By Mark Esposito, Weekend Contributor
One of the ways we decide how sincere a witness is down at the courthouse is seeing what he said about a topic before there was anything really at stake and comparing that to what he’s saying now. Watching the scandalous political corruption trial here in Richmond for the past few days, I’ve seen plenty of “I said one thing then, but I’m saying something else now” from the various witnesses taking the stand. Take Governor Bob McDonnell’s friend and stockbroker, John Piscitelli, who upon being asked about a particular sleazy scheme to avoid the state’s gift disclosure laws –cooked up apparently by Virginia’s First Lady — answered that he was not “uncomfortable” with the deal. When his prior grand jury testimony was pushed in his face, the securities peddler cleared his throat, straightened his tie, looked around, and then remembered that , lo and behold, the aborted deal to dump stock right before the disclosure deadline and then buy it back did indeed make him feel ” uncomfortable.” Wonderful thing, a trial.
Pity we can’t put politicians on trial simply for being politicians — especially those who are simply flitting around the flame of geopolitical power hoping to catch it for themselves. Take House Speaker and Republican Party leader John Boehner, for example. The burgeoning crisis in northern Iraq caused by the jihadist crazed theocrats of ISIS has come front and center to the world stage. Crashing in from Syria, the fundamentalists, dedicated to establishing a new world order based on a universal muslim caliphate governed by sharia law, have rounded up non-muslim Iraqis, forced them to convert to Islam, and then quite ceremoniously beheaded them or when the swords got too dull, simply stolen their possessions and run the “infidels” into to the mountains. A direct by-product of the unnecessary War in Iraq II by Bush II, the teetering country is now firmly ensconced in civil war with some added religious crusaders to spice the mix.
Seeing American interests and service personnel directly at risk from the full-out crisis and fearing a genocide of ethnic groups as well as Christian Iraqis, President Obama ordered a humanitarian airlift in conjunction with the British, and authorized American air power to perform limited bombing runs to dissuade ISIS from consolidating gains and advancing on even more Iraq cities and infrastructure. In a rare show of something approaching solidarity, most Republican lawmakers expressed satisfaction with the President’s moves though predictably it was “too little to late” in the minds of some GOP Svengalis who pulled the “told you so” card from the bottom of the deck.
Chief among the critics was Speaker John Boehner who loves him some bombing calling it “appropriate,” but hates him some Obama policy saying in a prepared statement that he is quite dismayed there isn’t one:
I am dismayed by the ongoing absence of a strategy for countering the grave threat ISIS poses to the region.Vital national interests are at stake, yet the White House has remained disengaged despite warnings from Iraqi leaders, Congress, and even members of its own administration. Such parochial thinking only emboldens the enemy and squanders the sacrifices Americans have made. The president needs a long-term strategy — one that defines success as completing our mission, not keeping political promises — and he needs to build the support to sustain it. If the president is willing to put forward such a strategy, I am ready to listen and work with him.
Well, “work(ing) with him” apparently doesn’t include attending a White House meeting last week on what the Speaker claims is a “grave threat.” No word on what was discussed at that meeting, but at a prior meeting on the topic in June attended by Republican hawks Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Arizona), Graham told reporters that the briefing “scared the hell out of him.” (You think Hell would have a better place to be anyway). McCain was no less “measured” in his commentary calling on the President to replace the entire national security brain trust.
No mention from these three prized elephants about what destabilized this seething caldron of a country in the first place (the late, great War on Weapons of Mass Destruction) or the lack of “exit strategy” from Bush II for this lark of a war that was plopped down on Obama’s desk on his first day in office, and nary a bit of grandfatherly advice for the man many Republicans consider “in over his head” to handle world affairs about how to manage the crisis without a full-scale ground and air assault on the tinder box constructed by the Bush-Cheney team.
But Speaker Boehner and his cronies were not always so critical of the President’s plans in Iraq. In fact, when it suited him, the man with the perpetual tan seemed downright laudatory. In a carefully worded statement on Iraq released on February 27, 2009, Boehner praised the President’s policy to extricate American forces from the quagmire even agreeing with the timeline approach to disengagement and saying the plan provided ultimate flexibility to handle future crises caused by the likes of ISIS.
The plan put forward by President Obama continues our strategy of bringing troops home from Iraq as they succeed in stabilizing the country. I believe he has outlined a responsible approach that retains maximum flexibility to reconsider troop levels and to respond to changes in the security environment should circumstances on the ground warrant.
A far cry from the sentiments of a man who recently said that Obama was “taking a nap” on Iraq.
So what are we to make of the hue and cry about incompetence and inattentiveness of Obama in dealing with Iraq from the man who praised him for the strategy in the first place? Maybe Speaker Boehner should clear his throat,straighten his tie, look around the room and tell us how he really feels. Now it’s your turn to tell us:
Source: The Hill
~Mark Esposito Weekend Contributor
By the way and for better or worse, the views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not necessarily those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays of art are solely the author’s decision and responsibility. No infringement of intellectual property rights is intended and will be remedied upon notice from the owner. Fair use is however asserted for such inclusions of quotes, excerpts, photos, art, and the like.
Eric,
your comparison to post WWII nation building and Iraq is flawed. The Korea conflict has never ended and both sides are heavily armed and the peninsula split. Was that a success? And what about Vietnam? Didn’t we try to nation build there? How did that turn out?
Just to be clear Dredd: was that an indictment of a foreign policy driven by Big Oil corporatism or an indictment of a domestic policy driven by the Environmental lobby? Is there a correlation here?
The general and most prevalent opinion of the U.S. in the Middle-East is that it is the greatest danger to world peace.
All the nations recently destroyed (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya) were much better off before we “brung democrazy to them for free” (MOMCOM And The Sins of Libya).
Ross
John, last I heard this is still a true statistic:
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Instead of a whisper in the ear, how about a credible link?
Paul C. Schulte
mespo – there is a big difference between strategy and tactics.
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Which came first antics, strategy, or tactics?
And which one does “love to be hated” fit into?
I ask in reference to Western Middle-East policy over the past ~100 years.
John, last I heard this is still a true statistic:
In merely 4 years of retirement, most of us have fully received 100% of all social security taxes that we paid into the system over our lifetimes. After about 4 years each and every one of us is essentially on government welfare.
The vast majority of (non-volunteer) fire departments don’t send an “invoice” to the citizens they serve – it is a form of welfare and not listed in the U.S. Constitution.
Large corporations are the largest recipients of government welfare, some making billions in profit in every year and far exceeding welfare to poor people.
Foreign oil wars, spills, pollution, etc. are also a form of welfare, the cost of oil wars aren’t paid for at the gas pump or included in the price of petroleum products paid by the end user.
For some reason, neither political party will run on this!
Annie: “This is how Iraqis thanked the US for deposing Saddam Hussein for them. Nice huh?”
When I served in Korea, the protests outside US bases (camps, garrisons) – sometimes running onto the US bases – were weekly scheduled events. Clockwork. We just recycled the same safety brief every week that was probably written years before I got there.
And that’s in a country without Saddam loyalists and Iran-sponsored Sadrists.
Granted, it’s fun when you’re tasked to represent your unit at a fete for US soldiers by government and business leaders, but the good we do isn’t normally measured by perpetual outpourings of love and gratitude for CNN. We’re not north Korea. Heck, there are Americans who’ve protested their own military harshly.
What the Korean protestors didn’t get about us, or maybe they did, is that we’re almost as pleased by the protests – because we know a piece of that freedom is from us – as we are by the celebrations in our honor.
John Oliver (@OurCivics)
Ah, Social Justice? This has got to be on of the most ignorant of all progressive causes. Cogito ergo sum doesn’t translate into: “I think, therefore it’s true!”
THOU SHALT NOT COVET and “interpret” it into “social justice.”
What to do after one STOPS COVETING, that’s up to the “emptor.”
Self-reliance.
America is a nation of COVETOUSNESS.
Sinners one and all.
I COVET therefore I DESERVE other people’s money.
Oh, Marx. Wherefore art thou?
wrxdave
GREAT! You found God.
Open a church.
Start a war.
Peddle that “opiate of the masses.”
Ross,
Ah, Social Justice? This has got to be on of the most ignorant of all progressive causes. Cogito ergo sum doesn’t translate into: “I think, therefore it’s true!”
Perhaps the African Tribal Chiefs who sold the slaves or the British Traders/Planters who purchased and deployed the slaves should be sued in the Hague for compensation. I have no interest or standing in that matter.
Sorry. I nor any of my ancestors ever owned a slave. Did you or yours?
Debates about compensation for wage levels will take longer and may include numerous other parties such as the very Caucasian “indentured servants” of a proximate era.
Oops. The “natives” came from Asia around the defunct Alaskan “land bridge.”
They are actually undocumented, illegal aliens.
All humans are “natives” of Africa.
“ALL — GO — WELL”
General Welfare (not individual).
GENERAL – “of, relating to, or affecting all the people or things in a group”
WELFARE – WELL-FARE AKA FARE-WELL
WELL –
in a good or satisfactory way.
“the whole team played well”
FARE –
perform in a specified way in a particular situation or over a particular period of time.
“the party fared badly in the spring elections”
John,
I agree you should return your property to Native Americans that we stole from and reimburse African-Americans for their non-paid volunteer work that built the United States.
Annie: “Eric, where will the money come from to continue a presence in Iraq?”
The same budget that paid for me when I was deployed, and pays today and will pay tomorrow and the day after for our on-going, indefinite security deployments around the world.
You know, the cost – in manpower, blood, and treasure – for our on-going European and Asian deployments aren’t permanently pegged at 1941-1945 (and 1950-1953, for that matter). As the enemy-turned-occupied-nation-turned-host-nation-and-partner rises, we get to step back, downsize, and spend down in pace. In the final part of our Iraq mission, it was conspicuously approaching that kind of routine.
It’s true that we wasted too many billions of development dollars in Iraq while the security foundation wasn’t set. The profligate ‘adhocracy’ spending was largely driven by the weird demand for immediate ROI in the distorted politics around the Iraq mission. That wasn’t going to continue when security was set. When security is established and stability maintained, the situation – especially the politics – calms down so everything acts more efficiently and accountability can grip.
Of course, going back to Iraq now to try to regain the very hard-earned progress we incredibly chose to throw away 3 years ago will cost a lot more than if we had simply stayed to protect and nurture the progressive trend that we abandoned.
Right now, it’s not about that, anyway. It’s simply about saving lives from monsters.
“Besides, Annie, General Welfare can be a broad spectrum, can’t it?”
This would be true if it weren’t for the “amble” that follows; you know that whole constitution thingy and amendments. Do you condemn laws that don’t secure the unalienable rights of all citizens?
There is actually quiet a bit between the Atoms and particles – Dark Matter, Dark Energy, fundamental particles shooting around and popping into and out of existence…
To say nothing of the extra dimensions of string theory (oops, just did).
John, Affirmative action hurts Asians as much as any group! They are not a protected class and man are they achievers. Thankfully, no repressive law will keep them from achieving.
Always looking for the positive, at least no one has played the race card, blaming Obama’s 40% approval rating on “RAAAAACISM.”
Debate or go ad hominem. That is the question. Good job.