military officials, including the individuals who carried out torture.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal of that ruling on Monday without comment, solidifying the lower court’s opinion that military officials are immune to civil lawsuits over torture.
The lawsuit sprang from the internment of two Americans, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, who worked for an Iraqi-owned contractor in occupied territory. Vance reported the contractor, Shield Group Security, to the FBI in 2006 for allegedly running illegal guns and trading U.S. troops booze for ammunition.
Shortly after filing that report, Vance and Ertel were arrested and placed in a U.S. military prison in Baghdad, then subjected to torture techniques that proponents, like the Seventh Circuit Court, preferred to call “harsh interrogation” methods. Both men were ultimately released without charge after about three months.
So, if Rumsfeld is innocent for ordering torture then why did soldiers go to prison for following his orders?
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
ACVDN
Paul Wolfowitz, Cops to Failure
The former deputy Pentagon chief, Paul Wolfowitz, a driving force behind the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, has conceded that a series of blunders by George W. Bush’s administration plunged Iraq into a cycle of violence that “spiralled out of control”.
In an interview with The Sunday Times to mark the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, he said there “should have been Iraqi leadership from the beginning”, rather than a 14-month occupation led by an American viceroy and based on “this idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them”.
He accepted that too many Iraqis were excluded by a programme to purge members of the ruling Ba’ath party, that the dissolution of the Iraqi army was botched and that the “biggest hole” in post-war planning was not to anticipate the possibility of an
insurgency.
“The most consequential failure was to understand the tenacity of Saddam’s regime,” he said.
Wolfowitz, 69, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington since he stepped down as World Bank president in 2007, has a somewhat diffident manner but he became animated as he reflected on the lead-up to the invasion and its aftermath.
He portrayed the Bush administration as deeply divided and he was fiercely critical of Colin Powell, the then secretary of state.
It was “outrageous” and “a joke” for Powell — who reportedly used to speak of a “Gestapo office” at the Pentagon — to have suggested that the case for the Iraq War was concocted by Wolfowitz and a cabal of fellow neoconservatives within the Bush
administration, he said.
“I don’t think I ever met with the president alone. I didn’t meet with him very often. Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it. And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”
Wolfowitz called for Saddam’s overthrow during the 1991 Gulf War and was the first senior official to advise Bush, days after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, to seek regime change in Iraq.
He denied that he was “the architect” of the Iraq invasion. “It wasn’t conducted according to my plan.”
His desire, he said, was to train Iraqi exile troops to take part in the invasion and then avoid the “illusion” that Americans could run the country better than Iraqis. “Most Americans needed a translator, which in itself was a terrible weakness because translators were either vulnerable to assassination or they were working for the enemy.”
Wolfowitz’s familiar shock of greying hair — mocked by Michael Moore in the anti-war documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which uses
footage of him trying to smooth it down with spit before a television appearance — is now almost white.
But he believes it is still too soon to pass judgment on the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq, which began 10 years ago this week.
“We still don’t know how all this is all going to end,” he said. “With the Korean War , it is amazing how different Korea looks after 60 years than it looked after 10 or even 30.”
The Iraq counterinsurgency strategy implemented in 2007, two years after Wolfowitz had left the Pentagon, was “impressively successful in a relatively short space of time”, even though the situation “had spiralled out of control and we’d had sectarian war”.
There would have been a high price to pay for inaction over Saddam, he insisted. “We would have had a growing development of Saddam’s support for terrorism.
“We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”
Wolfowitz lambasted those who accuse Bush of lying about Iraq. The conclusion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was “the consensus judgment of the intelligence community” and of most Democratic senators — “Hillary Clinton certainly was one of them”.
He added: “The falsehood that the president lied, which by the way is itself a lie, is so much worse than saying we were wrong.
A mistake is one thing, a lie is something else.”
Before the invasion, Wolfowitz was an admirer of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile who has since broken with the US government.
Asked if he thought Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress is said to have supplied much of the information to US intelligence that prompted the invasion, had been straight with America, Wolfowitz replied: “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us. They all had their agendas.”
By implication, Wolfowitz is critical of the US military, some of whose generals suggested sending in as many as 300,000 troops.
“I don’t want to get into the finger-pointing business but we had sort of forgotten everything we learned 30 years before about counterinsurgency . . . this was not the kind of war you win by overwhelming force.”
His biggest fear now is that war weariness will prompt America to abandon Iraq and leave Syria’s rebels to their fate, just as the Shi’ite rebels in southern Iraq were allowed to be crushed by Saddam in 1991.
“If those rebellions had succeeded, we would never have had that second [Iraq] war . . . that is the lesson we should be applying in Syria today.
“Instead, somehow people are afraid to do anything to help the Syrian rebels lest we end up with an invasion and occupation of Syria. But that isn’t on the table.”
Over the years, Wolfowitz has quietly visited grievously wounded troops at Walter Reed military hospital outside Washington as well as the families of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Asked whether the deaths and injuries of troops weigh on him, he paused before responding: “I realise these are consequential decisions. It’s just that they’re consequential both ways.
“I don’t want to start to reopen this whole debate about 9/11 and what our overall response was and the fact that we haven’t been hit again.
“But at the core of it to me is we faced a very serious threat, the Supreme Court affirms Rumsfeld’s immunity from torture lawsuit. I
think we’ve done remarkably well at preventing a recurrence.”
Supreme Court affirms Rumsfeld’s immunity from torture lawsuits (June 2013)
U.S. military officials who engaged in ordering or carrying out the torture of individuals in custody can now rely upon an across-the-board legal defense that protects them from being sued for committing what amounts to an international crime, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling on Monday.
The court affirmed an earlier ruling by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which held in 2012 that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could not be sued for personally approving torture techniques used against prisoners held during the
Bush administration’s terror war.
The earlier ruling was so broad that it applied to all military officials, including the individuals who carried out torture.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal of that ruling on Monday without comment, solidifying the lower court’s opinion that military officials are immune to civil lawsuits over torture.
The lawsuit sprang from the internment of two Americans, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, who worked for an Iraqi-owned contractor in occupied territory. Vance reported the contractor, Shield Group Security, to the FBI in 2006 for allegedly running illegal guns and trading U.S. troops booze for ammunition.
Shortly after filing that report, Vance and Ertel were arrested and placed in a U.S. military prison in Baghdad, then subjected to torture techniques that proponents, like the Seventh Circuit Court, preferred to call “harsh interrogation” methods. Both men were ultimately released without charge after about three months.
So, if Rumsfeld is innocent for ordering torture then why did soldiers go to prison for following his orders?
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
ACVDN
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