Obamapresidesoverunravelingofhispredecessors’foreign

Obama presides over unraveling of his predecessors’ foreign policy accomplishments

posted at 12:41 pm on August 12, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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President Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with an undeniable mandate to bring about a swift but favorable conclusion to the Iraq War. But by the time the president entered office, combat operations in Iraq were already winding down.

By the middle of 2008, the “surge” strategy and a political offensive resulting in the “Anbar Awakening” had greatly reduced internecine violence. Iraq was on a path toward reconciliation and, it was hoped, stability and peace.

“The surge had undoubtedly met its stated aim of buying the time and space necessary for the Iraqi government to advance national reconciliation and, at least in theory, develop the capacity to provide adequate public services,” a 2011 article in Foreign Affairs magazine by reporter Emma Sky read.

As I prepared to depart Iraq in August 2010, it was clear that the close partnership between the U.S. military and the ISF had paid dividends. Accompanying [Gen. Raymond] Odierno as he toured the country to review the progress, I witnessed U.S. and ISF soldiers celebrating each time the United States transferred one of its bases to Iraqi forces, conducting ceremonies in which U.S. commanders symbolically delivered the keys to their Iraqi counterparts. The strong individual and institutional relationships between the two forces contributed to a growing sense of security across the country.

That is not to say that the insurgency in Iraq had been entirely put down by 2009, or that the Bush administration bequeathed Obama an Iraq that was politically stable. The president had his work cut out for him in Iraq, but even those predisposed to be skeptical of the idea that Iraq could ever become a model state were forced to concede gains had been made.

By the summer of 2010, The New York Times, which long ago allowed the tone of the editorial page to color its supposedly neutral coverage of the Iraq War, was quoting even Iraq War skeptics who sounded notes of optimism. Framed as an iconoclastic voice of skepticism within the military establishment, Col. Alan Baldwin, a former Marine intelligence officer who warned before the invasion of Iraq that the United States would likely set off a civil war, marveled at America’s perseverance in pursuit of a stable Iraq.

“We opened a Pandora’s box,” Baldwin told Times reporter Peter Baker. “Lots of bad things were flying out of there. But good things are there now too. It’s amazing we had the patience to be where we are today.”

It was not America’s patience, but the patience of its political establishment that deserved the credit. The American public would have long ago abandoned Iraq to its own murderous devices had the political will existed in Washington to invite that kind of calamity. Sobriety and foresight guided Washington’s approach to the situation in Iraq, but only just long enough to provide Obama with the space he needed to desert Iraq entirely.

Today, that country is a failed state. The Islamic State militants who swept across the border from Syria occupy one third of the nation, a government in turmoil in the midst of an effort to oust a divisive prime minister controls another third, and the Kurdish proto-state governs the remainder. This condition was all but unthinkable when the last American troops boarded the final C-130 out of Iraq.

Iraq is not the first of Obama’s predecessors’ foreign policy accomplishments which he has undone.

When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, the geopolitical landscape in East Asia presented not merely challenges but opportunities as well. The Sino-Soviet split evolved in the later part of that decade from an ideological dispute between Beijing and Moscow into a military challenge. In March of 1969, a series of border skirmishes between the Red and People’s Liberation Armies resulted in heavy casualties. By October of that year, the two Communist poles were on the brink of war.

It was a master stroke for the Nixon administration to leverage this split in the Communist world to the United States’ advantage. The “opening” of China, culminating in Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, put the Soviets on the defensive and made Nixon into a national hero. Just imagine what it would take today for two chambers of Congress controlled by Democrats offer a sitting Republican president a standing ovation in the summer of a presidential election year. U.S. intervention into the Sino-Soviet clash, and it was an intervention albeit a diplomatic one, froze that conflict in place until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

The Russian Federation normalized relations with China and it was under Obama’s predecessor that the two countries again embarked on a path of military cooperation (what have now become regular joint military exercises between the two powers were first held in 2005 and 2007). It was, however, Obama’s presidency which saw this relationship evolve from a cooperative alliance of convenience into an anti-American bloc aimed at overturning the geopolitical status quo.

Russia, a revanchist power which aims to restore some measure of its Soviet-era regional hegemony, has been able to rely on China to offset any of the repercussions the West has imposed as a result of Moscow’s invasion and annexation of parts of Ukraine.

A bilateral energy deal which Russia and China signed in June has been described as a “geopolitical tectonic shift.” Similarly, China has offered to help replace many of the imported Western food products that have been banned as the result of a volley of tit-for-tat sanctions. “Some believe that a China-Russia axis is now emerging and could eventually propose an alternative towards a multi-polar world order,” Al Jazeera reported in June.

This was not the only accomplishment of the Nixon administration that Obama unraveled. Just over 40 years ago, the Soviet client state of Egypt threw out the Russian military advisors which had supported that country since Gamal Nasser. The Nixon administration cemented Egypt’s new fealty to the United States when it mediated an end to the 1973 Yom Kippur War in a fashion that did not humiliate Cairo. Nixon’s successor, Jimmy Carter, and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, solidified the relationship between the U.S. and the Egyptian army during the Camp David Accord negotiations.

The Arab Spring upended all of that when the Egyptian military lost control of the government to the Muslim Brotherhood. In what the U.S. reluctantly deemed a coup, the military reasserted control over the state when they overthrew the deeply unpopular Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013. Bilateral relations with Egypt were severely damaged when the Obama administration cut off some aid to Cairo as a result of this putsch.

“Since then the U.S. has done little to mend fences with the military and demonstrated little understanding of the fact that Egypt had become a zero-sum game in which the only choices were the Brotherhood or the military,” Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin wrote in December. “With the administration announcing a partial aid cutoff to the new government, what followed next was entirely predictable. Cairo turned to Moscow for help and for the first time since 1973 Russia has a foothold in the Arab world’s most populous nation as well as the one that, with the Suez Canal, holds its most strategic position.”

On Tuesday, the Russian news source RIA Novosti announced triumphantly that Russia had finally reversed the embarrassment meted out by Anwar Sadat, and there would again be military cooperation between these two states. Russian President Vladimir Putin also revealed that the two countries are investigating the potential to create a free trade zone.

These are just a few of the most egregious examples of how the Obama administration has squandered the legacy achievements of his predecessors. With more than two years of the Obama presidency to go, he may secure for himself even more dubious accomplishments.

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Tags: Barack Obama, China, Egypt, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Russia

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Thebordercrisisisn’tObama’sKatrina–it’s

The border crisis isn’t Obama’s Katrina – it’s worse

posted at 3:31 pm on July 13, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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Many have parsed what President Barack Obama’s critics mean when they charge that the handling of the crisis on America’s southern border is “Obama’s Katrina.”

The president’s supporters are quick to note that this comparison is misleading and unfair. Hurricane Katrina drowned an entire urban center. American citizens died waiting for federal and state aid. Thousands of Americans, mostly of meager means, were trapped in a dying city. Some of them did not make it out alive waiting for their countrymen to save them. In that sobering moment, much of the promise of the United States was betrayed.

It is impossible to know how many children crossing the American border have died as a result of their trek across forsaken deserts. At least one 11-year-old Guatemalan boy lost his life as the result of dehydration, but there has not been a death toll comparable to Katrina. In terms of body count, these two crises are not comparable.

But this is all Obama’s supporters have going for them. The president’s approach to this crisis is distinct from George W. Bush’s approach to Katrina insofar as the current president is comfortable campaigning on, rather than addressing, an ongoing disaster.

Real Clear Politics columnist Carl Cannon published a dispassionate column on Sunday comparing Bush’s reaction to Katrina, and the garment-rending, hyperbolic outrage his response to that crisis inspired among his liberal opponents, and Obama’s response to the nightmare on the border. Cannon found that there has been little seriousness in Obama’s approach to this crisis whereas Bush’s approach to Katrina, while imperfect, was at least empirically measurable.

Cannon recalled how Bush’s critics erupted in indignation when the White House published a photograph of the president surveying the devastation from Air Force One. Entertainers like Michael Moore and Kanye West accused the president of racism and callousness. Bush’s Democratic adversaries in Congress, including then Senator Obama, were no kinder.

In hindsight, little of this seems fair. What Bush saw as he flew over the battered region shocked him. The next day, he publicly pledged $10.5 billion in federal aid, enlisted his father and Bill Clinton to help in recovery efforts, and spoke about the tragedy from the Rose Garden. The next day, he headed down there, where he literally put his arms around shell-shocked survivors, many of them black people. Bush returned again in mid-September and made a nationally televised address from Jackson Square in New Orleans.

When he ran for president, then-Sen. Barack Obama seemed to forget all that. All he cared to recall was the flyover, which is more than he’s done on the Texas border this year.

The president has used this crisis to push for a $4 billion supplemental funding request, but has stipulated on several occasions that these funds had to be passed by Congress before there would be any emergency response to the flood of unaccompanied children crossing the border. That does not even resemble a “response” to an acute crisis. In all past disasters of this scale, the response comes first and without hesitation. The petty bickering over how to pay for it is a secondary concern.

Obama’s galling and politicized response to the border crisis does not stop there.

When he’s not berating Congress for not passing his ballooning supplemental request fast enough, Obama harangues Republicans in the House for not passing the Senate’s immigration reform bill – a legacy initiative Obama promised would be one of his accomplishments in his first year in office.

He has ignored Democratic lawmakers who demanded the president see the border for himself, preferring instead to maintain his distance from the crisis so as not to be too closely associated with it.

The president and his administration are happy to blame the current crisis on a Bush-era anti-human trafficking law which treats children coming into the country from non-contiguous nations differently from Mexican immigrants, but they have not demonstrated that they think changing this law to address the calamity it has supposedly precipitated should be a congressional priority.

All this paints a picture of a commander-in-chief who views this “humanitarian crisis,” as Obama called it, to be more of a political problem than a genuine source of apprehension and fear for America’s border state residents, border enforcement agents, and the immigrant children trafficked into the United States.

Obama’s adversaries and allies agree that, quite unlike Bush, the president sees this crisis as a political opportunity.

“There is every sign he let the crisis on the border build to put heat on Republicans and make them pass his idea of good immigration reform,” The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan submitted. “It would be “comprehensive,” meaning huge, impenetrable and probably full of mischief. His base wants it. It would no doubt benefit the Democratic Party in the long term.”

Francis Wilkinson, a liberal Bloomberg View columnist, concurred.

“I think he wants this to be a big problem,” Wilkinson told MSNBC’s hosts on Thursday. “I think he wants this to be such big problem right now that Congress has to deal with it, and that the media’s focused on it, and that the American public is focused on it.”

Bush’s approach to Katrina was criticized by his allies and opponents alike, and some of that criticism was deserved, but he never treated the situation in New Orleans as though it was a political opportunity. That is a grotesque abuse of the public trust, but this seems to be the calculation the president and his advisors made.

“Although Obama probably doesn’t have to go to the border personally to be an effective leader, he may owe George W. Bush an apology,” Cannon concluded.

Like Katrina, Obama’s successors will likely study his response to the situation on the border as a case study in how not to address a crisis. The border disaster is, however, not Obama’s Katrina. The president’s refusal to perform the responsibilities associated with his role as the nation’s chief executive makes this episode far worse.

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WMDinIraqarathernuancedissue

WMD in Iraq a rather nuanced issue

posted at 7:01 pm on July 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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One of the greatest debates over the Iraq War of 2003 was the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons) supposedly hidden and manufactured by Saddam Hussein after his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Hussein only cooperated fitfully with the disclosure and destruction efforts required under the 1991 cease-fire that ended offensive operations in Iraq, and Western nations became convinced by the late 1990s that he was rebuilding his stockpiles.  That was just one of the sixteen justifications presented by the Bush administration in late 2002 for ending the cease fire and eliminating Hussein, but the one that drew the most support.

After the Western coalition deposed Hussein in the first weeks of the war, they began looking for the WMDs. Most assume that none were found, but a 2010 article from Wired based on Wikileaks documents reminded us that the truth was more nuanced (via Instapundit):

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massiveWMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents. …

But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

Why mention this now? For the past couple of weeks, reports about ISIS capturing WMD in Iraq have been cited as vindication for the 2002 argument. That started in mid-June when ISIS captured Al Muthanna and a large cache of chemical weapons, and picked up steam last week on Twitter. The danger of these weapons falling into terrorist hands is real, but perhaps even more so to the terrorists themselves. The Washington Post offered a straightforward explanation, complete with CIA assessment of the risks:

According to the CIA, the facility about 36 miles northwest of Baghdad was bombed extensively during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, ending its ability to produce chemical weapons. U.N. weapons inspectors subsequently destroyed equipment and stockpiles there, most of the complex was razed by the Iraqis, and the remainder was extensively looted, the agency said in a 2007 report.

However, the CIA report said: “Stockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there. The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers. Although declared, the bunkers contents have yet to be confirmed. These areas of the compound pose a hazard to civilians and potential blackmarketers.” Among the chemical agents once produced at Al Muthanna were mustard gas, sarin and VX, it said.

It’s bad stuff, all right, but none of it was the suspected WMD that prompted the fears later on. The complex at Al Muthanna was an UNSCOM containment facility where Hussein’s confiscated weapons came for destruction or permanent storage. Those that could not be safely destroyed, mainly because the weapons became too unstable to handle safely, got sealed in the bunkers. The CIA has a very handy and informative history of the Al Muthanna site:

Al Muthanna State Establishment Post-Gulf War
From 1992 to 1994, UNSCOM’s Chemical Destruction Group (CDG) oversaw destruction operations. A portion of the facility was transformed into a CW agent destruction facility. An incinerator was constructed in the summer of 1992 for the destruction of mustard agent at the munitions filling location. Chemical munitions stored throughout Iraq were to be gathered and destroyed at Al Muthanna. See Figure 6 for the location (note image was taken after incinerator was dismantled).

• Between 1992 and 1994 the facility was the primary collection and destruction site for all declared CW agents, precursor chemicals, and chemical production equipment.
• Between 1992 and 1994 and again in 1996, the CDG oversaw destruction of 30,000 pieces of ordnance, 480,000 liters of chemical agents, and more than 2 million liters of chemical precursors. Eventually, most of the facilities at the complex the Iraqi’s destroyed and sold for scrap.
• Equipment that survived Desert Storm was tagged by UN or destroyed, but the UN was never able to verify that all equipment purchased for MSE was tagged or destroyed.
• Two Cruciform Bunkers were sealed containing munitions too dangerous for destruction.
• Bunkers, damaged by coalition bombing, collapsed, concealing unaccounted CW equipment and munitions in the debris. Over the next ten years some of the facilities were razed by the Iraqis. Precise accountability of equipment and munitions is unverifiable, because the National Monitoring Directorate and UNSCOM did not always oversee excavation.

…

UN Criteria for CW Destruction
During the UNSCOM-supervised destruction processes, a CW facility was technically considered destroyed under three different criteria:

• Equipment was permanently disabled by the Iraqis, then examined and documented by UN.
• Equipment would be tagged, dismantled, and reused by the Iraqis for other legitimate commercial use while being documented and monitored by UN.
• Facilities destroyed from coalition strikes were deemed unusable for CW development.
• Note: UN did not verify reusability of some of the equipment concealed within rubble of destroyed facilities. The CW process that once occurred within a bombed facility was regarded as inoperable, but utility of equipment reusability sometimes remained unverifiable.

The Iraqis razed and removed all existing structures for the biological/toxicological lab, mustard research lab, and Sarin production facility. In addition to complete removal of the facilities, complete foundations were excavated and removed. These actions were undertaken after the National Monitoring Directorate was displaced in Iraq and completed without international scrutiny.

There’s much more, but that gives a good look at the main point. The weapons at Al Muthanna were declared and surrendered years before the claims in the late 1990s and early 2000s that Saddam Hussein was either hiding more WMD or making new weapons. The UNSCOM facility destroyed or secured the weapons either found or surrendered in the years after the Gulf War. The intelligence from Western agencies about renewed WMD operations did not involve Al Muthanna at all. The UN had those weapons secured until the 2003 invasion, and then after that we did, and then the Iraqi army. Until now, of course.

That’s a bad development, especially for the people in the area if ISIS decides to crack those seals. It’s a reminder of how dangerous Saddam Hussein was, although the chemical-weapon massacre at Halabja made that plain enough anyway. But these were not the weapons that we suspected Saddam hid or built anew; we were already well aware of them, and Saddam had complied with the terms of the cease fire on these weapons, at least. That’s not to say that Saddam didn’t have newer or better hidden WMDs prior to 2003, but these don’t settle that argument one war or another.

Nor does the more recent story about uranium in Mosul:

Militants in Iraq have taken hold of nuclear materials at university science facilities near the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi government has said in a letter to the United Nations.

But two U.S. officials told CNN on Wednesday that the small amounts of uranium aren’t enriched or weapons-grade, prompting only minimal concern.

The letter from Iraq’s U.N. ambassador about the uranium compounds asks for help “to stave off the threat of their use by terrorists in Iraq or abroad” as the country struggles with a deadly insurgency.

In the letter, obtained Wednesday by CNN, Iraqi Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said that “terrorist groups have seized control” of nearly 40 kilograms (90 pounds) of uranium compounds at science departments at the University of Mosul after the sites “came out of control of the state.”

This, however, is unenriched and unrefined uranium, pretty much what can be pulled out of the ground, and not even pure. Ninety pounds of uranium sounds like a lot, but it takes tons of unenriched uranium to be refined into weapons-grade uranium — not to mention a sophisticated cascade of highly specialized centrifuges.  It took Iran decades to develop that capability, even while well out of the reach of a hostile military, and even then they needed help from AQ Khan. Unenriched uranium can be effectively used as a terror weapon, but most of the actual damage would come from the blast and the panic that would follow.

We’ll probably never settle the question of what happened to the purported WMD in the 2002 argument — whether it existed at all, and if so what happened to it, and why Saddam Hussein didn’t just cooperate fully with the UNSCOM team if he had nothing to hide. The developments of the past few weeks, though, have nothing to do with that debate for the history books.

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Tags: Al Muthanna, George W. Bush, intelligence, Iraq, ISIS, Saddam Hussein, UNSCOM, WMDs

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No, Matt Bai, it’s not all Bush’s fault

No,MattBai,it’snotallBush’sfault

Q-poll:ObamaworstpresidentsinceWWII posted

Q-poll: Obama worst president since WWII

posted at 8:41 am on July 2, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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It’s no secret that Barack Obama’s popularity has plunged over the past 18 months of his second term, but just how bad has it gotten? According to a new poll from Quinnipiac, Americans pick him as the worst post-WWII president of all. A third of respondents choose Obama for that dubious honor, while 28% pick George W. Bush:

President Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II, 33 percent of American voters say in a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today. Another 28 percent pick President George W. Bush. …

Obama has been a better president than George W. Bush, 39 percent of voters say, while 40 percent say he is worse. Men say 43 – 36 percent that Obama is worse than Bush while women say 42 – 38 percent he is better. Obama is worse, Republicans say 79 – 7 percent and independent voters say 41 – 31 percent. Democrats say 78 – 4 percent that he is better.

Obama beats up George Bush on the economy any time he can in order to distract attention from the fact that his own economic policies have produced the worst recovery since WWII — not exactly a coincidence in regard to this poll. That tactic isn’t working as well as it used to work, though:

Voters say by a narrow 37 – 34 percent that Obama is better for the economy than Bush.

That’s within the MOE, but that’s the good news on Bush comparisons. He’s now at 39/40 against Bush as to which was the better President, down from 46/30 in January 2011 when the question was last asked. Among independents, Obama scores 31/41 and barely holds serve with women at 42/38.

Obama got a little bit of good news in his overall approval ratings, but that just shows how bad the rest of the news is from this poll. His job approval improved to 40/53, up from 38/57 in December … but not by much. Among independents, it’s 31/59, and among women — a critical demographic for Democrats this fall — it’s 42/49. He’s dead even on trustworthiness overall (48/48) but 42/53 among independents, and underwater on leadership at 47/51 overall and 41/57 among independents.

Perhaps even more embarrassing — and potentially more dangerous for other Democrats — is the rise of buyer’s remorse from the election of 2012:

America would be better off if Republican Mitt Romney had won the 2012 presidential election, 45 percent of voters say, while 38 percent say the country would be worse off.

Missing Mitt are Republicans 84 – 5 percent and independent voters 47 – 33 percent, while Democrats say 74 – 10 percent that the U.S. would be worse off with Romney.

If independents have double-digit buyer’s remorse from 2012, that suggests a strong desire to make up for their earlier mistake. The economy is driving that remorse. Respondents rate the economy as their highest priority by far in the midterms. Obama only gets a 40/55 on the economy, and 34/61 among independents. At the very least, it shows that independents won’t be too motivated to vote for Obama’s allies, while Republicans will be very motivated to turn out in November.

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TheBush-eraisback,andit’sdrivingObama’s

The Bush-era is back, and it’s driving Obama’s supporters insane

posted at 10:41 am on June 17, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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Among the many triumphs President Barack Obama’s supporters credited themselves with in the wake of the freshman Illinois senator’s historic primary and presidential victories in 2008 was that they had demonstrated that any support for military intervention in Iraq was a political career killer. The return of catastrophic violence to Iraq, after that violence spilled over the Syrian border, has proven especially vexing for Obama’s backers. This crisis has revealed that George W. Bush’s pro-interventionist allies not only failed to exile themselves following Obama’s ascension to the White House, but they remain unrepentant. And that’s driving the left mad.

Iraq War opponents have fumed in recent days, not because of the sacking of Iraqi cities by Islamic jihadists who are going about systematically executing Shiites and imposing Sharia Law on the survivors, but over the fact that a variety of prominent Iraq War supporters are back in the news.

“NBC and ABC’s Sunday news shows turned to discredited architects of the Iraq War to opine on the appropriate U.S. response to growing violence in Iraq, without acknowledging their history of deceit and faulty predictions,” Media Matters’ Emily Arrowood opined, citing specifically the return to the airwaves of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (who never really disappeared from the talk show circuit in the first place).

“If you were asked to identify a single moment that best captures the failure of elite media outlets to act as agents of accountability, you could do worse than David Gregory asking Paul Wolfowitz on “Meet the Press” this weekend what we should do, “as a policy matter,” to deal with the deteriorating situation in Iraq,” Salon’s Simon Maloy vented.

Maloy goes on to rend garments over the gall of The Wall Street Journal daring to provide former head of the Iraqi occupation authority L. Paul Bremmer space in the opinion pages to weigh in on the crisis.

“Their argument for taking them seriously is to ignore everything they’ve said up to this point,” the Salon columnist continued. Finally, Maloy questions why American society has not whisked these and other prominent figures of the Bush-era off to the Leper Caves.

There are no consequences for being so wrong all the time. Kristol and Wolfowitz and all the other people responsible for dragging us into Iraq should be pariahs who labor under the expectation of doing some measure of atonement for their stubborn and wrongheaded pursuit of a disastrous policy. Instead they get invited on to Sunday shows to discuss what we should do next in Iraq.

“[P]eople who both supported the invasion, and believe further military involvement is the right course now,” The New Republic’s Brian Beutler wrote, crafting a slightly more thoughtful version of the Maloy’s take. “They should be regarded with incredible skepticism, and not simply because of the magnitude of their initial mistake.”

[I]t’s crucial for everyone to recognize that double-down interventionists have much more on the line than a desire to provide accurate, dispassionate risk assessments, and to price that into their arguments. We should set the bar for those arguments very high. Unfortunately, the substantive dispute about Iraq still lies on a largely partisan axis, and because the country elected and re-elected a president who was right in the first instance, the “opposition” is now composed of people who blew it over a decade ago. And so they’re the ones getting calls from reporters and network news producers looking for a fresh take today.

At least Beutler took a stab at informing his readers as to why they should be skeptical of the pronouncements of the Iraq War’s architects, but that is not the same as a case for their self-censorship.

These and others who populate social media with similar self-assured sermons denouncing the Iraq War architects’ self-assuredness are so utterly convinced that Bush allies should disappear in disgrace that they often fail to assert why.

“Why?” they bristle. There is no need to even dignify such an impertinent question with a response. History itself has repudiated the Iraq War’s supporters, they claim. Majority opinion in virtually every major institution in American – from government, to entertainment, to media, to academia – all are quite convinced that the Iraq War was folly from beginning to end, and cutting America’s losses was the only option available to Obama.

In fact, this consensus among America’s influencer caste has dulled the arguments of those whose very political identities were shaped amid the debate over Iraq. The Iraq War’s architects were self-evidently wrong, the closed circle assures itself. That fact alone should relegate them to the black list.

And the Iraq War architects issued many a faulty prediction, but wrongness alone on the complex issue of post-war Iraqi security is not really a disqualifier for this crowd. Obama, too, crafted and applied a demonstrably failed post-war model for Iraq.

As Mary Katherine Hamm observed on Monday evening, Obama’s December, 2011 speech at Fort Bragg announcing the completion of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is riddled with “mission accomplished” moments.

“We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people,” Obama insisted. He contradicted himself just last week when he scolded Nouri al-Maliki’s administration for excluding the country’s Sunni minority from enjoying full representation.

“And around the globe, as we draw down in Iraq, we have gone after al Qaeda so that terrorists who threaten America will have no safe haven, and Osama bin Laden will never again walk the face of this Earth,” Obama added. According to Obama’s former acting CIA director Mike Morell, among ISIS’s goals is the formation of a state-like entity secure enough to facilitate the planning and execution of attacks on Americans in the United States.

On Sunday, the president informed Congress that he was sending nearly 300 combat-ready American troops back to Iraq to provide security for American embassy staff. They are considering additional measures which include airstrikes and an insertion of special forces to provide Iraqi troops with training. While the mission is circumspect, the promise Obama made to the American people to extricate them from Iraq’s domestic affairs is a failed one by any objective measure.

True, Obama might not have been drawn back into Iraq if the 2003 invasion had never occurred, though we are so removed from that event that any number of other factors could have intervened in the interim. History alone suggests that it unlikely that Obama would have been the first president since Reagan to avoid military conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But it’s just as true that, had the president executed strikes on Syria in 2013 to pursue his stated aim of containing that conflict, Obama’s current predicament in Mesopotamia may also have been avoided.

Obama’s obviously failed approach to Iraq does not lead Obama’s supporters to demand his exile. The demand that people like Kristol and Wolfowitz disappear is not based in a noble regard for realist foreign policy. It is an expression of the increasingly desperate effort to hold on to a formative weltanschauung, one which was forged in Iraq and is now dying there.

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Tags: Barack Obama, bill krystol, brian beutler, George W. Bush, Iraq, L. paul bremmer, Paul Wolfowitz, Syria

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CNN poll: Obama now as unpopular as Bush

CNNpoll:ObamanowasunpopularasBush

AndthefirstpersontoblameBushfor

And the first person to blame Bush for the crisis in Iraq is…

posted at 5:01 pm on June 12, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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The explosion of bloodshed in Iraq has created the temptation for many to revisit their support for or opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and to ascribe blame for the recent surge in violence to their preferred boogieman.

Not all have succumbed to the enticing lure of nostalgia. Not even consistent Iraq War and George W. Bush critic Fareed Zakaria allowed himself himself to take a swipe at the former commander-in-chief for looming over the present crisis.

Appearing on CNN on Thursday, Zakaria blamed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for undoing what he said was the good accomplished by Gen. David Petraeus following the 2007 Iraq surge. The CNN analyst said that, in the wake of U.S withdrawal, the Iraqi prime minister fostered the resentments among average Iraqis which have created the conditions in which a surge can flourish.

That’s significant for a number of reasons. Zakaria opposed the surge in 2007 for the same reasons he opposed Barack Obama’s surge into Afghanistan – it was a military operation when it should have been a political and economic one. Today, however, Zakaria appears to have moderated his position on the Iraq War in light of the last seven years.

Zakaria is owed some credit. Not everyone can shed a once favored but clearly defunct political narrative as gracefully as he has. Take, for instance, MSNBC host Joy Reid who educated her audience on the origins of the ISIS threat on Thursday.

“And now to the events in Iraq, which actually began with the invasion of Iraq,” she said. “The dissolution of its army later in 2003, a subsequent civil war, a surge that was supposed to give Iraq time to form a stable government and become a modern state, and the internecine political process that resulted instead.”

“Now, it’s this unpleasant recent history that helped set the stage for the bloody events that we’re seeing in Iraq right now,” Reid said. The MSNBC host conveniently forgot to include the fact that the ISIS rebellion was incubated in Syria – a civil war characterized by the use of chemical weapons on civilians and which the United States world failed to do anything about. The very name of the organization rampaging across Iraq today pays homage to its origins in that Mediterranean state.

Instead, Reid prefers to go back in history to the very roots of the modern Democratic Party, forged in opposition to the Iraq War. She might as well have gone back to the British Mandate of Mesopotamia or Iraq’s 1958 coup to “set the stage” for present events.

But even Reid did not go so far as to blame Bush by name for crisis in Iraq. No, that dubious distinction must be awarded to Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democratic governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee.

Seeing a moment of political opportunism, Chafee jumped at the chance to remind his state’s liberal voters that he opposed the Iraq Ware while serving in the U.S. Senate.

“I never understood the original push for war in Iraq, never understood the logic of regime change,” Chafee said. “These neocons [neo-conservatives] all through the ’90s were talking the importance of regime change in Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, the strongman. I just didn’t understand stirring up the hornets’ nest that is the Middle East. It just never made any sense to me, and now we’re seeing some of the ramifications of having deviated from our Cold War containment strategy.”

Channeling George Kennan, Chafee insisted that the United States could have and should have contained Iraq 11 years ago. “It worked in Russia,” he said. “It worked in China.” Maybe he forgets that the West functionally abandoned containment in the 1950s in favor of a policy advocating the “rollback” of the Communist world. That shift in tactics eventually resulted in the liberation of Eastern Europe.

But, anyway, back to Chafee’s melancholy romp through events in the distant past:

“I always thought our Cold War strategy depended on strong alliances,” the Ocean State’s governor said, vividly recounting the heated cable news segments of 2002. “Those have been fractured through this misadventure.”

*Obviously, it’s happening in Syria. I just believe in multinational approaches that are respectful of everybody’s positions. We deviated from that respect. We’ve got to try rebuilding those alliances with the Saudis, the Turks, the Jordanians — that’s going to be the key.”

And that project has been going swimmingly.

Credit where credit is due; more than a handful of political commentators have been able to take into account that Barack Obama has been president for nearly six years while commenting on the renewed violence in Iraq. For some, though, it will always be those heady 22 months leading up to the Iraq War.

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Tags: Barack Obama, david patraeus, Fareed Zakaria, George W. Bush, Iraq, Joy Reid, Lincoln Chafee, Nouri al-Maliki, Syria

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MikaBrzezinskigoesoffonHillary’s‘contrived’book,

Mika Brzezinski goes off on Hillary’s ‘contrived’ book, ‘tone-deaf’ comments

posted at 10:01 am on June 10, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski has had it with her fellow Morning Joe guests whitewashing Hillary Clinton’s comments about her family emerging from the White House “dead broke.” While she said that the statement is true, and her family also struggled when they made the transition into public service, she implored her fellow broadcasters to stop angling for an interview with Clinton and comment honestly about how politically “tone-deaf” her statement was.

Along with ceding Republicans the traditional Democratic advantages of a youthful candidate and a vigorous primary process, Joe Scarborough began by observing that Clinton would likely represent the candidate more closely linked to Wall Street than the eventual GOP nominee. “There is a problem,” he said. “A tone-deaf problem.”

“It’s not just a little tone-deaf,” Brzezinski agreed. “I don’t think it gets a pass.”

“Everybody stop,” she demanded. “Everybody stop thinking you’re going to get some sort of interview with her.”

She noted that the Clintons’ expected income from speaking fees was being reported widely in 2001 during the inauguration of George W. Bush. “And for her to do a book and to have a section on this saying we were dead broke and it was hard, let me just tell you, that shows just how contrived the book is,” Brzezinski declared. “That’s a huge mistake.”

Defending the Clintons, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts suggested the former secretary of state may have just been blunting criticism of her family for “living the American dream.”

“No,” Brzezinski interrupted.

Time’s Mark Halperin noted that a Republican with a multimillion dollar annual income with ties to Goldman Sachs who cried poverty in a pre-presidential book “would be eviscerated.”

Not to be outdone, Brzezinski went on to lambaste Democrats pining for a return of the 1990s. “Hey, by the way, Bill Clinton? That’s over,” she said. “He is not running.”

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Tags: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Mark Halperin, Mika Brzezinski, Thomas Roberts

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Obama:Idon’thavetimetoexplainmy

Obama: I don’t have time to explain my “doctrine,” but let me explain Bush’s

posted at 10:41 am on April 28, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

The only thing missing from Barack Obama’s defense of his stumbling foreign policy was the word “inherited.” Fox’s Ed Henry asked Obama earlier today to explain the “Obama Doctrine” that drives foreign policy in the wake of the disarray in Ukraine, Syria, and the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, among other flops. Obama responded that he didn’t have the time in the presser to detail an “Obama Doctrine,” but he took the time to declare that his predecessor’s was all about military intervention:

Asked by @edhenryTV to describe the Obama Doctrine, @BarackObama says, "I doubt I am going to have time to outline my entire foreign policy"

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) April 28, 2014

CNN’s Jake Tapper was among the few who picked up the exchange, and his panel scoffed at the strawman argument from Obama. No one’s arguing for military intervention in Ukraine, Maeve Reston points out, laughing at Obama’a accusation. His critics want a stronger response on sanctions and diplomacy, and aren’t getting it:

“It’s interesting that he would take it that far to deflect the criticism,” Reston says. Er … not really. Obama has made a habit of building phony straw-man arguments about his critics in order to ridicule them without addressing the actual criticisms themselves. Reston rightly recognizes that in this instance. Jonathan Martin does note that this is a long-standing pattern for the White House — declaring that the issue is a form of “Sydney or the Bush,” with the latter term a little more literal.

And oh, by the way — which President used military force to decapitate a dictator without having boots on the ground to control the outcome, and did so without Congressional approval? I don’t think the last name was Bush, and the outcome turned out worse than the one Obama’s complaining about in this presser.

Six years later, Obama’s still blaming everything on Bush. But it wasn’t Bush that gave Sergei Lavrov a reset button and then canceled the missile-shield program in eastern Europe, and it wasn’t Bush who asked Dmitri Medvedev to transmit a promise to Vladimir Putin of “more flexibility” after his next election. It seems the only people Obama will challenge are Republicans and straw men.

Tags: Barack Obama, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Obama doctrine, strawman argument, Ukraine

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GeorgeW.Bush’sformerchiefofstaff:“We

George W. Bush’s former chief of staff: “We have a responsibility to make sure Jeb runs”

posted at 6:01 pm on April 7, 2014 by Allahpundit

Via BuzzFeed, a vignette from the big Bushworld confab over the weekend to honor Bush 41. Imagine if the “tea-party era” in Republican politics, which began after eight years of Dubya and the nomination of John McCain, produced Mitt Romney and then Jeb Bush as presidential nominees.

I’m treating the prospect of another Bush nomination as a test of whether the Republican grassroots, realistically, has any influence at all over who their party chooses. Say what you will about O but his win over Hillary six years ago proved that it’s still possible for the establishment favorite to be beaten in a Democratic primary. When was the last time that happened on our side? If a power complex exists within the party capable of elevating a guy to the nomination (a) who hasn’t run a campaign in 12 years, (b) who’s suspicious to the party’s own base, and (c) whose surname is a heavy liability everywhere in the country except within that power complex, in what way does any sort of conservative activism — at the national level at least — matter?

“We have a responsibility to make sure Jeb runs,” said longtime Bush adviser Andy Card after the speech.

“If Jeb Bush does not run, shame on us.” Card added, “I would work in a Jeb administration in a heartbeat.”

“Look at all of us,” said another former campaign aide, Jill Collins, excitedly motioning to an auditorium filled with former ambassadors, appointees, and cabinet members. “We are all ready to fundraise and start planting yard signs. We have all done it before and we will do it again.”…

“Those of us who support [H.W. Bush] know that he was worthy of a second term,” McGrath said. “The Bush style of leadership needs to return to Washington.”

“If Mitt Romney had had the Jeb package,” said tireless Romney 2012 surrogate John Sununu, “we would have won in 2012.” Even if Jeb doesn’t run, though, or — miraculously — ends up getting beat in the primaries by a righty insurgent, how many former Bush advisors will end up as part of the eventual nominee’s campaign? It may be possible to avoid having another Bush on the ticket. I’m not sure it’s possible to have a new Republican administration that keeps Bushworld out of the White House. Here’s WaPo on the “credentials caucus,” the race among 2016 Republican hopefuls to recruit policy advisors before the primaries start hopping:

With the exception of some voices within the circle of libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), those being tapped hew to Republican norms on foreign policy, with emphasis on a vigorous military and a willingness to use force overseas…

Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, known for his controversial decisions during the Iraq war, has been courted by several potential candidates and plans to meet with Cruz. Cruz has hired former Rumsfeld aide Victoria Coates as his national security adviser…

Walker is doing more prep on global issues and has developed a bond with Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter and a foreign policy hawk. In 2013, when Thiessen helped Walker write the governor’s memoir, they talked via Skype about many issues.

Actual quote: “On foreign policy especially, the potential candidates are still learning. A frequent counselor is Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the GOP’s 2008 nominee.” I’m guessing Cruz isn’t one of them, although the fact that Cruz is hiring Rumsfeld alums means the Cruz/Paul contrast on foreign policy next year will be even sharper than we thought. Maybe that’s Rand’s best play — presenting himself as an alternative not just to Republican orthodoxy generally but to the Bush legacy specifically. Is that too risky in a Republican primary, though, even five years after the tea party emerged? The one virtue of a new Bush candidacy is that it’d be a fascinating temperature check of GOPers about Dubya’s legacy. Are they, after flirtations with libertarianism and isolationism, nonetheless prepared to offer Bush 3.0 to the country? Can the party’s coalition survive that?

The one really obvious move Jeb could make to lighten some of the baggage he’s carrying and present himself to voters as distinctly his own man would be to criticize the Iraq war, even to the point of saying that it never should have happened. I doubt he’s willing to do it, though, and even if he was, he’s on record as recently as last year as saying he thinks people will eventually stop seeing the war as a mistake. Rand’s been tiptoeing away from dad’s views for the past three years and people are still suspicious of his true intentions. Even if Jeb tried the same move vis-a-vis Dubya’s foreign policy, how likely is it he could convince people at this point that he’d be different? And even if he did, how excited would Bushworld be about him then?

Tags: 2016, andrew card, credentials, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, primary, republican

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AreyoureadyfortheGeorgeW.Bush

Are you ready for the George W. Bush portrait exhibition?

posted at 11:21 am on April 4, 2014 by Allahpundit

The showstopper is the one of Putin, which nails those dead, beady eyes. He looks even more like a Bond villain here than he does in real life.

The Times wonders why the public is so intrigued by Dubya’s second career:

Many have wondered whether Mr. Bush is working through some unresolved issues through his art, but friends say it is a way of channeling a restless spirit now that he has left politics behind. “Fundamentally, he’s a guy with a lot of energy,” said Mark McKinnon, his former political consultant. “And he needs a pursuit to help burn it off. And it may seem counterintuitive, but it’s also how he relaxes.”

Mr. Bush is not the first presidential painter. Ulysses S. Grant studied painting while at West Point and produced landscapes and western scenes. Dwight D. Eisenhower picked up the hobby later in life, after World War II, but still produced scores of known paintings. Jimmy Carter has painted nature scenes and one of his works was even sold at auction for $250,000 in 2012 for charity.

Somehow, though, Mr. Bush’s dabbling seems to have captured more attention, if for no other reason than it seemed surprising that the “war president,” as he liked to call himself, had an artistic side – one that even he apparently did not know about. Just as surprising was that his early work drew generous reviews from some art critics not known for conservative politics.

Right. The caricature of Bush as an incurious brute is so entrenched in some quarters that this can’t help but seem revelatory. To liberals, it must be like watching a chimp play piano. Beyond that, though, it confounds the public suspicion that politicians have no hobbies except politics. I remember a comedian, maybe Dennis Miller, noting years ago that people were bowled over when candidate Bill Clinton played saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show because it suggested that he had interests apart from accumulating power. (Little did we know.) Not too many “soulful” pols running around D.C. lately, or so it often seems. It’s amusing that the left’s least favorite one is among them.

Can’t wait until former President Obama starts writing poetry or whatever. What rhymes with “stinkburger”?

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Tags: blair, brush, George W. Bush, library, painting, portrait, putin

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