The prophecy is more than seeing into the future. For the prophecy sees without the element of time. For the prophecy sees things as they were, as they are, and as they always shall be.
ReutersJune 8, 20224:07 PM MDTLast Updated a day ago
ERBIL, June 8 (Reuters) – A drone exploded in Iraq’s northern city of Erbil on Wednesday injuring three people and damaging several cars, according to a statement by Kurdistan’s counter-terrorism service.
The explosive drone detonated on Pirmam road in Erbil’s outskirts at 9:35 p.m. Iraq time, the statement said.
Two security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the drone was shot down.
A security source said earlier that a drone attack targeted the U.S. consulate but did not give further details.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi told Kurdish Prime Minister Masoud Barzani in a phone call that Baghdad will cooperate with Erbil to hold the perpetrators accountable, according to a statement.
“Bomb-laden drone hit Erbil-Pirmam road, causing civilian injuries and damage,” the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq said on Twitter. “Iraq does not need self-proclaimed armed arbiters. Asserting State authority is essential. If the perpetrators are known, call them out and hold them to account.”
Last month, Iran Revolutionary Guards artillery fire hit an area north of Erbil, targeting what Iranian state television described as terrorist bases.
Also, in March the Guards attacked the capital of the Kurdish region with a dozen ballistic missiles in an unprecedented assault on the capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region that appeared to target the United States and its allies read more
At least three other attacks have targeted oil refineries in Erbil since the March attack, but no group has claimed responsibility for them.
Reporting by Ali Sultan; Writing by Amina Ismail; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Grant McCool
An Islamic State operative plotted to assassinate former president George W. Bush at his home in Dallas by smuggling assassins across the Mexican border, according to an FBI search warrant application obtained by Forbes.
The FBI said it uncovered the plan through the work of two confidential informants and surveillance of the alleged plotter’s account on the WhatsApp messaging platform. According to the warrant application, the suspect said he wanted to assassinate Bush in retaliation for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Shihab said he planned to bring four Iraqi ISIS operatives located in Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark into the United States, one of whom he claimed was “the secretary of an ISIS financial minister,” according to the warrant application. His scheme allegedly involved acquiring Mexican visitor visas for the assassins in order to get them across the border.
Shihab claimed he belonged to a terrorist unit called Al-Raed, led by a former Iraqi pilot for Saddam Hussein, the warrant application said. According to a conversation detailed in the warrant, Shihab’s job was “to locate and conduct surveillance on former president Bush’s residences and/or offices and obtain firearms and vehicles to use in the assassination.”
Two law enforcement officials maintained that Bush’s safety was never threatened, and a representative for Bush told Forbes the former president has “all the confidence in the world in the United States Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities.”
Seamus Hughes, an expert on extremism and counterterrorism at George Washington University, told Forbes the United States has not seen a plot of this scale in years.
“It shows that while domestic terrorism rightly takes a good amount of counterterrorism focus, the threats are not there alone,” Hughes said.
Two confidential informants and surveillance of the alleged plotter’s WhatsApp account reveal plans to smuggle assassins into the U.S. to murder the former president, according to a search warrant application discovered by Forbes.
An Iraqi man in the U.S. accused of being linked to ISIS operatives was plotting to kill George W. Bush, going so far as to travel to Dallas in November to take video around the former president’s home and recruiting a team of compatriots he hoped to smuggle into the country over the Mexican border, according to an FBI search-warrant application filed March 23 and unsealed this week in the Southern District of Ohio.
The FBI said it uncovered the scheme through the work of two confidential informants and surveillance of the alleged plotter’s account on the Meta-owned WhatsApp messaging platform. The suspect, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, based in Columbus, Ohio, said he wanted to assassinate Bush because he felt the former president was responsible for killing many Iraqis and breaking apart the country after the 2003 U.S. military invasion, according to the warrant.
The case shows how federal investigators continue to monitor threats from ISIS even as the group has been severely weakened by American intelligence and military operations in recent years. It also shows how the FBI, despite its claims of being prevented from investigating major crimes because of Meta and other tech providers’ use of encryption, has been able to work around WhatsApp security by using old-school policing with sourcing of informants and tracking the metadata they can get from the messaging company.
A snippet from the search warrant uncovered by Forbes detailing the plot on George W. Bush’s life. The name of the suspect has been redacted.
Shihab is an Iraqi national who’d been in the U.S. since 2020 and had an asylum application pending, according to the FBI’s search-warrant application. Federal agents used two different confidential sources to investigate the plot, one who claimed to offer assistance obtaining false immigration and identification documents, the second a purported customer of the alleged people smuggler, who was willing to pay thousands of dollars to bring his family into the country.
(As the criminal complaint against the suspect has not been made public, Forbes is not publishing the full warrant. According to NBC, he was arrested earlier today, a fact later confirmed by the Department of Justice.)
Freddy Ford, chief of staff for the Office of George W. Bush, said, “President Bush has all the confidence in the world in the United States Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities.”
In November 2021, Shihab revealed to the FBI insider the plot to assassinate Bush and asked the confidential source if he knew how to “obtain replica or fraudulent police and/or FBI identifications and badges” to help carry out the killing, and whether it was possible to smuggle the plotters out of the country the same way they came in after their mission was complete, according to the warrant. The alleged smuggler said he also wanted to find and assassinate a former Iraqi general who helped Americans during the war and whom he believed was living under a fictitious identity in the U.S., investigators said.
The alleged plotter claimed to be part of a unit called “Al-Raed,” meaning “Thunder,” that was led by a former Iraqi pilot for Saddam Hussein who had been based out of Qatar until his recent death, the warrant said. As many as seven members of the group would be sent to the U.S. to kill President Bush, according to a conversation described in the warrant, and the Shihab’s job was “to locate and conduct surveillance on former president Bush’s residences and/or offices and obtain firearms and vehicles to use in the assassination.”
After traveling to Dallas with the informant to take video of Bush’s residence, the accused took more footage at the George W. Bush Institute, according to federal agents. The Texas city was the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Bush, a Republican who was in the news last week when he inadvertently referred to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in a speech about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was president from 2001 to 2009.
In one conversation with a confidential FBI source, the suspect said he was planning to get four Iraqi national males located in Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Denmark into the U.S., according to the warrant. In a later conversation, he claimed that one of the four was “the secretary of an ISIS financial minister,” the FBI said. The alleged smuggler described the men as “former Baath Party members in Iraq who did not agree with the current Iraqi government and were political exiles,” the FBI said. He was planning to charge each $15,000 to be smuggled into America, the FBI said. The Baath Party was the political organization of Hussein, who was deposed in the 2003 U.S. invasion.
His plan, according to the warrant, was to get Mexican visitor visas for the ISIS operatives, using passport information he would send to the informant over WhatsApp, before getting them over the border. Meanwhile, he was communicating with a contact in Egypt over a fake Facebook profile, which carried a profile picture of two individual hands each holding a rose, designed to look romantic and “not suspicious,” according to the FBI’s account. In 2021, the FBI got a warrant to search that Facebook account, though it’s unclear what they obtained.
Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Forbes, “It’s clear this was a sophisticated counterterrorism operation with a lot of moving parts. It was both far reaching and unique in its targeting.
“It also shows that while the debate on so called “going dark” can be overcome through the use of undercover operatives, it’s labor intensive but possible.” The term “going dark” is used by law enforcement to describe the inability to get to data that has been encrypted by software applications.
“Also, we haven’t seen a plot of this scale in a number of years. It shows that while domestic terrorism rightly takes a good amount of counterterrorism focus, the threats are not there alone.”
As part of its surveillance of the alleged plotters, the FBI recently received permission to acquire mobile location information from AT&T. It had already used what’s known as a “pen register” on the WhatsApp account believed to belong to the chief suspect, helping them determine how often the account was used, what numbers it was contacting and whether or not it was active.
Though Shihab seemed convinced his WhatsApp account was secure, he was unaware that the confidential sources were passing on messages to the FBI. Nor was he aware that starting in October he was using a phone that he was given by the informant at the FBI’s request. The informant noted that the target was a keen user of WhatsApp and was a member of Baath and ISIS chat groups on the app. In another conversation with an informant, the suspect claimed to have “been in recent communications with a friend in Qatar who was a former minister in Iraq under Saddam Hussein who had access to large quantities of money” and was messaging him over WhatsApp, the FBI said.
A mysterious group known as Al-Raed was allegedly plotting to kill former President George W. Bush, according to an FBI search warrant, shown here in redacted form.
While the sources were passing on what they learned over WhatsApp throughout 2021 and 2022, they were also secretly recording the in-person meetings with the alleged plotter in which additional startling details were revealed, according to the FBI. In one conversation from December, according to the warrant, the suspect claimed to have had just smuggled two individuals associated with Hezbollah — a terrorist organization, according to the U.S. — into the U.S. for a fee of $50,000 each.
Also in the FBI court filing, the alleged plotter claimed to be a member of “the resistance” and had killed many Americans in Iraq between 2003 and 2006, packing vehicles with explosives and detonating them when U.S. soldiers were near.
Updated at 1.50pm ET to publish the suspect’s name, following NBC reporting that he had been apprehended.Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website. Send me a secure tip.
I’m associate editor for Forbes, covering security, surveillance and privacy. I’m also the…
Trying to condemn the war in Ukraine, Bush inadvertently calls Iraq war unjustified
Former President George W. Bush was criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday when his old nemesis, the verbal slip, struck again. Bush eventually condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but not before he condemned “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
Bush was drawing a parallel between how countries conduct elections and their stance toward other nations when his tongue went rogue.
“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine,” Bush said.
“Iraq… anyway,” he said with a shake of his head, as members of the audience chuckled. He then cited his age, 75, before returning to his speech.
Bush was speaking to an audience at his presidential library in Dallas, Texas, at an event focused on the importance of ensuring free, fair and secure elections, aiming to bolster voters’ confidence in U.S. elections. But the former president’s verbal gaffe quickly drew notice on social media and in headlines.
In 2003, Bush led the U.S. into an invasion and war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction and was working toward a nuclear weapon. No evidence of such threats was found in the country. Members of his administration have insisted they were acting on faulty intelligence.
In Thursday’s speech, Bush was comparing the free and fair election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyto Putin’s suppression of his political opponents.
He also said he recently spoke to Zelenskyy via Zoom, declaring the Ukrainian leader to be a “cool little guy — the Churchill of the 21stcentury.”
Bush has famously been a wellspring of malapropisms, even prompting the term “Bushisms” and sparking research into slips of the tongue. His latest high-profile foray into mangled speech adds to what is shaping up as an odd return to the early 2000s, when news outlets tracked Brittney Spears and reported on the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan.
President George W. Bush: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
A little over a year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, despite lacking any evidence Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The attack was widely considered illegal under international law. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, there have been over 180,000 Iraqi civilians killed by direct violence since the U.S. invasion.
The former US secretary of state was instrumental in paving the way for the invasion of Iraq on spurious intelligence in his infamous speech at the UN in 2003.
Former US secretary of state Colin Powell, who paved the way for the 2003 Iraq War under President George W Bush, died today at the age of 84 from complications from Covid-19.
Born in Harlem of Jamaican heritage, Powell was the nation’s first Black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state.
A fixture in American politics for decades, he was a four-star army general whose career began in Vietnam and later spanned several Republican administrations, even toying with a presidential run in 1995 before deciding against it.
A tendency towards careerism – what admirers chalked up as “being a good soldier” – was an attribute that would serve him well during his ascent up the US national security bureaucracy.
In Vietnam, Powell was part of the army division that ended up being responsible for the My Lai massacre. While he talked about it in his best-selling memoir, “My American Journey,” he absolved himself by recounting he was unaware of the scale of the institutional coverup.
Never one to buck the system, Powell was the consummate inside man; someone who thought whatever compromises he made were worth it because it would offer him a chance to do the right thing.
Whether that meant participating in Ronald Regan’s Iran-Contra operation, or being an architect behind the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the Persian Gulf war in 1991 under George H W Bush, the ostensibly prudent Powell was, at the end of the day, a yes man.
And there was no better example of that on display than his role in justifying the war in Iraq.
Believed to be a moderating influence in the Bush administration and skeptical of the idea of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Powell still went out to make the case. Because he was held in such high esteem by members of both parties, the fact that he so forcefully made the case solidified bipartisan support for the war.
Coupled with his infamous UN speech on Iraq harbouring Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the image of Powell holding up a vial of an alleged chemical agent is iconic from that era (along with artistic renderings of what the alleged biological labs would look like), was a display of propaganda the self-advertised moderate found hard to scrub from his legacy.US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said could contain anthrax as he presents evidence of Iraq’s alleged weapons programs to the United Nations Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003. (Ray Stubblebine / Reuters)
The ‘grand game of Powellian deception’
On February 5, 2003, Powell gave testimony to the UN Security Council in which he claimed that the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government was hiding a secret chemical weapons program from the international community and supporting terrorism following the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
His address was an effort to provide delegates “with additional information…about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq’s involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of resolution 1411 and other earlier resolutions.”
The proof? “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid evidence.”
Did Iraq revive their nuclear weapons program? “There is no doubt in my mind,” he concluded.
Privately, however, he displayed less certainty. “I wonder how we’ll all feel if we put half a million troops in Iraq and march from one end of the country to the other and find nothing,” he told his chief of staff Larry Wilkerson at the time.
It was all part of a “grand game of Powellian deception,” wrote Binoy Kampmark in Counterpunch.
One of the clues Powell furnished was drawn from an intercepted conversation about UN inspections between Iraqi army officers that he turned on its head: “Clean out all of the areas…Make sure there is nothing there.” None of which was in the intercept.
As Jon Schwarz wrote in The Intercept: “Powell took evidence of the Iraqis doing what they were supposed to do – i.e., searching their gigantic ammunition dumps to make sure they weren’t accidently holding onto banned chemical weapons – and doctored it to make it look as if Iraq were hiding banned weapons.”
“Clearly Powell’s loyalty to Bush extended to being willing to deceive the world: the United Nations, Americans, and the coalition troops about to be sent to kill and die in Iraq,” Schwarz said.
“He’s never been held accountable for his actions, and it’s extremely unlikely he ever will be.”
Despite the eventual hand wringing by acknowledging how the UN speech was a “blot” on his record and a “great intelligence failure,” Powell displayed no sincere remorse over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers. He remained insistent the war was a just one
Wilkerson said Powell’s UN testimony was significant for both its dishonesty and that Powell’s “gravitas” was a crucial “part of the two-year-long effort by the Bush administration to get Americans on the war wagon.”
“That effort led to a war of choice with Iraq, one that resulted in catastrophic losses for the region and the United States-led coalition, and that destabilized the entire Middle East,” wrote Wilkerson in 2018.
Nor was the UN speech the first example of Powell’s acquiescence. Reports revealedhow timid he was in speaking against the Bush administration’s imprisonment and torture policy, despite knowing the legal risks, in another instance where Powell seemed to put career before principles.
Despite falling out with the administration and leaving at the end of Bush’s first term, Powell continued to be held in high regard as a statesman within Beltway circles. His credibility with the American public, however, had been sacrificed at the altar of Iraq.
Following the Bush era, Powell endorsed President Barack Obama in 2008 and voted for the Democratic ticket ever since. He was an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump and the direction the Republican party took under Trump’s presidency.
While publicly walking back some of his blunders on Iraq, Powell embarked on a path of restoration that ultimately assuaged any greater responsibility.
“Iraq was not his debacle but that of others,” argued Kampmark. “He has spent years cultivating his apologias, showing up his peers as imbeciles and he, a warning filled sage of reason.”
It cannot be denied that Powell left an indelible mark on the history of US foreign policy. He, along with Dick Cheney, were two of the chief designers behind the strategic legacies of the Regan and Bush Sr eras. At the core of the new military doctrine was that the US should avoid the kind of protracted engagement that could become politically costly, as it did in Vietnam.
But for someone who established what came to be known as the ‘Powell Doctrine’ – don’t get into a war you don’t know how to get out of – it is somewhat tragically ironic that Powell failed to heed that lesson himself in 2003.
Colin Powell, who was the nation’s top diplomat, its top general, and the first Black man to be either, died on Monday at the age of 84. Rarely, if ever, has an American statesman or warrior risen to such heights of power, then been cut off at the knees by his bureaucratic rivals.
Born in Harlem to Jamaican parents, a classic tale of a working-class kid pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, Powell joined the Army, fought in Vietnam as a grunt, rose through the ranks to corps commander, then, after a stint as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, was named by President George H.W. Bush to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As a rare officer who combined battlefield experience with political savvy, Powell turned the chairmanship into a powerhouse, utilizing his large staff—several hundred of the military’s smartest officers, split into several specialized units—in a way that, as one official at the time told me, “ran circles around the rest of the national-security bureaucracy.” It was in that position that Powell emerged as a public figure, devising much of the strategy for the first Gulf War, which pushed Iraq’s invading army out of Kuwait, and explaining the strategy at several televised press conferences.
During that time, he also enunciated what came to be called the “Powell doctrine,” a view that the U.S. should go to war only if the political objectives are vital and defined, if military force can achieve those objectives at an acceptable cost, if all nonviolent means have failed—and then, if war is necessary, that we should go to war only with overwhelming force. The doctrine amounted to a critique of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam—both its flawed rationale and its piecemeal tactics—and has influenced the debate on the proper role of military force ever since.
After Democrats regained the White House in 1992, Powell wrote a bestselling memoir, My American Journey, and considered running for president. (His wife, Alma, urged him not to run, fearing that some racist would assassinate him.) When the Republicans won again in 2000, President George W. Bush named Powell secretary of state, to unanimous acclaim, in what seemed the pinnacle of his rise—but it proved to be the start of his downfall. Taking office with an air of confidence, assuming that he could rule the realm of foreign policy through his clout and popularity, he soon found himself—to his initial surprise—outmaneuvered, on one major issue after another, by the tag team of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had been friends and colleagues dating back to the Nixon administration.
Powell accomplished a great deal on issues that Cheney and Rumsfeld didn’t care about. In the fall of 2001, they let him conduct the shuttle diplomacy that may well have prevented war between the nuclear-armed nations of India and Pakistan. Powell also helped soothe tensions with China after its shoot-down of a U.S. spy plane. However, he lost almost every other battle. In one of his first statements, Powell declared that he would resume President Bill Clinton’s nuclear negotiations with North Korea—only to be told by Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, that he would do no such thing. He had to eat his words.
Whenever Powell tried to initiate any form of arms control, his undersecretary of state, John Bolton, who had been installed in the job as a spy for Cheney, did his best to sabotage the move. On the few occasions when Powell won a debate in the National Security Council, Cheney would go talk with Bush privately—and usually get the decision reversed.
By the middle of Bush’s first term, his counterparts in Europe—who had celebrated Powell’s appointment and spoke with him frequently—came to realize that his views, which they found agreeable, did not reflect the president’s views, and he lost his influence abroad. When Bush wanted to send a message on the Middle East, he sent Rice. When he dispatched an emissary to Western Europe to lobby for Iraqi debt cancellation, he sent James Baker, the Bush family’s longtime friend who had been his father’s secretary of state.
The war in Iraq might have served as Powell’s off-ramp to redemption but instead deepened his downslide to Nowheresville. As Bush crept toward the invasion, Powell warned him of its pitfalls—most prophetically on what he called “the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it”—but to no avail. (Shortly before the war started, a European diplomat reminded him that Bush was said to sleep like a baby. Powell replied, “I sleep like a baby, too—every two hours, I wake up screaming.”) Once again, though, he was outmaneuvered. Unable to muster support for the invasion, either on the homefront or among allies, Cheney came up with the diabolical idea of having Powell—the one senior Bush official with international credibility—make the case for war before the U.N. Security Council. Initially, Powell resisted, tearing up the script the White House gave him to read. But then, in an effort to be helpful and loyal, he went to CIA headquarters and buried himself in documents and briefings for days on end, tossing out claims that had no support and leaving in those that seemed at least plausible. In the end, he gave his fateful speech, with passion. Many critics of the invasion were won over, in good part because it was Colin Powell making the case.
But all the claims that Powell was believed—all the evidence he recited to support the idea that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—turned out to be false as well. In his excellent book, To Start a War, Robert Draper wrote that plenty of CIA analysts could have told Powell that the claims were false, or at least dubious—but that CIA Director George Tenet, eager to please Bush with the conclusions Bush wanted to hear, deliberately kept Powell from talking with them.
Powell left the administration after Bush’s first term. Toward the end, he was portrayed in several journalistic accounts, most notably Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, as a critic of the war who regarded Cheney as having “the fever” for invasion; but, even a year after leaving his post, Powell stayed mum on these matters in public. As late as June 2005, six months into Bush’s second term, Powell went on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart in one of his first TV guest spots since leaving office. Stewart asked questions that left him wide openings to take jabs at his former colleagues, who were still in power, or at the war, which was still raging. But he took none of them. Sure, there were disagreements, Powell said, but that’s true in any administration. The president is the boss, and he’s a swell guy. Why, he and Laura were just over at his house for dinner the previous week.
Powell later openly regretted his role in the U.N. speech and denounced those who’d manipulated him at Langley. Too late. If he had resigned in protest before the invasion, he might have stopped the war from happening; if he had spoken out after leaving office, he might have affected its future course. But this wasn’t his way. He was, at heart, a team player, a “good soldier.”
Over time, he turned away from the Republican Party. In the 2008 presidential election, he endorsed Barack Obama, calling him a “transformational” candidate, to the great dismay of his old friend and Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain. However, Obama rarely called him for advice on defense issues. Powell subsequently endorsed only Democrats—Obama again in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020.
In recent years, apart from the endorsements, Powell remained out of the limelight of national politics—though it wasn’t clear whether this was by choice. He devoted most of his time to personal and public causes, especially the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at his alma mater, the City College of New York. He wrote more bestselling books and spoke widely, sometimes for fees, sometimes not. He had a wonderful life. At one pivotal moment in our history, it could have been a more decisive one.
Rating Donald Trump: At least he’s not George W. Bush
By Zachary Karabell, Opinion Contributor
September 26, 2019 – 04:30 PM EDT
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
Let’s stipulate the following: By most measures, Donald Trump has been a problematic president.
For some, he is the worst ever; for others, he is a hero for breaking
the mold of Washington as usual, for deregulating, for appointing judges
in a particular Federalist Society mold. His standing in national
opinion polls is rather low for this point in a presidency, and augur a
tough road to reelection.
For those who believe he is the worst ever – and, with this week’s
scandal surrounding what Trump might have said to Ukraine’s
president and the subsequent opening of an impeachment inquiry, that
view has been amply reinforced – let’s stipulate something else: Nothing Trump has done, not a single thing, would rank in the top five of what George W. Bush did in the first term
of his presidency in terms of sheer, utter, unequivocal harm to the
United States, to its legal and governing norms, to the stability of the
international system and to the economic security of Americans.
It is remarkable, and not a bit weird, how quickly the Bush years
have receded into the past, with Bush himself the recipient of a
Trump-era nostalgia for a time when men (yes, men) of character occupied
the White House, honored the office and took the responsibilities of
“leader of the free world” seriously. Bush’s somber, quiet rectitude
during his father’s funeral earned him high accolades even from former
adversaries. And he has been praised for staying above the fray as an
ex-president and refusing to call out either Barack Obama or Trump when
he disagrees with them.
And yet, Bush’s first term was an unmitigated disaster
whose ill effects still bedevil the world, and from which we have never
fully recovered. The fact that Trump occupies so much mind-space —
because of his often odious language, lack of world view and utter
disregard for law, norms, civility and thoughtful policy-making — seems
to have obscured just how little he actually has done compared to his
Republican predecessor, who did a lot and caused irreparable harm.
Let’s catalogue: In Bush’s first term, his administration either deliberately falsified or purposefully fudged intelligence reports about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities,
as well as connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, in
order to steer public opinion to support an invasion of Iraq that, by
most estimates, took the lives of at least half a million Iraqi
civilians in order to oust a brutal dictator.
Most of those deaths were not directly caused by American munitions
or troops but by a combination of the subsequent Iraqi civil war and
disease among refugees. But they were the product of a U.S. invasion
that included, at best, minimal planning for the invasion’s aftermath;
the resulting haphazard nature of the occupation, in turn, gave rise to a
violent insurgency and a metastasizing Islamic extremism in the form of
ISIS that ultimately helped turn Syria into a war zone.
The Bush administration also opened and then maintained both the extralegal prison system at Guantanamo Bay
for suspected terrorists, interrogation techniques that skirted the
line between agreed Geneva conventions and actual torture, and the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq, which undoubtedly crossed that line. In addition,
the administration actively solicited allies such as Egypt and Saudi
Arabia for extralegal “rendition” of suspects for “enhanced”
interrogation, all under the justification that the war on terror
required extraordinary measures not contemplated under existing law.
For similar reasons, the administration authorized, via the National Security Agency, an extensive metadata spying program, purposely
circumventing delegated congressional authority and declining to inform
Congress. It was only terminated (purportedly) when the program came to
light in 2004. Even the Department of Justice challenged the program’s
legality at the time, with most of the department concluding that the
program violated the law.
Those three things alone – the invasion of Iraq on false grounds and
the subsequent chaos due to lack of planning, the sanctioning of torture
and encouragement of it beyond U.S. borders, and domestic spying
without congressional authorization – are beyond anything yet done or
accomplished by Trump. But wait, as they say in late-night commercials,
there’s more.
Bush’s first term also saw a substantial deregulation of the housing
market and the financial markets in terms of due diligence and oversight
of bank lending and financial sector risk. That had already begun
during the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president, and enjoyed wide
support among elites in both parties.
At the time, of course, those moves were seen not just as benign but
actively beneficial not just to financial markets but to millions who
could suddenly afford to buy homes and faced less scrutiny when applying
for mortgages. Nonetheless, this loosening and indifference to earlier
standards enabled the vast distortions in the financial system that
helped set the stage for the massive financial crisis of 2008-2009.
There were factors other than Bush administration policies, of course,
but his role cannot be elided.
And, finally, following the highly questionable Supreme Court
decision Bush v. Gore in 2000, the Bush administration opened the
floodgates to a political system that now distorts the Electoral College
and allows an administration to claim the mantle of a majority while
winning a minority of the popular vote. The ballot results, if they had
been counted in Florida as agreed on by Florida law, might, of course,
have favored Bush and led to his election regardless. But by
short-circuiting that process, the administration (with the help of the
Supreme Court) set a precedent of cherry-picking law and precedent as it
suits rather than being bound regardless. We are witnessing that
tendency in excess today.
Recalling the harms of the Bush years is important because, in our
hysterical present, where hyperbole is the coin of the realm, we have an
unfortunate predilection to hold up “Now” as the worst of all possible
worlds and forget just how bad it was only a few years ago.
Trump, for all his evident and multiple faults, has yet to
manufacture an invasion of another country that not only costs thousands
of lives but creates a trail of regional instability and global
violence. He has not, as far as we know, unleashed the national security
state on U.S. citizens at home, and he has not authorized torture. Grim
conditions in detention camps on the Mexican border are pristine
compared to Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and downright cushy compared to
the “black” rendition sites of our allies in 2002; that doesn’t make
border conditions defensible, but there is a material distinction that
matters.
And while some of Trump’s deregulatory efforts could yet backfire,
most would seem to enable possible corruption in oil, gas and land use
contracts rather than systemic dangers a la the mid-2000s’ housing and
mortgage bubble.
Some will say, “So, Bush was bad, but he’s in the past.” This
reminder of the Bush administration should be a corrective to the view
of terminal American decline, to the belief that we will never again be
the same and that we are living in some sort of end-of-days. We’ve been
worse in the past; we’ve also been far better. And here we are, to tell
those tales and fight these fights.
Zachary Karabell, founder of the Progress Network and the author of a
dozen books, including “The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the
Numbers that Rule Our World,” is president of River Twice Research and
River Twice Capital.
Cheney was referring back to the segment of the previous evening’s presidential debate when moderator Jake Tapper asked whether, as president, the candidates would declare that the United States would never use nukes first.
Warren said that she would adopt that policy.
Cheney, it seems, took that to mean that a President Warren would vow to do nothing while America got nuked. Or that a country wouldn’t be deterred by America’s massive ability to retaliate against any strike.
Reactions to the tweet ranged fromthe obvious, “There is no winning a nuclear war,” tothe vicious, “Wow damn didn’t realize that the desire to murder entire nations was a trait you could inherit from your dad,” and several logical souls who pointed out that Warren did not say that.
Someone even referenced Maslow’s hammer.
Harvard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda was among those appalled by Cheney the younger’s nuclear ambitions, “A little self-awareness might lead you to the conclusion that, having made your career entirely on the coat-tails of your war criminal father, maybe you’re not the best person to weigh in on the wisdom of preventive war? Your Dad’s Iraq catastrophe springs to mind, somehow,”he tweeted.
TheDaily Dothas reached out to the Warren campaign and will update with their response.
It is worth noting that the United States has long had a policy of being willing to strike first in a nuclear war.
But on the same token, it’s pretty crazy to suggest that a president not being willing to launch a preemptive nuclear attack is the equivalent of them letting nuclear warheads rain down on our nation.
Let’s go back to 2002 and look at what one highly credentialed person was saying as our country was preparing to wage war against Iraq. We do so because some high officials of the U.S. government seem determined to launch another conflict, this time with Iran.
On July 20, 2002, Scott Ritter authored an op-ed for the Boston Globe in which he disagreed with obvious plans to send U.S. forces into Iraq. He countered the prevailing government-inspired notion claiming Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had “weapons of mass destruction,” even some of the nuclear variety, and was preparing to use them. Ritter didn’t believe the Iraqi leader had such weaponry and, further, he didn’t think there was any need to re-invade Saddam Hussein’s country. (U.S. forces had stormed into Iraq in 1991’s Desert Storm invasion.)
But who was Scott Ritter, and why should he be listened to when President George W. Bush, numerous members of Congress, an assortment of media pundits, and others were insisting that nuclear weapons from Iraq would soon incinerate a portion of the world? Why should Ritter’s reluctance be relied upon? The general public didn’t know him. True, but U.S. government officials knew that Ritter, after spending more than a dozen years as a U.S. Marine Corps intelligence specialist, had spent seven more years as the chief weapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq. His years of investigation showed him that Iraq posed no weapons of mass destruction, not only of the nuclear variety but also those deemed chemical and biological weapons.
In Washington, war drums got louder as the George W. Bush administration settled in. While at a podium in the nation’s capital, President Bush discussed the “W.M.D.” problem, admitted that none had “yet” been found, and mockingly executed a 360-degree turn away from his microphone after claiming that he was still looking for forbidden weapons. Colin Powell then appeared on television to show photographs of Iraqi structures and claim that they housed the dreaded WMDs. Whoever set the retired general up for that performance accomplished destroying the former U.S. secretary of state’s credibility. It did nothing to prove that Saddam was planning to nuke mankind.
But the plan to again invade Iraq gathered momentum. U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte successfully sought a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Iraq comply with UN mandates to get rid of its alleged WMDs, and the United States launched a war that Scott Ritter and many others said wasn’t needed in order to force Iraq to comply with this resolution. Side note: One seeks authorization from a superior, not an inferior. Negroponte’s action clearly showed that U.S. military served at the pleasure of the world body.
As anyone paying attention knows, U.S. forces reinvaded Iraq in 2003. Approximately 4,500 American military personnel have perished in a struggle that continues to be costly in lives, finances and credibility. Claims that this dubious military adventure spurred the rise of ISIS and all of its horrors may actually be verifiable. And the million and a half strong Christian population in the beleaguered country has shrunk to 200 thousand.
Here we are in 2019 and Scott Ritter is now telling U.S. officials that war against Iran isn’t necessary. Nor should a war against North Korea be launched. He greatly applauds the gesture recently taken by President Trump when our nation’s leader went to North Korea and actually set foot in the Communist-led portion of the Korean peninsula. Calling the president’s brief walk into the North “20 steps in the right direction,” Trump’s gesture signaled to the North Korean leader that the United States has no intention of starting a war in that part of the world.
Neoconservatives in the Trump administration aren’t as happy. But Scott Ritter, this writer, and hundreds of millions in the United States and Korea are delighted to see the newer rush to war slowed down. Still, war-happy U.S. officials continue working behind the scenes to involve our nation in more conflicts. They know that taking the nation to war presents an opportunity to build the power of government.
Chief among those who favor war — almost any war — is National Security adviser John Bolton. About his continued presence serving in such an important post, even leftist David Alexrod finds it curious. Having served for years as a top aide to former president Barack Obama, he had some advice for President Trump. He still believes that Obama was a great leader but he saw fit to wonder about the Trump administration: “If part of your brand is that you’re not going to get the U.S. into unnecessary wars, why in the world would you hire John Bolton?”
Good question. President Trump ought to retire John Bolton. Perhaps Scott Ritter would be a better choice to fill that important post.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society.
Airmen from the 821st Contingency Response Group at Qayyarah West Airfield, Iraq, on November 19, 2016. Propaganda floated by former Vice President Dick Cheney over a decade ago to justify his push for war against Iran has been revived by the Trump administration.
Gareth Porter Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on U.S. national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter. More by this author…
Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, whose job is to round up international support for the Trump administration’s campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran, presented the charge at a State Department press briefing on April 2. “I can announce today, based on declassified U.S. military reports,” Hook said, “that Iran is responsible for the deaths of 608 American service members. This accounts for 17 percent of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011.”
In fact, the myth that Tehran is responsible for killing over 600 U.S. troops in the Iraq War is merely a new variant of a propaganda line that former Vice President Dick Cheney used to attempt to justify a war against Iran more than a decade ago. Reviewing the history of that earlier effort is necessary to understand why the new myth is a palpable lie.
Myths About Iran Providing Shiite Militias With Bombs
The history of the myth begins with Vice President Dick Cheney’s determination to attack Iran sometime before the end of the George W. Bush administration. Cheney had contemplated a campaign of U.S. airstrikes on Iran, to be justified by charging that Iran was trying to produce a nuclear weapon. But that rationale for a U.S. military strike on Iran was unanimously rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a December 13, 2006, meeting with Cheney and President George W. Bush, according to a report by political columnist Joe Klein in TIME magazine.
After that rebuff, Cheney began to focus on another rationale for war on Iran: the alleged Iranian role in killing U.S. troops in Iraq. On January 10, 2007, President George W. Bush gave a speech that included language accusing Iran of “providing material support for attacks on American troops.” Although Bush did not threaten in that speech to retaliate against Iran, his words established a legal and political basis for a possible future attack, according to Hillary Mann Leverett, former National Security Council staff director for the Persian Gulf, in an interview with me in 2008.
After Gen. David Petraeus took over as commander of coalition forces in Iraq in January 2007, the command went all out to support Cheney’s strategy. Its main argument was that Iran was providing Shiite militias with the powerful roadside bombs called Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) that were causing increasing number of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
But the evidence proved otherwise. Hezbollah — not Iran — had been well known as the world’s most knowledgeable designer and user of EFPs. Michael Knights, who had been following the role of EFPs in Iraq for nearly three years for a private security company in London, told me in an exclusive interview in January 2007 that it was Hezbollah that had transferred EFPs and components for manufacture to Palestinian militants after the second intifada began in 2000. He also observed in a detailed account in Jane’s Intelligence Review in 2006 that the first EFPs to appear in Iraq in 2004 were believed to have come from Hezbollah.
Newsday had reported on August 12, 2005, moreover, that Shiite militiamen had begun copying Hezbollah techniques for building as well as using EFPs, based on Lebanese and Iraqi official sources.
The U.S. military intelligence chief in Iraq had claimed in September 2006 that the C-4 explosive used in EFPs in Iraq bore the same batch number as the C-4 found on a Hezbollah ship said by Israeli officials to be bound for Palestinian fighters in 2003. But Knights observed this statement showed that Iran wasn’t shipping the materials for EFPs to Shiites in Iraq. If Iran had been shipping the C-4 to Iraq the previous year, he pointed out, the batch number would have been different from the one given to Hezbollah at least four years earlier.
The command’s effort to push its line about Iran and EFPs encountered one embarrassing revelation after another. In February 2007 a U.S. command briefing asserted that the EFPs had “characteristics unique to being manufactured in Iran.” However, after NBC correspondent Jane Arraf confronted the deputy commander of coalition troops, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, with the fact that a senior military official had acknowledged to her that U.S. troops had been discovering many sites manufacturing EFPs in Iraq, Odierno was forced to admit that it was true.
Then in late February 2007, U.S. troops found another cache of parts and explosives for EFPs near Baghdad, which included shipments of PVC tubes for the canisters that contradicted its claims. They had come not from factories in Iran, but from factories in the UAE and other Arab countries, including Iraq itself. That evidence clearly suggested that the Shiites were procuring EFP parts on the commercial market rather than getting them from Iran.
Although the military briefing by the command in February 2007 pointed to cross-border weapons smuggling, it actually confirmed in one of its slides that it was being handled by “Iraqi extremist group members” rather than by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And as Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. commander for southern Iraq, admitted in a July 6 press briefing, his troops had not “captured anybody that we can directly tie back to Iran.”
Blaming Iran for Casualties From U.S. Attacks
The centerpiece of the Petraeus campaign was an effort to argue that Iran was responsible for U.S. casualties, primarily in Baghdad, because of its sponsorship of Shiite militias. In August 2007, Lt. Gen. Odierno asserted that 73 percent of all attacks that had killed or wounded U.S. forces in Baghdad during July were by Shiite militias linked to Iran. That charge generated the New York Times headline, “U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Kills More Troops.”
In his September 2007 congressional testimony, Petraeus introduced a new propaganda line that Iran had turned Sadr’s militia into a “Hezbollah-like force” in order to “fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.” But there was no evidence that those Shiite forces resisting the U.S. military’s offensive had broken away from Sadr and were now responsive to Iran.
The Iraqi Shiite figure said to have been the leader of supposed Iranian-backed breakaway “Special Groups,” Qais al-Khazali, was interrogated by the U.S. military for weeks after his arrest in March 2007. Reports of dozens of those interrogations have recently been declassified, and a review of the reports reveals that Khazali portrayed the “Special Groups” as an integral part of the Sadrist movement. He recalled that a large meeting of the “Sadrist Trend” — the political and military forces aligned with Sadr — made the decision to organize “Special Groups” as early as 2004. And he pointed out that Iranian financial support did not go directly to those groups, but went through the same Sadr channel that supported the rest of the Mahdi Army.
The bitter irony of the Petraeus propaganda campaign against the Mahdi Army is that Muqtada al-Sadr had stubbornly maintained his Iraqi nationalist stance completely independent from Iranian policy in Iraq since 2003. Meanwhile, rival Iraqi Shiite organizations, the Badr Organization and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), having fled to Iran years earlier, had followed strict orders from their Iranian patrons to collaborate closely with the U.S. military and civilian authorities to establish and consolidate a Shiite-dominated regime in Iraq. The Shiite groups loyal to Iran and Sadr’s armed followers were always in bitter conflict, and in 2008 they fought in the streets of Basra and Baghdad.
Propaganda Supporting Cheney’s Strike Plan
In a July 2, 2007, press briefing Petraeus’s spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner implied that Iran’s Qods Force had helped a Shiite militia carry out a January 2007 attack in Karbala, Iraq, that killed five Americans. Bergner offered no evidence of any such Iranian role in the attack, however, only the suggestion that the Qods Force leadership was informed about the planning of the operation by a Hezbollah official in Iraq.
The New York Times, Associated Press, and other outlets released stories claiming that Bergner had said Iranian agents helped plan the Karbala attack. Within hours, Sen. Joe Lieberman issued a press release saying that the Iranian government had “declared war on us.” Bergner’s comments and Lieberman’s statement set the stage for the unanimous passage the following week of a Senate resolution that the murder of American military personnel by Iran was “an intolerable act of hostility against the United States.”
Around the time Lieberman was introducing that resolution (in partnership with four Republican senators), Cheney proposed in a meeting with other senior officials that if the United States obtained hard evidence of Iranian support for Shiite militias killing U.S. forces in Iraq, such as fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from an IRGC base in Iran linked to that assistance.
Defense Department officials quashed the proposal, however, by demanding that Cheney’s staff explain how this military escalation would unfold, and how it would end, according to J. Scott Carpenter former deputy assistant secretary of state, in a 2008 interview with this writer. Cheney’s staff couldn’t provide satisfactory answers.
