25 thoughts on “No, Warhawks, We Told YOU So”

1. Unsurprisingly, our War-and-Chicken-Hawks want to return.

   SAWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET BABY JAYZOOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   HELL NO!
   WE SHOULDN’T GO – BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!
   (AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

   It was bad, stupid, and expensive enough in BLOOD & TREASURE that we hemorrhaged the first time (2nd time, if you count W’s Daddy).

   This is only one of the aftermath’s of “Dick and W’s Great Mis-adventures” – aka: “W’s Follies!”

   More to follow in Afghanistan – and Egypt, and Syria, and Libya, and Iran, and other places.

   Hey, if YOU conservatives and Republicans WANT to do something to help fix the f’in messes you’ve created, start an ‘American Foreign Legion,’ join it – AND THEN YOU STUPID MFers GO AND VOLUNTEER!

   YOU MFers broke it – YOU MFers fix it!

   I’m lookin’ at you, McCain, Graham, Kristol, Krauthammer, Freidman, etc…!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   File this under “CLUELESS F*CKIN’ PSYCHOPATHIC F*CKIN’ ‘TEH STOOOOOOOOPID’ and IGNORANT ‘MORANS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   Sorry for all of the cap’s, exclamation marks, and bolding – BUT I’M F*CKIN’ PISSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   Oh, and thanks again, Ralph… YOU FUCKIN” STUPID SON OF A BITCH!!!

2. Well of course we should have stayed, had we stayed we only would have lost another 5000 soldiers or so, another trillion dollars, big deal that is what the soldiers are for, better to spend the money because freedom than for librul merica hating welfare here at home. Send them back to the endless meatgrinder, why not?

3. It’s infuriating to hear the average wingnut blame Obama for this. I find myself repeating this generic formula to them:

   1) Conservatives create a gigantic mess, which then gets passed off to liberals to fix.

   2) Libs attempt to fix it, while conservatives do everything in their power to obstruct, and then 3) complain (and crow) that it’s not fixed.

   There are four year olds with more maturity.

4. Saddam Hussein was a dirtbag strongman, but he was a dirtbag strongman presiding over a Westernized, secular society. He was loathed by Al Qaeda, and he kept Iraq’s borders impermeable; he kept Al Qaeda OUT. The U.S. invaded and Al Qaeda, and Isis, and Dawg knows what else, came flowing IN.

   What Dubya hath wrought. Dubya. No one else. And we can’t fix this, as most of us have understood for the past 11 years.

5. Yes, I just saw Michael Gerson chastising the President for not using his magical peace making powers. Whatever.

   • Oh, it’s getting better. Doug Feith has emerged and is flapping his lips about “the education of Barack Obama.” Yes, Doug Feith.

6. Doug Feith?!?!?!?!
   OY!
   It’s stupidity, ignorance, and reckless insanity is now loose upon the land – AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!

   Ok, whoever kicked over that rock in the toxic swamp, admit it!!!

   We won’t kill you – we’ll only hold you responsible .

   Which, sorry, is more than we ever did for any of Nixon’s, Reagan’s, Bush I’s, or Dumbaya’s, cadre of psychopathic thugs and morons.

7. Unfortunately, OIL.

   Our best hope is probably to cut the best deal we can with the Kurds, NOW. Before the Iranis and the Putinis show up with strong offers. And overrun the place. Screw ‘tradition’. Screw the past. Iraq is toast, borders drawn by the British a century ago are being erased as we watch. Get over it.

   Either we do it, or Halliburton loses. Can’t have that.

8. I’d like to see Doug feith fed x’ed to an bar Provence. I agree with everything in your post, maha, and I agree with the comments. Sorry my mini pad auto correct is in control here.

9. What Dubya hath wrought. Dubya. No one else. And we can’t fix this, as most of us have understood for the past 11 years.

   Yeah, but Dubya says if you could experience the orgasmic thrill of standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln wearing a cod piece that’s snug on your manhood while absorbing the adulations from fellow warriors for a mission accomplished, then you’d understand that it was well worth every ounce of American blood it took to secure that moment. It was transcendent..It was glorious. It was as close to being a God as man can come.
   It’s not like the 5000 American soldiers who were killed in Iraq died in vain.. They in died in service of Bush’s stupidity and ego.

10. Michael Gerson says that Obama was so paralyzed by risk aversion that he wouldn’t supply weapons to the “responsible opposition” against Assad in Syria thereby creating the mess that has now developed in Iraq. But if reports of what constitutes a large portion the ISIS forces is correct, then it would be the ‘responsible opposition” forces that are now pushing toward Baghdad.
    I like the way Gerson glosses over the specifics of the situation and then arbitrarily tosses in a word like responsible to create the illusion that Obama made a wrong decision that was morally flawed and ultimately resulted in the current situation in Iraq.

11. (Mahablog): “We warned that sending American troops into a Middle Eastern country, especially for obviously phony reasons, would inspire more radicalism and more enmity toward the U.S.”

    How was the intelligence on Iraqi WMD and support for terrorism “obviously phony”?
    Hindsight is not 20/20 (and 20/20 isn’t perfect vision, it’s normal vision). Congress voted overwhelmingly for the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton said that the intelligence she saw as a Senator matched what the White House had seen when Bill Clinton was President. Ambassador Wilson testified to a Congressional committee investigating the intelligence failure that his inquiries in Niger supported the CIA conclusion that Saddam Hussein’s government had sought uranium ore in Niger. A group of opponents of the war, the Veteran Intelligence for Peace, argued against the war on the grounds that Iraq’s chemical weapons would make US casualties unacceptably high. David Kay testified to the Congressional committee investigating the intelligence failure that the CIA’s misjudgment was not a result of undue command influence but of the echo chamber effect.

    Here’s Senator John Edwards on MSNB.
    MATTHEWS: “Did you get an honest reading on the intelligence?”
    EDWRADS: “But now we’re getting to the second part of your question. I think we have to get to the bottom of this. I think there’s clear inconsistency between what’s been found in Iraq and what we were told. And as you know, I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee. So it wasn’t just the Bush administration. I sat in meeting after meeting after meeting where we were told about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. There is clearly a disconnect between what we were told and what, in fact, we found there.”

    There is clearly often a disconnect between what we are told and what, in fact, we find in the documentary record.

    • How was the intelligence on Iraqi WMD and support for terrorism “obviously phony”?

      If you had been paying attention — to print media, anyway — at the time, you would have known these things:

      1. Propaganda to the contrary, it was extremely unlikely pretty much impossible on its face that Saddam Hussein — a secularist dictator — would have been supporting a faction of jihadi extremists whose well-publicized goal was the creation of a world-wide Islamic caliphate. SH was already on the record as being an enemy of al Qaeda, in fact, not allowing them to operate within the reach of his security forces. This is not a fact one ever heard of television, though.

      2. The arguments memes and talking points being floated by the Bush Administration to sell the invasion were ridiculous. It was obvious to me that the chief meme, that Saddam Hussein had had something to do with 9/11, was a Big Lie. The Bushies never once made a coherent argument why that was so; they just kept implying it until enough people bought it. I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and, believe me, I was fine with going after the perpetrators. But I was also reading everything I could get my hands on at the time about the likely suspects, and it was obvious to me the Bushies were targeting Saddam Hussein because they wanted to target Saddam Hussein, not because there was any likelihood he was connected to 9/11.

      One of the wingnuts’ favorite talking points — that Saddam Hussein had gassed the Kurds — referred to an incident that had occurred in March 1988, during the bleeping Reagan Administration. The Reagan Administration at the time blocked initiatives from Congress to condemn the act and claimed it had been Iran’s doing, which they must have known wasn’t true. Why, in 2003, 15 years later, was it suddenly so all-fired urgent to avenge the poor Kurds? It was obvious to me the Bushies were just using the incident to whip up peoples’ emotions. Here’s a little essay I wrote a day or two before the invasion that expresses what I knew then:

      All day long the talking heads on CNN have announced brightly that most Americans back the President’s plan for a preemptive attack of Iraq. A majority of Americans believe our government’s lie that Saddam Hussein must be removed because he backed the September 11 attacks. So a lie is about to send Americans into battle, and a lie will install an American military government in Iraq.

      At the same time, the government protects the wealth of the wealthy, while the not-wealthy struggle with rising costs and sinking incomes. The Bush Administration is building a protective wall around the super-rich and super-powerful so that they may usurp the nation’s wealth and plunder its resources. The rest of us are increasingly vulnerable; just one layoff away from financial ruin and loss of access to health care.

      If George Bush’s policies are allowed to continue unchecked, the America just ahead will be a place with strict limits on both liberty and opportunity. Our hopes and expectations will be replaced by fear and stagnation. And when this happens, America will be dead and gone. Oh, we still may call it America. We may yet wave the flag and shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But it won’t be the same America my ancestors knew.

      I think that holds up pretty well. The Bushies gave up on the U.S. military government in Iraq, but that was mostly because of their own incompetence.

      3. United Nations weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix were allowed back into Iraq in November 2002 and were finding no evidence of either a current nuclear program — just their old one, still in ruins and sealed with UN inspector seals from the 1990s — or weapons of mass destruction. “[A]t the beginning of 2003 Blix reported to the U.N. that Iraq most probably neither possessed WMDs or the means to produce them and asked for more time to come up with a conclusive answer.” The response from the Bushies was to demonize Blix and call him incompetent or even a Saddam Hussein sympathizer. Blix continued to ask the UN, the US and Great Britain to at least postpone the invasion while his team still had work to do, and he was ignored.

      That’s just the obvious stuff. I could go on. I doubt anyone in the Middle East would have believed Saddam Hussein had had anything to do with 9/11 or posed much in the way of an immanent threat to anyone outside his own borders in 2003.

      A sensible nation, a nation not caught up in some kind of emotional frenzy and not mistaking their own biases for reality, would never have invaded Iraq based on the evidence in hand in 2003. It’s that simple. I thought that at the time, and I believe my position has been vindicated several times over.

      So, yeah, it was obviously phony. Many of the politicians who voted for the invasion did so mostly because they thought it was the politically expedient thing to do, I’m sure.

12. ‘How was the intelligence on Iraqi WMD and support for terrorism “obviously phony”?’

    Well, Mal, mah pal,
    Maybe ’cause 11 FUCKING years later, we still ain’t found fuckin’ nothin’!

    Dick and Dumbaya weren’t even smart enough to FedEx some over there, just to make sure.
    And any WMD’s that Saddam may have had, had an expiration date, after Reagan’s and Bush I’s administration.:
    ‘Please kill and mass-slaughter by – 1/1/01.

    Hey Mal,
    Your zipper’s down.
    HA!
    Made YA look!
    Asshole…

13. (Me): “‘How was the intelligence on Iraqi WMD and support for terrorism ‘obviously phony’? ”
    (gulag): “Well, Mal, mah pal,
    Maybe ’cause 11 FUCKING years later, we still ain’t found fuckin’ nothin’!”

    That doesn’t work. “Obviously phony” has to include the implicit “at the time it was advanced as an argument for war”.
    (Mahablog): “We warned that sending American troops into a Middle Eastern country, especially for obviously phony reasons…”
    … does not refer to hindsight. It’s a claim that the WMD intelligence was “obviously phony” at the time. It was not.

    • Mal — READ THIS, then comment. This documents what was known BEFORE THE INVASION. See also a blog post I wrote later in 2003 that documents how Bush ignored evidence he had before the invasion — scroll down to July 18, 2003 (Out, Damn Paragraph!), the last thing on the page, documenting that things Bush said in his 2003 state of the union address — directly contradicted facts already in evidence at the time. It is beyond questioning that the Bushies rushed us into a war based on imagined and fabricated evidence, and this was something even an average citizen — like me — could see at the time. And I suspect nearly everyone in the Middle East saw this, which is more relevant.

      Mal– THE EVIDENCE WAS OBVIOUSLY PHONY AT THE TIME OF THE INVASION. Not just hindsight; IT WAS OBVIOUS AT THE TIME if you were really paying attention and not getting your information from the teevee.

14. “I think that holds up pretty well. The Bushies gave up on the U.S. military government in Iraq, but that was mostly because of their own incompetence.”

    I think it was that post, maha, which drew me to your blog.

    As for Mal, “My pal – “Wingnut’s don’t see what they don’t want to seel”
    See?
    No………………..

    And ya can’t ‘learn-’em nothin,’ ’cause they don’t want to be edumacated!

15. To paraphrase the great Bob Dylan:
    ‘Ya don’t need a weatherman to know which way the Wingnut’s blow!”

    • To be fair, I think a lot of people who really aren’t that right-wing still haven’t wrapped their heads around the truth about how the Bushies stampeded America into Iraq. We news/political junkies know this stuff, but I think most people still think the Bushies were going by credible intelligence that everyone else on the planet had accepted as true also. Of course, now we know that the Bushies were not only ignoring what the UN weapons inspectors were saying on the pubic record; they were also being warned by some other governments that some of their intelligence sources were unreliable — Curveball, anyone? — but that didn’t come out for a few years, when most of the public were tuning it all out.

16. This will continue pointlessly. My last:
    I don’t think it holds up at all.

    (Maha): “1. Propaganda to the contrary, it was extremely unlikely pretty much impossible on its face that Saddam Hussein — a secularist dictator — would have been supporting a faction of jihadi extremists whose well-publicized goal was the creation of a world-wide Islamic caliphate.”
    Try:…
    Historians and your grandparents to the the contrary, it was extremely unlikely pretty much impossible on its face that Franklin Roosevelt — President of a capitalist country– would have been supporting the USSR against Hitler.”

    Hussein gave financial rewards to families of Palestinian suicide bombers, so he most definitely did support terrorism.

    The intelligence did not change between the Clinton presidency and the Bush presidency. According to Amb. Wilson, Iraq inquired after uranium ore in Niger. Iraq did not have a nuclear power reactor in which to burn it.

    • Historians and your grandparents to the the contrary, it was extremely unlikely pretty much impossible on its face that Franklin Roosevelt — President of a capitalist country– would have been supporting the USSR against Hitler.”

      Not at all parallel. The USSR and the US both faced an existential threat from the same enemy, the Third Reich, and entered an alliance AFTER both had formally declared war. It was a militarily expedient thing to do, just as it probably would be a militarily expedient thing for the U.S. and Iran to cooperate vis a vis the current crisis in Iraq, even though we don’t like each other.

      Al Qaeda, on the other hand, was a threat to both the United States and Iraq. The natural alliance should have been between Saddam Hussein and the Bush Administration, except given their histories that was not possible.

      Saddam Hussein may have supported Palestinians, but Palestinians are not al Qaeda. Your argument is like saying that if you’ve ever given money to any conservative cause you must be a Ku Klux Klan member.

      And if you still believe that much-debunked bit about uranium in Niger you are hopeless. That’s been debunked so many ways you must have slept through most of the Bush Administration to not have noticed. Joe Wilson told the truth about this and he and his wife Valerie Plame became targets of Dick Cheney’s rage, you might recall.

      For one thing, Saddam Hussein already was sitting on tons of yellowcake Uranium stored just a bit south of Bagdhdad. It had been there since the 1970s. Back then Iraq really was building a nuclear reactor, but the Israelis bombed it to smithereens in 1981. Repeated inspections by the UN, including just before the invasion, confirmed that the yellowcake uranium remained stored in barrels, still sealed by UN seals, and the wreckage of the reactor was still a wreckage. Saddam Hussein had no capability to refine any of it, in other words, and absolutely no reason to acquire more, and it has been well documented that the “evidence” the Bushies were going by to claim Saddam Hussein wanted to buy uranium was forged. It didn’t happen. It may be the Bushies believed the evidence was real, and were fooled, but the fact of the stored yellowcake already in Iraq was on the bleeping UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) web site at the time. It was public knowledge.

      And what made this even better was that when Marines stumbled into the yellowcake as they were driving toward Baghdad, it was reported that the WMDs had been found! No one had bothered to tell the invasion force about this stuff, even though it was public knowledge it was there! The UN weapons inspectors visited the site and documented the yellowcake in December 2002! I wrote about this back in June 2003. The important point is that it was worthless to Saddam Hussein because he had no way to refine it.

      I had been willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that perhaps you just weren’t as “into” this as some of us, but you are obviously a brainwashed wingnut. So, I’m done talking to you. Bye.

17. Hussein gave financial rewards to families of Palestinian suicide bombers, so he most definitely did support terrorism.

    How do you know he was supporting terrorism rather than being faithful to Islam’s call to care for the widows and orphans?
    My point is that you are making a determination based on your own bias. You have no way of knowing if what you assert is actually true, and even if Saddam did what you allege you have no way of knowing what motivation moved him to that act. The fact that you refer to any financial support to the widows and orphans as a reward shows your bias.

18. “According to Amb. Wilson, Iraq inquired after uranium ore in Niger. Iraq did not have a nuclear power reactor in which to burn it.”

    Mal. my pal,
    Did you sleep through the ’00’a?
    Are you another imbecile who doesn’t know how to “google?”

    From Wiki:
    Joseph Charles Wilson IV (born November 6, 1949) is a former United States diplomat best known for his 2002 trip to Niger to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium; his New York Times op-ed piece, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”;[1] and the subsequent leaking of information pertaining to his wife Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent. He is the CEO of a consulting firm he founded, JC Wilson International Ventures. In January 2007, Wilson joined Jarch Capital, LLC, as vice chairman.”

    What he DIDN’T find, was any yellowcake, you asshole!
    Except that which might have been in birthday cakes.

19. The bottom line is the Bush / Cheney administration created their own reality in regards to Saddam and the WMD freakout / scare. They lied the USA into a war frenzie, and dissent was met with “traitor ! ” and “I support the troops!” ; as in if you don’t agree, you hate “our boys”. It was total bullshit and manipulation. Suck it.

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