The 2016 Democratic Nominee Must Be Someone Who Opposed The Iraq War

And unfortunately, that ain't Hillary. Greg Sargent explains it this way:

[T]he current line of questioning for Republicans and Hillary Clinton about Iraq — “would you have supported the invasion knowing what we know now?” — is deeply flawed, and risks whitewashing the real history of the run-up to the war. Now, however, it seems possible that this weak line of questioning might actually aid and abet the current GOP strategy for talking about Iraq. 

As Bob Costa notes, this whole history re-write thing by the GOP is ultimately geared toward blaming Obama -- and ultimately Hillary -- for what's going on in the Middle East right now:

The political endgame for Republicans is a general election where Clinton can be portrayed as someone who initially backed the U.S. mission but did not see it through. In that sense, foisting blame on Obama is only the first step in the GOP’s aims. Knowing their ownership of the invasion in the eyes of voters has not faded, they would like to distance themselves from the messy debate over weapons of mass destruction and make the Islamic State — how it rose and how to stop it — the central political battleground on foreign policy.

That's the whole problem -- Hillary supported the invasion of Iraq!  She is therefore in no position to call the GOP on all its recent history-rewriting bullshit, and neither is any Democrat who supports her run for the presidency.  And for Christ's Sake, we certainly can't count on the Mainstream Media to go after Jeb Bush and the rest of the GOP on this Iraq Re-Write Fuckery.

Indeed, perhaps the only folks who will ultimately be in the position to call bullshit on the GOP are the voters themselves, and that all depends on whether the American people have a good collective memory on how we got into Iraq in the first place.  But as I implied in my post yesterday, I think that memories might be fading in that regard.

UPDATE:  Obama chimed in on this debate today.  He said this (via Steve Benen):

"I'm very clear on the lessons of Iraq. I think it was a mistake for us to go in in the first place, despite the incredible efforts that were made by our men and women in uniform. Despite that error, those sacrifices allowed the Iraqis to take back their country. That opportunity was squandered by Prime Minister Maliki and the unwillingness to reach out effectively to the Sunni and Kurdish populations."

C'mon, Barack -- you can do better than that. Benen suggests the following:

I suspect, if I were in the president’s shoes, I might be tempted to say, “Wait, those guys who were wrong about everything and lied the nation into a catastrophic war that destabilized the region are trying to blame me? Are they insane?”

Fucking-A.

I Know I Seem to Be Beating A Dead Horse On The Matter of the GOP Iraq War Re-Write . . .

. . . but I am continually writing on this subject because the metaphorical horse in question appears to be far from dead.  As recently as two weeks ago, I honestly thought that the question of whether Bush and Cheney manipulated intelligence in order to get the war they wanted was answered long ago and the answer was that they most definitely lied this country into war.

But I spoke to a friend yesterday who will go unnamed (Dan), and he had read David Brooks' recent column on how the Iraq Debacle was basically an honest mistake and Dan more or less bought into Brooks' argument (Dan, by the way, was no fan of the Bush/Cheney Administration and keeps himself well-informed on the issues). In my friend's defense, why not buy into what Brooks had to say? After all, not only is he a New York Times columnist, but he is also one of the more thoughtful conservative writers out there.

No doubt the following paragraph from Brooks' piece sounded particularly convincing to Dan:

* * * There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

That doesn’t gibe (sic) with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”

Sounds pretty convincing, right? The only problem with what Brooks wrote is that it is complete, unadulterated horse-shit. Simon Maloy at Salon provides the one detail that Brooks either forgot about (unlikely) or intentionally ignored (very likely):

The Robb-Silberman report was not “exhaustive” – the commission was specifically instructed not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers. That task fell to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that George W. Bush and his closest advisers regularly made definitive statements about Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism ties that were either unsubstantiated by available intelligence or didn’t reflect disputes within the intelligence community.

Yeah, you read that right -- Brooks used a specific report to support his position that there was no intelligence manipulation by policymakers, even though the writers of that report were specifically told not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers.  Given that I could not believe Brooks would be so duplicitous careless, I actually followed Brooks' own link to the Robb-Silberman report, clicked through to the report's actual text, and found this in the introduction:

"[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information."

I naively hoped that the GOP (with the exception of Dick Cheney, of course) had finally decided to stop lying about Iraq.  I had also hoped that the New York Times had learned something from the Judith Miller Fuckery and actually started paying attention to what its writers were writing, particularly on the issue of the Iraq War and how we got into that quagmire in the first place.  I am now forced to conclude that Republicans will never stop lying about the Iraq Debacle and that the New York Times still has a lot of work to do.

Now That The Iraq War Will Once Again Be An Issue In A Presidential Election . . .

. . . shouldn't the Democrats give some serious thought to whether Hillary is the right candidate for 2016?  A couple days ago, I wrote:

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Hillary did chime in today on this issue by once again admitting her vote to authorize the Iraq War was a mistake, and then she said this:

"What we now see is a different and very dangerous situation. The United States is doing what it can, but ultimately this has to be a struggle that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people are determined to win for themselves and we can provide support, but they're going to have to do it."

Not good enough, dammit. Her comment demonstrates why Hillary should not be the Democratic nominee in 2016. Given that she voted to authorize the war, she is not in the position to take on the Republicans as they desperately try to "revise" the history of the Iraq Debacle.

You say it is not fair for me to criticize Hillary when so many other politicians got it wrong?  Well, the fact is that lots of people saw that the plan to invade Iraq was bullshit well before hostilities began. Twenty-two Democrats in the U.S. Senate -- and one Independent -- voted against authorization. All Senate Republicans, however, voted for it.  Barack Obama, before he became a US Senator, said this during the run-up to Iraq War:

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

I think it was Winston Churchill who once said: "History is written by the victors."  The corollary is, of course, that the losers don't get to write shit. The Republicans, however, are trying to turn that truism on its head.

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the losers who caused that massive clusterfuck in Iraq -- and the current crop of their GOP apologists -- are desperately trying to re-write history. We cannot, as a people, let them succeed.  All of their victims -- namely, the tens of thousands dead and injured American troops and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis -- deserve better.

What Paul Krugman Says . . .

"*** Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option. They decided right at the beginning — literally before the dust of 9/11 had settled — to use a terrorist attack by religious extremists as an excuse to go after a secular regime that, evil as it was, had nothing to do with that attack. To make the case for the splendid little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about WMD — because chemical weapons, which many believed Saddam had, are nothing like the nukes they implied he was working on — and insinuating the false claim that Saddam was behind 9/11.

 "*** It was quite clear at the time that the case for war was fake — God knows I thought it was glaringly obvious, and tried to tell people — and fairly obvious as well that the attempt to create a pro-American Iraq after the invasion was likely to be an expensive failure. The question for war supporters shouldn’t be, would you have been a supporter knowing what you know now. It should be, why didn’t you see the obvious back then?"

Amen. Read Krugman's entire post here.

Quote of the Week (And Why We Cannot Let The GOP Re-Write Iraq War History)

"[Jeb Bush's] first answer to Megyn Kelly’s question was the most honest one. Yes, knowing what we know now, he would still have invaded Iraq and he has the team of dunces to prove it."

- Ambassador Joe Wilson, commenting on Jeb Bush's recent flip-flopping on the Iraq question, and noting that Jeb has now surrounded himself with some of the very same idiots who lied this country into a war with Iraq in the first place.

Wilson's op/ed addresses what has really been bothering me this past week concerning Jeb's recent Iraq fiasco, and it has little to do with what Bush said and more to do with how the GOP is using his misstatements in an attempt to re-write history.

The Iraq Debacle was not a failure in intelligence, as Republicans continue to claim.  As Ambassador Wilson states, "deliberate political abuse and fabrication of intelligence" are what actually got us in to that clusterfuck twelve years ago:

The deliberately cherry-picked intelligence was concocted in order to influence the decision that led to the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Americans, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the quagmire in the Middle East in which we have been enmeshed for the past decade. As the head of British intelligence reported back to his government after meetings in Washington in June, 2002: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Alan Foley, the Director of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) told his people in late 2002 or early 2003: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.”

Although I am certain the Republican Party wants us to forget all of this, here are some of the high points of the Bush/Cheney fuckery that got us into Iraq:

• Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," even though there was no evidence that Saddam had an active nuclear program -- Christ, Saddam's own son-in-law, prior to the U.S. invasion, told us after he defected that there was no Iraqi nuclear program and another high level defector similarly told the U.S. that Iraq had absolutely no active weapons of mass destruction program.


• Remember the "high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production" that Saddam reportedly possessed and that George W. Bush referred to in his 2003 State of the Union?  That was all horseshit, and BushCo knew it was horseshit at the time they made the claim.


• In a 2001 interview, Dick Cheney said, "It's been pretty well confirmed that (9-11 ring leader Mohammed Atta) did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in (the Czech Republic) last April, several months before the attack."  Such a meeting, however, did not happen, and Cheney knew that.


• The Bush Regime was constantly linking Saddam to al-Qaeda (and thus to the 9-11 Attacks), even though no such link existed and in fact Saddam and bin Laden were "natural enemies."

This is just a taste of the panoply of lies that resulted in the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder of all time, and the last thing Americans should do is allow the GOP to re-write the history on this.  

As readers of this blog know, I've never really forgiven Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  She has since admitted that her vote to invade was a mistake, but she needs to go much further on this.  

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Put the turd in their pocket, Hillary.

UPDATE:  Right on cue:

"The question was whether it was a mistake, and my answer was it was not a mistake. I still say it was not a mistake, because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ... [Bush] made the right decision based on what he knew at that time. We learned subsequently that information was wrong. My answer is, at the time, it appears the intelligence was wrong."

- Marco Rubio, on this morning's Fox News Sunday.

Pandering To Idiots

Greatest right-wing conspiracy theory ever?  You decide:

Over the summer, the U.S. military is launching a training exercise called “Jade Helm 15,” which ordinarily wouldn’t generate any headlines at all. It’s a series of training drills throughout the Southwest, from Texas to California, for about 1,200 special operations personnel, including Green Berets and Navy SEALs.

In some right-wing circles, however, “Jade Helm 15” is the basis for an extraordinary conspiracy theory. The idea gets a little convoluted – fringe theories often are – but the unhinged activists apparently believe the Obama administration, in conjunction with the U.S. military and Wal-Mart, is planning to impose martial law on much of the country. As they see it, the plan also includes gun confiscation and “secret underground tunnels.”

The "pandering to idiots" line -- which I believe should become the slogan for the Republican Party generally -- came from Todd Smith, a GOP veteran of the Texas legislature who retired in 2013. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Of Course) ordered the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the military exercises in order to keep tabs on the operation and to ensure Texans that “their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”  Former representative Smith was none too pleased by all the idiocy:

[Smith] said he is “horrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my Governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my Governor doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to those who do.”  He said he wrote because the thought that the U.S. military would be a threat to Texas is “embarrassing” and it is important “to rational governance that thinking Republicans call you out on it.”

“Is there ANYBODY who is going to stand up to this radical nonsense that is a cancer on our State and our Party?” Smith asked.

Both the Pentagon and Wal-Mart have issued statements dismissing these rumors, which should put an end to all this conspiracy talk.

I'm kidding, of course.

UPDATE:  Jon Stewart weighs in (at 5:35):

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