Babylon Without George Bush Junior (Revelation 13:10)

Iraq reimagined: An alternative history of Saddam Hussein and the Arab Spring

by Chris Solomon , March 8, 2016 

 

This piece imagines an Iraq where Saddam Hussein was still in power in 2016. What if President Bush had allowed his red line to be crossed? How would Saddam’s response to the Arab Spring have played into the region’s geopolitics?

Ten years after Saddam’s death in December 2006, the decision to invade Iraq is still a contentious topic in the United States. Hillary Clinton has battled to win the favor of young and leftist Democrats who view her as part of the pro-war establishment that went ahead with a rash and costly military action. Jeb Bush struggled to shake the legacy, and in the end, it may have cost him the nomination. War fatigue is evident among Republicans who view Bush’s decision to invade Iraq as worsening the overall security situation. There is a widespread yearning for the simpler times of the classic Arab dictators.

How different would things have been if Bush had his version of Obama’s “Red Line moment” where he reneged on his threat to invade Iraq and Operation Iraqi Freedom never happened? How would Saddam’s regime have navigated the storm of the Arab Spring? What could’ve happened to the so-called Islamic State (IS) and Iran’s growing power in the region? Fictional depictions of history, such as The Man in the High Castle, occasionally provide insights into what might’ve been different or what could have stayed the same.

The following is a fictional version of events, imagining what might have happened had President Bush not decided to invade Iraq in 2003.

A war avoided

Following the resignation of Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz from the Administration, President George W. Bush opted to conduct a limited bombing mission (dubbed Operation Desert Fox II) against Saddam’s regime. With a focus on Afghanistan, Iraq falls on the foreign policy backburner.

Following Bush’s presidency, President McCain sets the stage for the Arab Spring. By 2008, new strides in technology, U.S. funded media training, and student exchange programs, led to the creation of a network of young democracy activists (including Iraqis) in the Arab World. President McCain focuses his attention on isolating the Iranian regime.

Despite the many years of hostile relations during Bush’s presidency, the growing threat of Iran’s nuclear program led to low-level bilateral dialogue. Initiated by Saudi Arabia and facilitated through mediation from German and French contacts, the U.S. and United Kingdom, fearing a nuclear Iran, agree to end Operation Southern Watch. Iraq, in turn, surrenders its WMDs, in exchange for cooperation against Iran.

Imagining Saddam’s regime in 2016

Harith al-Qarawee, Fellow with the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University explained to GRI, “In the 1990s and as a result of the harsh international sanctions that followed the war which inflicted huge damage in the infrastructure, the regime lost a great part of its resources and was adapting internally in order to be able to rule with limited resources. This is why it almost completely gave up on its ‘modernizing policies’, continued liberalizing the economy, and created alternative channels of relating to local communities. The Baath party became less relevant, while a process of re-tribalization was initiated to use traditional networks, based on patronage, in managing local communities.”  

The ruling Baath Party leadership is aging. Saddam and his cohorts are almost all octogenarians. Since 2000, Saddam has been preparing for a leadership transition for his second son, Qusay Hussein, who is viewed by some diplomats as reasonable and open to reform. A similar diplomatic overture is being explored with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in Libya.

Years of sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy. The Saddam Dam, one of the government’s grandiose state development projects, continues to teeter on complete disaster. Despite the hardships and high unemployment, the resourceful and innovative people of Iraq found ways to rebuild at the local level.
In the late 1990’s, Saddam had begun experimenting with satellite TV and wireless communications. By the time of McCain’s presidency in 2008, the new window to the outside world was difficult for the Iraqi government to control. Satellite dishes adorn the rooftops of many homes in Baghdad and across Iraq. In 2011 cracks appear in the regime and people began to hold demonstrations organized through online social networks.

A different Iraqi Civil War?

As the demonstrations and repeated violent crackdowns continued, the Iraqi military was severely weakened from repeated bombing, sanctions, and isolation. Grumblings within the Republican Guard led to a new round of purges. Seeking new allies, Saddam turns to his fellow Sunnis and his former financial backer from the Iran-Iraq War, Saudi Arabia.

The Baath Party had embarked on a nominal path towards Islamism under the guidance of Vice President Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri via the faith campaign. This galvanized and shored up Sunni support from Jordan and the Arab Gulf States. Donations from abroad poured in to the Saddam University for Islamic Studies.

It is not long before the demonstrations turned into a full-fledged repeat of the 1991 and 1999 predominately Shia uprisings.

Iran, after several nuclear tests, remained isolated and agitated. Syria’s separate peace with Israel left Iran searching for allies within Iraq’s rebel movement and an increase in terror abroad. A powerful Lebanese Christian-Sunni political establishment with ties to Saddam faces near daily attacks from a hardline and politically marginalized Shia Hezbollah.

The conflict very quickly took on a sectarian element. With support from the Iranian government and trainers, the Iraqi Badr organization and Dawa Party form sizable militias. The Mehdi Army has held out under the regime’s siege of Saddam City for over a year and the humanitarian situation is dire. Smart phone footage from Abu Ghraib shows mass overcrowding and torture in prisons.
The Kurds manage to stay neutral until regime attacks force them to once again side with Iran. Hezbollah comes in via Iran to aid Iraq’s Shia fighters. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean Catholic, appealed desperately for more Western support to protect Iraq’s beleaguered Christians.

The regime struggled to contain the number of Sunni extremists group operating in the country, facilitated by a vast network of Baath army and intelligence officers with questionable loyalties.  Despite the fact that Saddam still provides financial supports to different Palestinian factions, the government’s crackdowns against Ansar al-Islam and the arrest and execution of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi further marginalize the regime’s relations with Sunni Salafists.

Saddam, while using the guise of religion to shore up local support, never trusted the Islamists. Clashes erupt between defecting Republican Guard units and the loyal Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary force. Iraq is soon dealing with a multifaceted civil war.

Should the world miss Saddam?

Realist and idealists will continue to debate the human cost of the war for both the Americans and Iraqis, whether Iraqis were better off under Saddam, and what the region’s geopolitics might have meant for Iran and IS. Iran has increased its influence in the region and Syria was directly impacted by the violence in Iraq. However, it is unclear if Syria could have actually escaped violence or what direction Iran would’ve gone in had Saddam stayed in power.

As for IS, it is difficult to know whether a Sunni extremist organization of its size could’ve formed without the power vacuum that transpired in 2003. Baathist like Abdul Karim Muta’a Kheirallah, Samir al-Khlifawi, and Fadel Ahmad Abdullah al-Hyali from Saddam’s intelligence services may have never met IS leader Al-Baghdadi in Camp Bucca but would’ve instead been instrumental in putting down rebellions instead of fomenting them.

Alternative history shows that one historical decision may have postponed regional upheaval and shifting of alliances, but perhaps only for a while. Dictatorship is not a guarantee of peace and stability. The new era of post-Arab Spring authoritarianism has already begun taking shape. The lessons of Saddam’s long period of brutal rule will continue to demonstrate the impact of his dictatorship on the region.

HW Turns Against His Son’s Transgressions (1 Kings 15)

Bush-41 Finally Speaks on Iraq War
November 8, 2015
Exclusive: A dozen years too late, President George H.W. Bush has given voice to his doubts about the wisdom of rushing into the Iraq War, putting much of the blame on President George W. Bush’s “iron-ass” advisers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
By Ray McGovern
Media reports on Jon Meacham’s biography of George H. W. Bush, the 41st President, have brought me a painful flashback to the deceptive, destructive – yet at the same time highly instructive – years 2002 and 2003, when his son George W. Bush, the 43rd President, attacked Iraq.
Reality should trump rhetoric regarding that godforsaken war – in my view the most unprincipled and consequential foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. This may be reason enough to renew focus on those years because, for many Americans, those events remain cloaked in mystery and misunderstanding.
With his candor about his eldest son, the 91-year-old Bush patriarch also has sounded what may be the death knell for the moribund campaign of his younger son Jeb to be president #45. I do not suggest that #41 did that consciously. His unusually unguarded remarks, though, will lead voters to be chary of yet another Bush, if only on the “fool me once … fool me twice” aphorism that Jeb’s big brother had trouble remembering.
Meacham’s Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush will not be available to the hoi polloi until next week. Details already reported on the critical years of 2002 and 2003, however, permit – I think, rather, dictate – some preliminary analysis, before the Karl Roves of this world create still more “new history.”
The clear and present danger of getting sucked into yet another quagmire or quicksand pool on false pretenses persists. Thus, it seems fitting and proper to review the lead-up to the unprovoked “shock and awe” on Iraq proudly launched in March 2003 by #43, egged on by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other white-collar thugs.
Despite the propaganda and more tangible signs of incipient war in Iraq, my former intelligence analyst colleagues and I – with considerable professional experience watching other countries prepare for aggression against others – were finding it difficult to believe that the United States of America would be doing precisely that.
Still harder was it to digest the notion that Washington would do so, absent credible evidence of any immediate threat and would “fix” intelligence to “justify” it. But that, sadly, is what happened. On March 19, 2003, U.S. “shock and awe” lit the sky over Baghdad.
A Dozen Years Later
That was more than 12 ½ years ago. That not one of the white-collar crooks responsible for the war and ensuing chaos has been held accountable is an indelible blot not only on our country, but also on international law and custom. After all, the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq fits snugly the definition given to a “war of aggression” as defined by the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal. Nuremberg labeled such a war “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
And the evil continued to accumulate: torture, kidnapping, black prisons, extrajudicial killing, massive invasions of privacy, and even the annulment of such basic human rights as the great writ of habeas corpus that was wrested from England’s King John 800 years ago. And, in the wake of this criminality, bedlam now reigns across large swaths of the Middle East driving millions of refugees into neighboring countries and Europe.
That the U.S. and U.K. leaders who launched the Iraq war have so far escaped apprehension and prosecution might be seen as a sad example of “victor’s justice.” But there are no victors, only victims. The reality that President George W. Bush and his co-conspirators remain unpunished makes a mockery of the commitment to the transcendent importance of evenhanded justice as expressed on Aug. 12, 1945, by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. representative at Nuremberg:
“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.”
Maybe it is partly because I know the elder Bush personally, but it does strike me that, since we are all human, some degree of empathy might be in order. I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to be a former President with a son, also a former President, undeniably responsible for such trespass on law – for such widespread killing, injury and abject misery.
It is something of a stretch, but I have tried to put myself into the shoes of the elder Bush. In them I find myself insecure and struggling – like Jacob – before his dream about wrestling with God. The story in Genesis shows Jacob full of anxiety, despite God’s promise that God would bless his dynasty. He cannot overcome his fear and is powerless to control his fate.
Jacob is aware that he is at a pivotal juncture but he is physically spent. Alone in the wilderness facing death, he collapses into a deep sleep, only to find himself wrestling all night with God. At daybreak he awakes with an injured hip; he is disabled but his life is spared. He had come to grips with God and, in the end, receives God’s blessing of peace.
What author Meacham has written suggests to me the possibility that the sins of the son are being visited on the father, to reverse one familiar Biblical expression.
In these circumstances, the tendency to require that thugs like Cheney and Rumsfeld bear their share of the blame seems quite human. And, to his credit, Bush-41 concedes “the buck stops” at the President. But I sense him thinking – correctly, in my view – that without those two “iron-ass” advisers, things would have been quite different. The son might even have paid more heed to the experienced cautions of the father and his associates.
Sins of Omission
As the senior Bush knows, sins of omission can be as consequential as those of commission. Judging from what he is quoted as saying in Meacham’s book, it appears he decided to make a (sort-of) clean breast of things – okay, call it a Watergate-style “modified, limited hangout,” if you will. But, clearly, Bush has to be painfully aware that he was one of only a handful of people who might have been able to stop the chaos and carnage, had he spoken out publicly in real time.
He does hedge, saying for example that he still believes the attack on Iraq was the right thing to do. But this is a position he staked out years ago and, especially at 91, it may be too much to expect of him that he acknowledge the full implications of what he says elsewhere in the book about the misguided advice of “hardline” Cheney and “arrogant” Rumsfeld together with where, after all, the buck does stop.
My take is that Bush-41 has not completed his wrestle with the truth and with the guilt he may feel for failing to warn the rest of us what to expect from George, Cheney and Rumsfeld as he watched it happen. The elder Bush did use surrogates – including two of his closest and most prominent friends, James Baker, his secretary of state, and Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, to speak out against the war.
But here the mainstream media was of no help. Instead of weighing the merits of the strong arguments of Baker, Scowcroft and other experienced foreign policy professionals made against attacking Iraq, the media gave inordinate attention to incessant debates as to whether the seeming surrogates were actually speaking for the elder Bush.
In effect, the media was demanding what they knew Bush senior would almost certainly not do, “Speak for yourself, George H. W. Bush.” He refused to do it; he would not even comment on the critical views expressed by Baker and Scowcroft on Bush-43’s plan to attack Iraq.
Sure, it would have been hard, but at the time Bush senior was only in his late 70s, as he watched his son fall in with bad companions the dishonesty and foolishness leading up to the attack on Iraq.
With his current modified, limited hangout – especially (his richly deserved) criticism of Cheney and Rumsfeld – Bush the elder may be able to live more comfortably with himself and to get past what I believe must be his regret now over having made no public effort to stop the madness back then.
The chronology below includes some of the more important events and may help inform those who have not had the time or inclination to follow the play-by-play as Cheney and Rumsfeld played on the younger Bush’s unabashed preening as “the first war president of the 21st century.”
Keeping a Watching Brief
The elder Bush knew all too well what was happening. He also knew what his son George was capable of – not to mention the inclinations of Cheney, Rumsfeld and other white-collar criminals. To be brutally candid, it is a little late for the family patriarch to be telling us all this – while blaming the Iraq debacle mostly on Cheney and Rumsfeld, quintessentially blameworthy though they are.
Worst still, if Bush-43 is to be believed, Bush senior had guilty foreknowledge of the war-crime attack on Iraq. George W. Bush divulges this in his 2014 Virgil-style paean to his father, “41: A Portrait of My Father,” in which he arrogates to himself Aeneas-like filial devotion. (Friends more cynical than me suggest that 43’s panegyric should be construed as a benign pre-emptive move to prevent the father from blabbing to his biographer.)
In any event, Bush-43 includes the following sentences about informing his father about plans to attack Iraq: ”We both knew that this was a decision that only the president can make. We did talk about the issue, however. Over Christmas 2002, at Camp David, I did give Dad an update on our strategy.”
By that time, the die had been cast. Frankly, it is as painful as it is instructive to review the flow of key events in the summer and early fall of 2002. But I believe it may be necessary, not only to outline what Bush senior was watching, but also to pre-empt the creation of false history. Here are some selected benchmarks:
July 23, 2002: Tony Blair and his principal national security advisers are briefed at 10 Downing Street by MI-6 chief Richard Dearlove, CIA Director George Tenet’s British counterpart, three days after Dearlove met with Tenet at CIA Headquarters. A participant in the July 23 briefing prepares minutes of the meeting that same day. They are eventually leaked and published in the London Times on May 1, 2005.
The minutes quote Dearlove, Foreign Minister Jack Straw, and Attorney-General Peter Goldsmith. First Dearlove: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” [Translation: Saddam Hussein will be accused of having weapons of mass destruction that he could give to terrorists.]
“But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. … The Foreign Secretary said the case [for war] was thin. … The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action.”
August 2002: President George W. Bush spends from August 6 to 31 clearing brush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card sets up a White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to “educate the public” on the alleged threat from Iraq. The group includes heavy hitters like political adviser Karl Rove, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s communications director Karen Hughes, and two officials from Dick Cheney’s entourage – Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Mary Matalin. In his memoir, Cheney notes that both Matalin and Libby “wore two hats” – serving as assistants to both Cheney and the President.
August 2002: With Bush in Crawford, there is trouble brewing for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others pushing for war on Iraq. Close associates of the elder Bush and other senior foreign policy mavens begin to speak out strongly against an attack on Iraq.
Brent Scowcroft leads off the campaign on Aug. 4 at CBS’s Face the Nation. Next up is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with an Aug. 12 Washington Post op-ed titled “Unilateral Attack Will Set Dangerous Precedent.” On Aug. 15, Scowcroft publishes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with the non-subtle title: “Don’t Attack Saddam.”
Also on Aug. 15, Lawrence Eagleburger, who served the elder Bush briefly as secretary of state, tells ABC News that unless Saddam Hussein “has his hand on a trigger that is for a weapon of mass destruction, and our intelligence is clear, I don’t know why we have to do it [attack Iraq] now.”
Then on Aug. 25, in a New York Times op-ed, Bush-41’s Secretary of State James Baker adduces, in a lawyerly but compelling way, virtually all the reasons that what Bush-43, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. had already decided on regarding Iraq would bring disaster.
Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, also says openly in August that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage had earlier advised President George W. Bush of their concerns about the risks and complexities of a military strike on Iraq.
More trouble for hawks like Cheney was brewing in the House. Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey publicly warned that an “unprovoked attack” on Iraq would be illegal, adding, “It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.”
(Armey later told Michael Isikoff, during an on-the-record interview for Isikoff’s book Hubris, that he had warned President George W. Bush that war on Iraq might result in a “quagmire.” He added that, while he found questionable the intelligence presented to him in support of such a war, he would give Bush the benefit of the doubt. According to Barton Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Cheney told Armey that Saddam Hussein’s family had direct ties to Al Qaeda and that Saddam was developing miniature nuclear weapons. Armey then voted for the war, but bitterly complained later that he had been “bullshitted” by Cheney.)
Stopping the Peace Juggernaut
With the President clearing brush and Andrew Card proceeding at what must have seemed to Cheney a dilatory pace, given the mounting opposition to war on Iraq, Cheney seized the bull by the horns, so to speak. Without a word to Secretary of State Powell or CIA Director Tenet, and not wanting to interrupt the President’s vacation, Cheney set the parameters for using “fixed” intelligence to reverse the alarming efforts toward peace.
With the apparent endorsement of Bush junior, when the President got back in town on Sept. 1, the juggernaut was redirected toward war. (One stands in awe of the unchallenged power Cheney was able to exert – even if it was, technically speaking, ad referendum the President.)
Cheney chose to include in an Aug. 26 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville extreme, unsubstantiated charges about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that set the terms of reference for virtually all that was to follow, including, I regret to say, the National Intelligence Estimate that my former colleagues were suborned into “fixing” around the policy.
In his Aug. 26, 2002 speech, Cheney broadly warned that Saddam Hussein intends to “subject the United States to nuclear blackmail.” He continued:
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. … What he wants is … more time to husband his resources to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain possession of nuclear weapons.…
“Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action. … The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.
“Against that background, a person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of shoot and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions.”
Colin Powell, George Tenet and others had five days, before Bush got back in town, to regain their composure after being blindsided by Cheney – time enough, apparently, to remind themselves about who it was that really had the President’s ear. There is no sign that either Powell or Tenet chose to make a federal case out of it, so to speak. Also choosing to remain silent was former the CENTCOM commander, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was right there at the VFW convention.
Hear No Evil — Speak No Truth
Zinni later said he was shocked to hear Cheney’s depiction of intelligence (Iraq has WMD and is amassing them to use against us) that did not square with what he knew. Although Zinni had retired two years before, his role as consultant had enabled him to stay up to date on key intelligence findings.
“There was no solid proof that Saddam had WMD. … I heard a case being made to go to war,” Zinni told “Meet the Press” 3 ½ years later.
The question lingers: why did Zinni not go public when he first heard Cheney lie? After all, he was one of the very few credible senior officials who might have prevented a war he knew was unnecessary. A tough, widely respected Marine intimidated by a Vice President with five draft deferments? It happens. It happened.
Secretary of State Powell was also blindsided, but there is no sign he summoned the courage to voice any objections directly to the President about Cheney’s version of the threat from Iraq and what had to be done about it.
CIA Director Tenet has written that he, too, was taken completely by surprise by what Cheney said. In his memoir, Tenet added, “I had the impression that the president wasn’t any more aware than we were of what his number-two was going to say to the VFW until he said it.” But Tenet, as noted above, knew only too well that the intelligence was being “fixed,” because he was in charge of fixing it.
So for Tenet the surprise was simply one of timing – that Cheney would go out on so long a limb before Bush got back from vacation.
From Cheney’s perspective the timing was perfect. With Bush out of town, it was even easier to avoid messy fights with what Cheney considered a troublesome, unnecessary bureaucracy (he had built up his own). And with UK Prime Minister Blair coming to Camp David six days after Bush got back, it would be cumbersome enough to fine-tune and coordinate the appropriate talking points for Bush to use with Blair on Sept. 7.
And so, with the month of August seeing a phalanx of senior Bush foreign policy advisers and other experts, as well as key Congressional leaders, speaking out in a troubling way against the war, an ever decisive Cheney decided he could not abide by the proverbial maxim that Andrew Card actually let drop publicly in early September: ”From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Just to be clear, the White House chief of staff was talking about marketing war.
By the time George W. Bush got back to the Oval Office, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) had gotten its instructions from Cheney on the strategy with which to approach Tony Blair to keep him harnessed onto the commander’s Jeep for war – with particular attention to the joint U.S.-U.K. “marketing” campaign to be launched, big time, the day after the Bush and Blair met at Camp David.
The media did a little warm-up, with the BBC reporting that President Bush had shared with Prime Minister Blair satellite photographs released by a UN agency that allegedly showed clear evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” said Mr. Bush. (There were no such photos.)
On Sunday, Sept. 8, came the opening salvo of the marketing campaign – a major propaganda blitz with all hands on deck. The WHIG had been doing its homework and was working with very accommodating media. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Meyers fanned out to the talk shows right after Bush gave Blair the word at Camp David.
The hot topic was new information, apparently made available by the administration to the New York Times a day or two before, concerning “aluminum tubes,” sought by Iraq, supposedly for use in refining uranium for a nuclear weapon.
Rice claimed that the tubes were “really are only suited to — high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” Rice acknowledged that “there will always be some uncertainty” in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but warned, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” (It turned out the tubes were actually for artillery known to be in Iraq’s inventory.)
Upon her return to the White House from CNN, she must have been awarded WHIG’s first Oscar. Cheney should have been runner-up for his Meet the Press performance accusing Saddam Hussein of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms. The Vice President actually let slip the White House strategy, expressing hope that Congress would vote for war before it recessed in October (mid-term elections coming the following month).
With members fearing accusations of “softness” if they resisted President Bush’s authorization to use force, Congress voted for war. The war was on.
Also, on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, Rumsfeld on Face the Nation warned that inspections in Iraq would have to be intrusive enough to ensure that Saddam Hussein is disarmed. Powell told Fox News that the Bush administration believes that the best way to disarm Iraq “is with a regime change.” And Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Myers on ABC’s This Week added, “We have the forces, we have the readiness. U.S. armed forces will prevail, if called upon to strike Iraq.”
Six Months Later
A half-year later on Feb. 15, 2003, as the elder Bush watched 30 million demonstrators in 800 cities around the world marching against the war for which Bush-43 was so keen, I suspect there may have been a tinge of regret at having pulled strings to ensure young George would not have to experience war by serving in Vietnam.
Unlike his father, George W. had not the foggiest notion of what war is like, and Bush-41 can be thought to have been painfully aware of that. It may have occurred to him to belatedly apply some tough-love to 43 or to even go public in a last-ditch effort to prevent the coming catastrophe. He probably knew that it was unrealistic to expect that the likes of Scowcroft and Baker could influence 43 to change course.
But George H. W. Bush continued to say and do nothing, waiting until now – more than a dozen years after the catastrophic Iraq War was launched – to voice his objections. An unhappy ending for the patriarch of a would-be dynasty.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He worked for George H. W. Bush when he was director of the CIA and again during the first Reagan administration when he briefed him mornings, one-on-one, with the President’s Daily Brief.

Let’s not forget the beast from the sea (Rev 13:10)

  
A reminder of Iraq mess
ROY LEHMAN

I saw the other day where former President George W. Bush’s reputation had been rehabilitated from the 22 percent approval rating he had when he left office to an astoundingly high rate of 52 percent today. I was reminded of the collective amnesia of Americans, which the politicians can always count on to ply them with their propaganda.

Remember back in 2007 when Bush was praised for bringing some stability to his newly minted sovereign nation project of Iraq due to his “surge” of troops into the country? Lost in all that pro-Bush propaganda was the decision of Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, playing the long game, to have his militia stand down and the Sunni “awakening” in Anbar province, which was really nothing more than bribes paid to the Sunni leaders of the tribes to Anbar province for some stability.
Then forward to 2008, near the merciful end of Bush’s second term, working with his handpicked prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, (Ayad Allawi couldn’t work due to him being a Sunni in the newly established democracy with a Shiite majority and it turned out Ahmed Chalabi, his prime choice, was aligned with Iran) Bush dodged a couple of shoes as he and Maliki announced that they had achieved an agreement for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by December 2011.

This little factoid seems to have gone down the public’s amnesia hole as the “conventional wisdom” in Republican World is that President Barack Obama pulled the troops out too soon, which is a bald-faced lie. To do what the right-wing wanted, leave troops in Iraq, would have meant Obama would have had to countermand the wishes of Bush’s newly minted sovereign nation while putting American military at risk of the Iraqi justice system due to Bush’s and Obama’s inability to negotiate a status of forces agreement with Maliki. Worldwide, America has a SOFA with every host nation to protect our military.

Call it a can of worms or Pandora’s box, but the instability in the Middle East was birthed by Bush. ISIS is a risk to the region and Obama is wise to try to get the regional powers to handle the situation as ISIS is nothing more than a minimal threat to America’s security.

Obama’s injecting more troops into Iraq is not the right answer as the Western world has no answers to a 1,200-year-old religious schism. More Bush-style bribes for stability in Anbar might work again. Everybody up for trading stability in Iraq for new infrastructure in the U.S.?

On another “bright” note, Bush’s brother Jeb, possible Republican nominee for president, thinks we should be sending more troops to Europe.

I’m hoping Jim Webb joins the presidential race. He is a logical thinking, pragmatic leader.
The writer lives in Woolwich.

Rumsfeld Reveals His True Color: Blood Red (Rev 13:10)

 

Rumsfeld: ‘Unrealistic’ for Bush to pursue democracy in Iraq

Published June 09, 2015
FoxNews.com

Donald Rumsfeld, one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, said in a recent interview that then-President George W. Bush was unrealistic to pursue democracy in the country.

Rumsfeld, who served as Bush’s defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, made the comments in an interview with the Times of London.

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” Rumsfeld said.

“The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

The comments are a departure from Rumsfeld’s robust public defense of the war during the Bush administration, and mark a rare break between him and the former president on foreign policy.

Since the 2003 invasion and the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq has held multiple elections. But most recently, majority Shiites have been accused of sidelining minority Sunnis, feeding tensions that were exploited by the Islamic State, a Sunni terror group.

Even as he voiced second thoughts about the U.S. goals in the Iraq war, Rumsfeld scolded western governments for their current failure to deal with Muslim extremists.

“The movement for a caliphate, the movement against nation states is central and fundamental. And no one’s talking about it,” he said.

In Iraq and Syria, foreign fighters have flocked to the region to join the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. Rumsfeld told the Times that western leaders are refusing to even admit the nature of the threat.

“If leaders aren’t willing to do it, why the hell should a guy with a wife and kids in the community put himself at risk?” he asked, describing the fight ahead as “more like the Cold War” — won with ideas, not “bullets.”

Rumsfeld also accused President Obama of abandoning “America’s historic role in promoting and defending free societies.”

The Sins Of The Son (Rev 13:10)

  

Bush invaded Iraq to revenge on his dad – Ex-CIA official
02.06.2015 | Source: Pravda.Ru

Former CIA Deputy Director has conceded real reasons of invasion to Iraq.

According to the official data, one of the reasons to trigger off war with the country at the other end of the world, was that senior officials at Bush’s Administration claimed that Iraq not only possessed nuclear weapons, but also posed a direct threat to the US.

As former Vice President Dick Cheney claimed at the time, Iraq was reconstituting nuclear weapons in addition to biological and chemical ones they owned.

Michael Morell, former CIA Deputy Director refuted the statement in the interview on May, 19 and said that was not true.

Morell admitted that politicized intelligence publicly perverted the truth and gave false information on Iraq’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction as well as Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

Indeed, Bush was hell-bent on revenge against Saddam Hussein, as evidenced in his statement a month before the report, “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

Morell said that his job was not to tell the truth, but “carry CIA’s best information and best analysis to the president of the United States and make sure he understands it.”

– See more at: http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/02-06-2015/130841-iraq-0/#sthash.kqKZLrcl.dpuf

His Brother The Beast Will Cost Jeb The Election (Rev 13)

 
His Brother The Beast Will Cost Jeb The Election (Rev 13)

Dylan Stableford
Senior editor

Jeb Bush says that he would have authorized the 2003 war in Iraq — just like his brother did.
“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,” the former Florida governor told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly Saturday after delivering the commencement address at Liberty University in Virginia. “And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”

Bush, brother of former President George W. Bush and likely 2016 presidential candidate, said mistakes were made in not securing the country.

“By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush,” Jeb Bush said. “Yes, I mean, so just for the news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”

Last month, George W. Bush sharply criticized President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, saying his successor pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq too quickly and mishandled nuclear negotiations with Iran.
“You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren,” the former president was quoted by Bloomberg telling Jewish donors at the closed-door event. “That’s how Americans should view the deal.’”

Bush also told attendees that he likely won’t do any campaigning for his younger brother because he thinks it would hurt Jeb’s 2016 chances.

“That’s why you won’t see me,” he said, according to the New York Times.

In his speech at Liberty University, Jeb Bush took a jab at the Obama administration on religious freedom.

“Federal authorities are demanding obedience, in complete disregard of religious conscience,” he said in his speech. “What should be easy calls in favor of religious freedom have instead become an aggressive stance against it. Somebody here is being small-minded and intolerant, and it sure isn’t the nuns, ministers, and laymen and women who ask only to live and practice their faith.”

The Republican presidential hopeful bestows his wisdom to the graduating class of 2015.
In his interview with Fox News, Bush talked about an issue on which he seems less conservative than some of his GOP peers: immigration.

“I mean, there’s got to be a point where we fix this system so that legal immigration is easier than illegal immigration and show some respect for people,” he said. “[To] a kid that might have been here 10 years, that might be a valedictorian of their high school, to say, ‘No, no, no, you’re not allowed to go to college,’ I just think there’s a point passed which we’re over the line.”

The Beast Of The Sea Opens His Boastful Mouth (Rev 13:10)

  
George W. Bush Bashes Obama on Middle East

By Josh Rogin

In a closed-door meeting with Jewish donors on Saturday night, former President George W. Bush delivered his harshest public criticisms to date against his successor on foreign policy, saying that President Barack Obama is being naïve about Iran and the pending nuclear deal and losing the war against the Islamic State.

One attendee at the Republican Jewish Coalition session, held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas with owner Sheldon Adelson in attendance, transcribed large portions of Bush’s remarks. The former president, who rarely ever criticizes Obama in public, at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do. He then proceeded to explain why Obama, in his view, was placing the U.S. in “retreat” around the world. He also said Obama was misreading Iran’s intentions while relaxing sanctions on Tehran too easily. 

According to the attendee’s transcription, Bush noted that Iran has a new president, Hassan Rouhani. “He’s smooth,” Bush said. “And you’ve got to ask yourself, is there a new policy or did they just change the spokesman?”

Bush said that Obama’s plan to lift sanctions on Iran with a promise that they could snap back in place at any time was not plausible. He also said the deal would be bad for American national security in the long term: “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the deal.”  

Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama’s policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. On Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011, he quoted Senator Lindsey Graham calling it a “strategic blunder.” Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaeda’s “second act” and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration’s handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch: “Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo, and now they’re doing it on TV.”

Obama promised to degrade and destroy Islamic State’s forces but then didn’t develop a strategy to complete the mission, Bush said. He said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your military and say ‘What’s your plan?’ ” He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007, by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

“In order to be an effective president … when you say something you have to mean it,” he said. “You gotta kill em.”

Bush told several anecdotes about his old friend and rival Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bush recalled that Putin met his dog Barney at the White House and then later, when Bush went to Moscow, Putin showed him his dog and remarked that he was “bigger stronger and faster than Barney.” For Bush, that behavior showed him that Putin didn’t think in “win-win” terms.

Bush also remarked that Putin was rich, divorced his wife and loves power. Putin’s domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush. “Hell, I’d be popular, too, if I owned NBC news,” he said.

Regarding his brother Jeb’s potential run for the presidency, Bush acknowledged that he was a political liability for Jeb, that the Bush name can be used against him, and that Americans don’t like dynasties. He also said that foreign policy is going to be especially important in the presidential campaign and that the test for Republicans running will be who has got the “courage” to resist isolationist tendencies.

Regarding Hillary Clinton, Bush said it will be crucial how she plays her relationship with the president. She will eventually have to choose between running on the Obama administration’s policies or running against them. If she defends them, she’s admitting failure, he said, but if she doesn’t she’s blaming the president.

For George W. Bush, the remarks in Vegas showed he has little respect for how the current president is running the world. He also revealed that he takes little responsibility for the policies that he put in place that contributed to the current state of affairs.

To contact the author on this story:
Josh Rogin at joshrogin@bloomberg.net

George The Beast Of The Sea Speaks Boastful Words (Rev 13:1-10)

ANALYSIS: WMDs: The Rhetoric Fueling The War On Terror And The Arab Spring

The “weapons of mass destruction” premise has proven to be a mere pretext for war. It has ultimately done little more than distract attention away from the death and destruction wrought by intervening forces.

 

By Ramona Wadi  @walzerscent | January 22, 2015

President Bush speaks at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on Monday, July 12, 2004. Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq even as he conceded that investigators had not found the weapons of mass destruction that he had warned the country possessed. “Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq,” Bush said after inspecting a display of nuclear weapons parts and equipment from Libya, which were sent to Oak Ridge as part of an agreement with Moammar Gadhafi to end his country’s nuclear weapons program. Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP

RABAT, Malta — The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) premise has proven useful throughout the United States’ continued imperialist infiltration of the Middle East. Indeed, former President George W. Bush’s address to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001 can be read as a prelude to more recent intervention galvanized under the banner of democracy.

In his address, Bush remarked: “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars – but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil … Americans have known surprise attacks – but never before on thousands of civilians.”

He blamed al-Qaida for 9/11, and as his speech continued, he invoked the NATO Charter, Article 5 of which states, “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Armed with this justification, Bush declared the “war on terror.”

“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush said. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

After commencing in Afghanistan, the war on terror was taken to Iraq in 2003, where the WMD narrative was again used toward the ultimate goal of forcing a regime change.

But it didn’t stop there. The process that facilitated imperialist violence in Iraq was repeated, albeit under different circumstances, during the Arab Spring — especially in Libya. Apart from the U.S., active participants include NATO and the United Nations, whose input ensured the destruction of countries and, consequently, their subjugation.

A 2007 interview with U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark offers insight into the events unfolding around the Arab Spring. Clark said that a U.S. general, whose name is not disclosed, had told him, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

A history of subjugation and pretexts for war

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 represents the first step taken by the British and the French toward limiting Arab independence as they carved out new states from the Ottoman Empire. It established the strategy of dividing the Middle East along ethnic, sectarian and tribal lines.

In 1917, British imperialism set the foundations for a stronger, hostile presence in the Middle East with the Balfour Declaration, which approved a national home for Jews in Palestine. The inception of Israel in 1948 provided a solid settler-colonial presence in the Middle East — a presence hostile to Arabs and one which serves as a stronghold for the U.S.

Then, in 1945, the U.N. Charter established a hegemonic interpretation of intervention and domination. Chapter VII of the Charter legitimizes foreign intervention in the case of “threats to peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression.” U.S. aggression in Iraq is an example of violence being sanctioned under the auspices of the U.N. Charter. In this case, an ambiguous WMD premise was leveraged by the U.S. to facilitate regime change, install a U.S.-aligned government, and provide the foundations for mutating violence – the most recent such mutation to emerge has been the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

On Nov. 8, 2002, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441, which was meant to serve as a warning that would compel Saddam Hussein to comply with previous resolutions. It specifically asserted that Iraq constituted a threat to the international community due to its “non-compliance with Council resolutions and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles.”

Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, declared Resolution 1441 to be a mere pretext for the intended war in Iraq: “No government that talked to President Bush or his advisers since Resolution 1441 was passed in November 2002 could have any doubt that within a few months the Americans would announce a breach of this resolution as well as retaliatory measures.”

Meanwhile, from August 2002 to March 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush publicly reiterated the chemical weapons propaganda to the U.S. public as a pretext for the invasion.

The U.S. also set out to dismantle resistant nations’ means of maintaining their economic independence, thus allowing the U.S. to control oil wealth — a strategy that requires constant turmoil in the region. Bush signed Executive Order 13303 in 2003, giving immunity to oil companies controlling Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Purportedly enacted to protect the Development Fund for Iraq — a project affiliated with the World Bank, it exempts U.S. companies from being investigated for a wide range of violations, including those pertaining to human rights.

Chemical weapons

Recent reports in U.S. media indicate that troops in Iraq — both American troops and American-trained Iraqi troops — encountered chemical weapons from 2004 to 2011, including remnants of nerve and mustard gases. These weapons had mostly been left behind by Saddam’s regime, and were built with heavy cooperation with the West. However, this discovery was not made public at the time, as it would have rendered Bush’s WMD premise false and distorted the prevailing narrative.

U.N. weapons inspectors found no evidence of WMD manufacturing or possession of banned weapons throughout their investigation in Iraq. Given that the invasion and subsequent military occupation of Iraq was based on allegations that Saddam constituted a major threat through an alleged WMD program, a declaration on behalf of the U.S. government regarding the discovery of old, abandoned weapons would have been in glaring contrast to the propaganda disseminated by the Bush administration.

The truth was kept secret and manipulated to such an extent that affected troops were prevented from receiving medical care. Thus, holding onto that false premise was prioritized over dealing with the reality — troops injured by decades-old weapons.

A New York Times report in October states that the bulk of the material “could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin.” Manufactured between 1979 and 1981 in an attempt to counter the Iranian Revolution under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rule, Germany and the U.S. are two countries mentioned as responsible for aiding Iraq’s production of chemical weapons during that period.

Yet the U.S. forces’ use of white phosphorus in Fallujah in 2004 – a toxic and incendiary weapon which is restricted under the 1980 Protocol on Incendiary Weapons and prohibited under the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention — was manipulated to fall beyond the parameters of WMD and accountability. The U.S. State Department attempted to counter reports on the use of chemical weapons during the war in Fallujah by stating that white phosphorus was used “to illuminate enemy positions at night.” However, graphic images are testimony to the fact that white phosphorus was used during the attack in a manner that constituted a massacre.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization remains reluctant to link the high rate of congenital birth defects in Iraq to the depleted uranium used by the U.S. In the FAQ section pertaining to the congenital birth defect study that started in Iraq in 2012, the WHO explicitly states that the study, carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of Health in Iraq, will not delve into the link between birth defects and use of depleted uranium.

Either way, destruction and death

In 2011, prior to NATO’s invasion of Libya under the pretense of aiding the Arab Spring, former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Galil claimed that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was in possession of biological and chemical weapons.

“At the end, when he’s really pressured, he can do anything,” Galil told Al-Jazeera. “I think Gaddafi would burn everything left behind him.”

The destruction which leaders like Saddam and Gaddafi were expected to bring upon their countries was averted, of course. Yet toppling these leaders required a cycle of bombings, massacres and mass graves — all in the name of democracy.

Other than sensationalism to further instability in the Middle East and thus cement imperialist domination, the pretext of WMDs has proven irrelevant as a reason for foreign intervention. While no longer needed as justification for pre-emptive war, imperialist forces are still utilizing a variation of the narrative to divert attention away from the violence wrought by U.S. and NATO bombings. This, in turn, renders “liberated” countries subservient to contemporary forms of colonization.

The Bush Administration Was The Beast Of The Sea (Revelation 13:1-10)

National Politics Bears No Stamp Of God’s Approval

Published: Thursday, December 4, 2014 at 12:01 a.m.

Last Modified: Wednesday, December 3, 2014 at 10:56 p.m.

Richard Hilliard’s recent letter states that God has given the U.S. a second chance [“God Has Given U.S. 2nd Chance,” Nov. 16].

I don’t believe God has anything to do with it. He would not put his seal on anything as corrupt as politics. Our problems are not the fault of President Barack Obama.

His predecessor was the beginning of our problems. He and his leader R.B. Cheney thought they would look good in the historical record if they were wartime presidents. So they got a few other countries to form a so-called coalition and talked the American people into believing that Iraq had nuclear weapons of mass destruction that would reach the U.S.

Quoting part of Cheney’s speech for invading Iraq, “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,” when, in reality, he had very few small arms, let alone weapons of mass destruction of any kind.

The Iraq war cost 4,500 young American soldiers their lives, and many others were maimed and crippled for life. Countless Iraqi people lost their lives. The cost in money for this bogus war is almost $2 trillion.

Did God approve of this? The writer speaks of taking our country back. I ask where to? The Dark Ages? In my 84 years, I don’t recall our country being taken from us. This country doesn’t belong to one political party or another.

Religion should have no place in government. It says so in the U.S. Constitution. The God I’ve been taught to believe in would not condone what’s going on in these fanatical religious organizations that try to claim our county has been blessed by God.

The U.S. has been blessed by the hardworking immigrants who came here to escape religious tyranny.

AMOS MERRITT

Beast Of The Sea Is Delusional (Revelation 13:7)

George W. Bush: U.S. Is Safer Because We Invaded Iraq

The Huffington Post  | By Igor Bobic

 

Posted: 11/12/2014 1:09 pm EST Updated: 3 hours ago

 

Former President George W. Bush isn’t done spinning the Iraq War, one of the longest and costliest conflicts in U.S. history, as a net positive for both nations.

Discussing his new book 41: A Portrait of My Father, which touches on his father’s legacy, Bush was asked on NPR Wednesday morning whether he thought Iraq is safer now compared with when Saddam Hussein was in power. The answer that followed was a vague “hypothetical” of Hussein’s capabilities had the U.S. not intervened — under what many believe to be false pretenses.

“One could envision a nuclear arms race between Iran and Iraq. The man, Saddam Hussein, would have a lot of revenue as a result of high prices of oil,” Bush said. “And even though there wasn’t, you know, a — we found a dirty bomb, for example — he had the capacity to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And so there’s — you know, it’s all very hypothetical.”

“I could argue that we’re much safer without Saddam,” he added. “And I would argue that the people of Iraq have a better shot at living in a peaceful — a peaceful state.”

A “hypothetical” where Iraqis have “a better shot” at peace is a far cry from democratic nation-building, given recent developments — the rise of the Islamic State, for one – that have yet to give way to stability.

But Bush argued that his successor was to blame, because the U.S. failed to maintain a troop presence in the country. He noted that “in 2009 and 2010, the violence in Iraq was settling down. And the democracy, even though it was not perfect — kind of like ours was initially not perfect — was beginning to work.”

H/T The Washington Post

What If It Weren’t For George W Bush, the Beast of the Sea? (Rev 13:1)

The Way It Weren’t

Where’s Saddam when we need him?
by Bill Cope | September 24, 2014

Late at night, when you’re struggling to get to sleep but you can’t because you’re too worried about the Middle East–about guys who dress like ninjas beheading guys in orange scrubs; about the entire region disintegrating back to stone-age values, only with nuclear-age weapons–do you ever wonder what things would be like if Saddam Hussein were still in power?

Alternative timelines have long been a staple of sci-fi writers, historical revisionists and chronic day-dreamers. Who can forget Captain Kirk’s adventures on planets where the Roman Empire had never fallen, where Hitler won and the society was a fascist nightmare, or where Capone-ish gangsters with tommy guns were living like their world was all a rum-running racket? And did you know there are novels out that give those nostalgic for the Confederacy a pretend history in which the South was triumphant and the whole U.S. of A. now lives as it did in antebellum Dixie?
So, as useless as it is in any real sense, it’s not unusual for someone to wonder “What if?” For instance…

…what if George W. Bush had been born with even enough intelligence to learn something useful from his father, who was born with enough intelligence to know… yes, Saddam Hussein was a triple-A asshole, and no doubt murdered a great many of his own people… but that this particular area of the Earth’s surface was known for producing triple-A assholes, and that there were plenty more of them lurking around in the shadow of Saddam, just itching for a chance to come out from under their rocks and demonstrate their leadership style–which, in that neck of the desert, often amounts to murdering a great many of their own people?

And what if Bush, rather than invading a place where the perpetrators of 9/11 weren’t, had instead focused his meager attentions on where the perpetrators of 9/11 were; and rather than destroying one of the few regimes in the Middle East that was even more adamant than America about denying Jihadist savages a place to set up shop, he would have directed America’s awesome vengeance exclusively at those countries where Jihadist savages had been allowed to set up shop?

And what if Bush had not unleashed hell on the wrong country, leaving as many innocent civilians dead as Saddam could only dream about; that he and his neo-con cohorts had not turned the Iraqi military into a shambles that we’ve spent the past 10 years trying to rehabilitate; that the infrastructure and administrative capabilities of Iraq had not been smart-bombed into dust; and that there was still a functioning government in Iraq, no matter that it didn’t quite live up to American standards–standards that America itself is struggling to live up to?

And what if Saddam Hussein was still there, still the strong man in Iraq–(this is a particularly iffy “what if,” since he would now be 77 years old, which is pretty over-the-hill-ish for a “strong man”)–and either he or his asshole sons (Uday and Ixnay?) were still managing to keep asshole Jihadists savages from setting up shop anywhere in that country?

And what if there had never been a unilateral invasion, a surge, a sectarian civil war and 30,000-plus American soldiers dead or severely damaged?

And what if we’d never heard of WMDs, which didn’t exist, or IEDs, which did? Or billions of dollars being delivered on pallets into the unaccountability of corrupt contractors and Dick Cheney’s old pals at Halliburton? Or the purple finger sign that Iraqis were voting, as it has turned out, for the majority power of the Shia to screw the Sunni like the minority Sunni had screwed the Shia for all those years? Or the Iraqi treasury, armories and museums being looted like a convenience store during a hurricane. Or Fallujah? Or the Green Zone? Or the Ba’ath Party or Nouri al-Maliki or Muqtada al-Sadr?

What if we’d never had to withdraw our troops because they were never there in the first place? And what if we’d kept it like we had it before March 2003, when a no-fly zone was keeping Saddam from dropping any more poison gas on the Kurds? When Saddam was always bitching about us and we were always bitching about him, only a lot more people–ours and his–were still alive? When the cities and roads and power grid were still in one piece? When Saddam’s army, as feeble as it proved to be when it went up against ours, would have been plenty strong enough to squash ISIS like a baby camel spider, assuming those asshole Jihadist savages even had the nerve to show up when the asshole Saddam was in power? When we hadn’t thrown only-god-knows-how-many-zillions of dollars into the ancient winds that have blown through those sands since the beginning of time and swept away greater empires and greater armies and greater monuments to assholes of the past than Saddam could even dream of, all without any help from Hellfire missiles and bunker-buster bombs?
And what if George W. Bush had developed a strategy which thoughtfully and deeply considered the ramifications of what he was about to do before he did it, rather than recklessly casting America’s fate to those ancient winds, hoping “It’ll work out in the end… somehow?”

And finally, what if Bush’s strategy had succeeded, rather than so miserably failed, leaving the
following president, and most likely the president after him, and the president after her, etc. etc. etc. to be haunted by the eternal curse of George W. asshole Bush’s legacy?

Ah, what if… what if…
Now, back to what is.

Is It Really Just al-Qa’ida? The Saudi Connection

Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed 
The Underrated Saudi Connection 

The Original Source of Jihad

By Patrick Cockburn

[This essay is excerpted from the first chapter of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, with special thanks to his publisher, OR Books.  The first section is a new introduction written for TomDispatch.]

There are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities.

But U.S., Western European, Saudi, and Arab Gulf policy is to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which happens to be the policy of ISIS and other jihadis in Syria. If Assad goes, then ISIS will be the beneficiary, since it is either defeating or absorbing the rest of the Syrian armed opposition. There is a pretense in Washington and elsewhere that there exists a “moderate” Syrian opposition being helped by the U.S., Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis.  It is, however, weak and getting more so by the day. Soon the new caliphate may stretch from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean and the only force that can possibly stop this from happening is the Syrian army.

The reality of U.S. policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well.  This has now happened.

By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

Using the al-Qa’ida Label

The sharp increase in the strength and reach of jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been unacknowledged until recently by politicians and media in the West. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qa‘ida central or “core” al-Qa‘ida. This enables them to present a much more cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called war on terror than the situation on the ground warrants.

In fact, the idea that the only jihadis to be worried about are those with the official blessing of al-Qa‘ida is naïve and self-deceiving. It ignores the fact, for instance, that ISIS has been criticized by the al-Qa‘ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for its excessive violence and sectarianism. After talking to a range of Syrian jihadi rebels not directly affiliated with al-Qa‘ida in southeast Turkey earlier this year, a source told me that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the U.S.”

Jihadi groups ideologically close to al-Qa‘ida have been relabeled as moderate if their actions are deemed supportive of U.S. policy aims. In Syria, the Americans backed a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up a “Southern Front” based in Jordan that would be hostile to the Assad government in Damascus, and simultaneously hostile to al-Qa‘ida-type rebels in the north and east. The powerful but supposedly moderate Yarmouk Brigade, reportedly the planned recipient of anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi Arabia, was intended to be the leading element in this new formation. But numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in collaboration with JAN, the official al-Qa‘ida affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of battle, these two groups would share their munitions, Washington was effectively allowing advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest enemy. Iraqi officials confirm that they have captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers to forces considered to be anti-al-Qa‘ida in Syria.

The name al-Qa‘ida has always been applied flexibly when identifying an enemy. In 2003 and 2004 in Iraq, as armed Iraqi opposition to the American and British-led occupation mounted, U.S. officials attributed most attacks to al-Qa‘ida, though many were carried out by nationalist and Baathist groups. Propaganda like this helped to persuade nearly 60% of U.S. voters prior to the Iraq invasion that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and those responsible for 9/11, despite the absence of any evidence for this. In Iraq itself, indeed throughout the entire Muslim world, these accusations have benefited al-Qa‘ida by exaggerating its role in the resistance to the U.S. and British occupation.

Precisely the opposite PR tactics were employed by Western governments in 2011 in Libya, where any similarity between al-Qa‘ida and the NATO-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was played down. Only those jihadis who had a direct operational link to the al-Qa‘ida “core” of Osama bin Laden were deemed to be dangerous. The falsity of the pretense that the anti-Gaddafi jihadis in Libya were less threatening than those in direct contact with al-Qa‘ida was forcefully, if tragically, exposed when U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by jihadi fighters in Benghazi in September 2012. These were the same fighters lauded by Western governments and media for their role in the anti-Gaddafi uprising.

Imagining al-Qa’ida as the Mafia

Al-Qa‘ida is an idea rather than an organization, and this has long been the case. For a five-year period after 1996, it did have cadres, resources, and camps in Afghanistan, but these were eliminated after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Subsequently, al-Qa‘ida’s name became primarily a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs, centering on the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and the waging of holy war against other Muslims, notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy of death. At the center of this doctrine for making war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. This has resulted in using untrained but fanatical believers as suicide bombers, to devastating effect.

It has always been in the interest of the U.S. and other governments that al-Qa‘ida be viewed as having a command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon, or like the mafia in America. This is a comforting image for the public because organized groups, however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the reality of a movement whose adherents are self-recruited and can spring up anywhere.

Osama bin Laden’s gathering of militants, which he did not call al-Qa‘ida until after 9/11, was just one of many jihadi groups 12 years ago. But today its ideas and methods are predominant among jihadis because of the prestige and publicity it gained through the destruction of the Twin Towers, the war in Iraq, and its demonization by Washington as the source of all anti-American evil. These days, there is a narrowing of differences in the beliefs of jihadis, regardless of whether or not they are formally linked to al-Qa‘ida central.

Unsurprisingly, governments prefer the fantasy picture of al-Qa‘ida because it enables them to claim victories when it succeeds in killing its better known members and allies. Often, those eliminated are given quasi-military ranks, such as “head of operations,” to enhance the significance of their demise. The culmination of this heavily publicized but largely irrelevant aspect of the “war on terror” was the killing of bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan in 2011. This enabled President Obama to grandstand before the American public as the man who had presided over the hunting down of al-Qa‘ida’s leader. In practical terms, however, his death had little impact on al-Qa‘ida-type jihadi groups, whose greatest expansion has occurred subsequently.


Ignoring the Roles of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

The key decisions that enabled al-Qa‘ida to survive, and later to expand, were made in the hours immediately after 9/11. Almost every significant element in the project to crash planes into the Twin Towers and other iconic American buildings led back to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was a member of the Saudi elite, and his father had been a close associate of the Saudi monarch. Citing a CIA report from 2002, the official 9/11 report says that al-Qa‘ida relied for its financing on “a variety of donors and fundraisers, primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia.”

The report’s investigators repeatedly found their access limited or denied when seeking information in Saudi Arabia. Yet President George W. Bush apparently never even considered holding the Saudis responsible for what happened. An exit of senior Saudis, including bin Laden relatives, from the U.S. was facilitated by the U.S. government in the days after 9/11. Most significant, 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report about the relationship between the attackers and Saudi Arabia were cut and never published, despite a promise by President Obama to do so, on the grounds of national security.

In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the U.S. and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube, and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shia as heretics. These calls came as al-Qa‘ida bombs were slaughtering people in Shia neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: “Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism as Foreign Policy?” Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.

Pakistan, or rather Pakistani military intelligence in the shape of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was the other parent of al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, and jihadi movements in general. When the Taliban was disintegrating under the weight of U.S. bombing in 2001, its forces in northern Afghanistan were trapped by anti-Taliban forces. Before they surrendered, hundreds of ISI members, military trainers, and advisers were hastily evacuated by air. Despite the clearest evidence of ISI’s sponsorship of the Taliban and jihadis in general, Washington refused to confront Pakistan, and thereby opened the way for the resurgence of the Taliban after 2003, which neither the U.S. nor NATO has been able to reverse.

The “war on terror” has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The U.S. did not do so because these countries were important American allies whom it did not want to offend. Saudi Arabia is an enormous market for American arms, and the Saudis have cultivated, and on occasion purchased, influential members of the American political establishment. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of 180 million and a military with close links to the Pentagon.

The spectacular resurgence of al-Qa‘ida and its offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of American and British intelligence services and their budgets after 9/11. Since then, the U.S., closely followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and adopted procedures normally associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture, and domestic espionage. Governments wage the “war on terror” claiming that the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed to secure the safety of all.

In the face of these controversial security measures, the movements against which they are aimed have not been defeated but rather have grown stronger. At the time of 9/11, al-Qa‘ida was a small, generally ineffectual organization; by 2014 al-Qa‘ida-type groups were numerous and powerful.
In other words, the “war on terror,” the waging of which has shaped the political landscape for so much of the world since 2001, has demonstrably failed. Until the fall of Mosul, nobody paid much attention.

Patrick Cockburn is Middle East correspondent for the Independent and worked previously for the Financial Times. He has written three books on Iraq’s recent history as well as a memoir, The Broken Boy, and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry’s Demons. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. His forthcoming book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, is now available exclusively from OR Books. This excerpt (with an introductory section written for TomDispatch) is taken from that book.
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