Many of us on this blog have been critical of the Iraq war from the outset as a war based on a false claim by the Bush Administration and then perpetuated by political cynicism by both Democratic and Republican leaders who did not want to be accused of “losing” the war. The costs were paid by soldiers and taxpayers in a war where the U.S. was often openly opposed by government figures and demonized in many parts of the country. It was clear that we were propping up a government that could not maintain order or loyalty across the country. Now, shortly after our withdrawal of combat troops, one of the most costly “victories” of the war — Fallujah — has been retaken by Al Qaeda as militants threaten additional takeovers in the country. Despite this history, members of Congress are already complaining that we should have continued the ground war longer at the cost of more American lives and billions of dollars.
Sen. John McCain, Arizona, and Lindsey Graham, South Carolina, took to the airways to accuse President Obama of misleading the American people that the Iraqi leaders wanted the U.S. to withdraw forces and that the resulting consequences were “as tragic as they were predictable” and suggested Obama misled Americans into believing that Iraqi leaders wanted U.S. forces out of their country. They again ignore the lack of success under both Bush and Obama in stabilizing the country as an outside force or the opposition of many Americans to the loss of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on this war. It took Al Qaeda just three days to take the city despite heavy fighting.
In a joint statement the senators proclaimed that “[w]hen President Obama withdrew all U.S. forces … over the objections of our military leaders and commanders on the ground, many of us predicted that the vacuum would be filled by America’s enemies and would emerge as a threat to U.S. national security interests. Sadly, that reality is now clearer than ever.” So the solution was to prolong the war while members like Graham have called for war with Iran in a new military campaign.
We secured the city in 2004 after some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Anbar province itself remained an area of intense fighting throughout the war. Roughly a third of the 4,486 U.S. troops killed in Iraq died in Anbar and we lost roughly 100 just in the November 2004 battle for control of Fallujah.
McCain and Graham referred to those dead in calling for more U.S. combat troops in Iraq: “Thousands of brave Americans who fought, shed their blood, and lost their friends to bring peace to Fallujah and Iraq are now left to wonder whether these sacrifices were in vain.” Clearly, the answer as to Fallujah is yes for now. However, McCain and Graham avoid their responsibility in supporting the war in the beginning with little inquiry into the false claims of the Bush Administration or their support for the continuation of the war. They continued to support the wars at the cost of hundreds of billions as we cut key scientific, educational, and environmental programs at home. The question should be whether “these sacrifices were in vain” after entering a war on false pretenses and then opposing a withdrawal to save American lives.
There are tribes who are opposing Al Qaeda but this conflict reflects divisions that are hundreds of years old, including the worsening Sunni v. Shiite divide. There never was an end strategy in our involvement in Iraq. Even now, McCain and Graham oppose the concept of withdrawal while the country is unstable. Since it has been unstable, even under a dictatorship, you can do the math.
I do not lack sympathy for the plight of Iraqis — most of whom do not appear to support Al Qaeda, though polls show a high level of opposition to the United States as well. However, this is their country and their fight.
We have a growing crisis in this country over an economy that continues as an issue to be kicked down the road by this President and this Congress. We have cut educational, health, and scientific programs that will undermine our growth and competitiveness in the future. Yet, we have members of Congress who want to not only engage new enemies but reengage past enemies in military operations.
Source: Washington Post
Thank you Obama… may this come back to you in spades.
I stand reminded that there was no AQ in Iraq until AFTER America launched its illegal war of aggression…
… Sins of our Fathers.
And now Dessert.
A few quotes from this “scholar and paragon of geniustudeness”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
I think it is time for some indictments and arrest warrants to be issued for Wolfowitz to go before the ICC in the Hague. That is where he belongs, and since he is not an big fish guy, I think that it will be more likely and have fewer political complications to arrest and try him. Hell, if the ICC could arrest and try Milosevic, who was a former head of state and who was responsible for FAR fewer dead and misery than Wolfowitz, they most certainly can put him on trial with FAR more reason. The waging of aggressive war, or pre-emptive war as the Nazis and the Japanese, and Bush did was and is still a war crime.
One more excerpt,
One of the questions emerging from the Iraq debacle must be this one: Why did liberation at gunpoint yield results that differed so radically from what the war’s advocates had expected? Or, to sharpen the point, How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?
Not one of your colleagues from the Bush Administration possesses the necessary combination of honesty, courage, and wit to answer these questions. If you don’t believe me, please sample the tediously self-exculpatory memoirs penned by (or on behalf of) Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Bremer, Feith, and a small squad of eminently forgettable generals.
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McCain and Graham are still trumpeting the Bush Doctrine.
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/03/a-letter-to-paul-wolfowitz/3/
..By Andrew J. Bacevich
The election of George W. Bush as president permitted you to escape from academe. You’d done yeoman work tutoring candidate Bush in how the world works, and he repaid the debt by appointing you to serve as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy atop the Pentagon hierarchy. You took office as Osama bin Laden was conspiring to attack. Alas, neither Rumsfeld nor you nor anyone else in a position of real authority anticipated what was to occur. America’s vaunted defense establishment had left the country defenseless. Yet instead of seeing this as evidence of gross incompetence requiring the officials responsible to resign, you took it as an affirmation. For proof that averting surprise through preventive military action was now priority number one, Americans needed to look no further than the damage inflicted by nineteen thugs armed with box cutters.
You immediately saw the events of 9/11 as a second and more promising opening to assert U.S. supremacy. When riding high a decade earlier, many Americans had thought it either unseemly or unnecessary to lord it over others. Now, with the populace angry and frightened, the idea was likely to prove an easier sell. Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater.
In an instant, you grasped that the attacks provided a fresh opportunity to implement Wohlstetter’s Precepts, and Iraq offered a made-to-order venue. “We cannot wait to act until the threat is imminent,” you said in 2002. Toppling Saddam Hussein would validate the alternative to waiting. In Iraq the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war.
….. Imagine — you must have done so many times — if that notorious mission accomplished banner had accurately portrayed the situation on the ground in Iraq in May 2003. Imagine if U.S. forces had achieved a clean, decisive victory. Imagine that the famous (if staged) photo of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s Al Firdos Square being pulled down had actually presaged a rapid transition to a pro-American liberal democracy, just as your friend Ahmed Chalabi had promised. Imagine if none of the ensuing horrors and disappointments had occurred: the insurgency; Fallujah and Abu Ghraib; thousands of American lives lost and damaged; at least 125,000 Iraqis killed, and some 3 million others exiled or displaced; more than a trillion dollars squandered.
You expected something different, of course. Shortly before the war, you told Congress:
It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take. “We cannot wait to act until the threat is imminent,” you said in 2002. Toppling Saddam Hussein would validate the alternative to waiting. In Iraq the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war.
There is much more in this letter By Andrew J. Bacevich from the above link.
We had no business being there in the first place. Thanks to Dick Cheney and his manipulation of the American people (and a pliable president), thousands of military men and women have been killed and maimed, not to mention tens of thousands of civilians. It’s time we stay out of it and heal our own country.
Laser, You just moved up on the NSA monitoring list.
Paul Wolfowitz is titled as an AEI. scholar.
http://www.aei.org/scholar/paul-wolfowitz/
Experience
Chairman, U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, 2008-present
President, World Bank Group, 2005-2007
Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2001-2005; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 1989-93; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs, 1977-80, U.S. Department of Defense
Dean and Professor of International Relations, 1994-2001; Visiting Professor, 1980-81, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Ambassador to Indonesia, 1986-89
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, 1982-86; Director of Policy Planning, 1981-82, U.S. Department of State
Special Assistant, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1973-77
Professor, Department of Political Science, Yale University, 1970-73
davidblue, You forgot Wolfowitz’s most important credential, that of CHICKENHAWK and coward, not to mention the anti-corruption hypocrite who was as corrupt as the people he thought were corrupt. Then he had the gall to SPIT on a REAL American hero Gen. Shinseki who actually believed and LIVED the ideals he was taught at West Point. This guy should be in prison and serving a life sentence. He is an outright traitor to the USA. He was supposedly for democracy, but fought against it in virtually every place he served. He is an American fascist or a Jewish one, your choice or both. I rarely use the term fascist on many people, but this guy is the real deal in that.
What… Sounds like another Vietnam…..
Perhaps it is time to look at the mentality that started the war, bungled the war, and even drift back to Vietnam. The US is not alone in history as a military power with an oversize ego of might is right. The Vietnam war was a crime against humanity that cost the lives of over three million Vietnamese, who were fighting for their freedom from colonial intervention. We can continue to short sightedly look at the trees, our 50,000+ dead, or we can look at the forest. We have no right to be in certain situations.
We had no right to be in Iraq. We made a horrible mess of things. Politicians like McCain and others whose only claim to fame was that he was shot down while bombing innocent Vietnamese, can criticize all they want. However, the battle for the Islamic world will not be won by the US. These people will have to rise up and stand up to the extremists themselves. The US can help from a distance but should never decide who is to govern. We would never have tolerated foreign intervention into our affairs while we were eradicating the native population, lynching slaves who thought they should be free, and all the other atrocities that evolving out of made America what it is today. They have to do it on their own. Bush and the other stooges should be tried for treason. Obama was right. His was the hardest decision.
Lazer, ‘Good People’ need to grow up and realize that society will never be peacefully organized by means of aggression. All governments either begin, or gravitate into rogue elements with veiled agendas. Governments are nothing more than groups of men and women who claim to enjoy an authorized monopoly over the exercise of force and aggression against their fellows.
You can’t imagine a world without government? Most small imaginations can’t.
Spend some time listening to materials offered by freedomainradio.com A good place to start is the free audio book Universally Preferable Behavior. If you can put aside your initial negativity and are truly searching for solutions I think you will find that solutions do exist. Although they are outside of our present paradigm.
Humankind is headed down a road of self-extinction if we don’t make some necessary changes in how we interact with others.
As is readily apparent, we all concur that our government, vis-a-vis rogue elements with veiled agendas – have done serious wrongs against humanity;
so – what do good people do – about that?
Now officialdumb won’t need night glasses to find Al-Qaeda at night:
(Myth Addiction Is Establishment’s LSD – 3). Those in the know realize that Fallujah became a de facto dump of DU (depleted uranium) and other horribles.
Al-Qaeda will be soon be glowing in the dark in Fallujah town.
GWB/Cheney lies about WMDs will haunt this nations for decades. The death and destruction caused by the McCain/Graham types will continue to mount. Clowns like McCain/Graham should be apologizing to America and it’s military for forcing an unnecessary war, but instead they advocate for continued imperialism and war. Blaming Obama for Iraq’s condition is like blaming Jimmy Carter for Pol Pot. Of course GOP has never accepted responsibility for any of their destructive actions, so their response is not surprising. .
it is typical of the ruling class that they only advocate being responsible for others NOT themselves. They are immune from the rules for the rest of us as we can see on Wall Street and in the military business.
Last figures I saw on the cost in dollars was upwards of THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! That does not figure in the cost of medical care and payments for wounded GIs and long term payments for life. Then we have the huge giveaway of Iraqi assets and money that we spent for which there was NO accounting, and for which as custodians of those assets, the US taxpayer is legally on the hook for. So the costs are gigantic, and it is ludicrous for ANY GOPer to be concerned about the deficit since THEY are the ones who caused 90% of it.
It is absurd for any rational person to say that there was any legal, moral, or national security justification for the invasion. It is without question ILLEGAL under US law and international agreements which the US has signed. The best thing Obama did was to get out of Iraq, thus fulfilling a campaign promise and keeping his word. Too bad his critics here refuse to give him any credit.
As for the lives being lost in vain, the ones responsible for that is W BUSH who went in, defied the recommendations of the US Army as to the numbers needed, and tossed out any plan for post war Iraq. Bush should be held to account for those who feel that they were betrayed or that their sacrifices were in vain. There was NO rational or legal reason for that war.
McCain and Graham are war mongers. We need to publicize their cries loud and long. Hopefully the more people hear, the more they will be ostracized. One can hope.
It is a sad situation but like you say, this is a civil war that has been long in the brewing. It is not our fight.
Write your congresspeople, tell them what you think. I certainly will.
Graham and McCain war mongers accusing someone else of lying! I don’t care whether the Iraqis wanted us to leave or not, we never should and been there and we needed to leave.
It is hard to ferret out fact from fiction concerning such troubling matters.
Many sites that I hold dear, claim that Al Qaeda was never an issue in Iraq until our troops arrived; because Saddam and Al Qaeda were ardent enemies.
The battle for the U.S. to dominate all the oil producing middle east countries at the expense of human life and material adversity vexes me greatly.
We are the bullies of the world; and I’m ashamed of that.
I as a veteran do feel as if our efforts were in vain. Only time will tell if allegations were false or not in my opinion.
Reblogged this on Dead Citizen's Rights Society.