The Incompetency of Babylon the Great

 

The CIA Comedy of Saddam Hussein
By Adam Fleming Petty

FEBRUARY 4, 2017

WHAT IS THE GENRE of the Iraq War? What do the hundreds of books written on the subject over the last 15 years have in common? You might begin by reading terse accounts by and about soldiers, stories of men, and a few women, struggling to maintain their lives and dignity both on the field and back at home. Or perhaps you would choose the geopolitical intrigues of journalists and historians, labyrinths of ideology, power, and money.

Among this growing genre, John Nixon’s Debriefing the President is nearly unique, resembling nothing so much as a workplace comedy. Forget American Sniper or Zero Dark Thirty — the nearest analogue to Nixon’s story of meetings going nowhere and supervisors talking past each other may very well be The Office.

The bureaucratic absurdism appears right at the start, and only increases. In 2003, CIA analyst Nixon was stationed in Iraq, sorting through intelligence briefings. A five-year veteran of the Agency at this point, he had previously spent his time at Langley monitoring Iraq in general, and Saddam in particular. When US forces captured Saddam on December 13, 2003, following a lead from one of the leader’s former bodyguards, Nixon made an ideal candidate for debriefing him. He couldn’t help but be excited at the prospect of speaking to a world historical figure at length. He hoped to ask Saddam the questions he had been pondering for years, to gain invaluable insights into his background and motivations. However, Nixon was alone in his enthusiasm. Everyone else seemed to regard the debriefing of High Value Target Number One as, at best, an inconvenience. Nixon writes:

[It never] occurred to me that our government had never prepared for capturing Saddam alive. U.S. officials took it as a foregone conclusion that Saddam would kill himself rather than be captured, or be killed as he tried to escape. When he was captured alive, no one knew what to do.

This is a microcosm of the ineptitude that went into launching the war, the first example of many in the book.

After a week of dithering, during which crucial opportunities for extracting intelligence from the rattled subject were squandered, Nixon begins his debriefing. But his hands are still tied: he receives orders to not question Saddam about terrorism. The FBI will handle that when they arrive and start to build their criminal case against him.

Nothing about terrorism? Isn’t that why they’re here in the first place? Nixon is frustrated, but realizes this could allow him to focus on Saddam’s character and history without worrying about gleaning the right piece of intelligence under deadline. This open-ended approach suits Nixon, who has a scholar’s interest in Saddam. But it’s an interest that few of his colleagues share.

The portrait Nixon sketches here is fascinating, offering details that have been misrepresented or completely missed elsewhere. For example, it was widely known that Saddam grew up poor in Tikrit, a backwater village north of Baghdad. After the death of his father when Saddam was very young, one of his uncles became his stepfather and raised him. The going theory in the intelligence community was that Saddam’s stepfather was cruel, beating him from a young age, and that withstanding such abuse made Saddam into a cruel dictator.

Saddam was certainly vicious, but not for this reason. Nixon learns that Saddam loved his stepfather, “the kindest man he knew.” A minor discrepancy, perhaps, but one that speaks to a larger laziness on the part of US leaders to understand Saddam on his own terms, within the context that shaped him, rather than the pop psychology of a supervillain. Indeed, this Dr. Doom view of Saddam informed US policy in Iraq since the administration of Bush the Elder, and almost certainly did more harm than good.

Take the military. The popular view held that the Iraqi army was effectively an extension of Saddam himself, the fearsome Republican Guard ready to defend their leader at all costs. But as Nixon writes, Saddam had little idea what the military was actually doing:

In his final years, Saddam appeared to be as clueless about what was happening inside Iraq as his British and American enemies were […] Saddam had deep respect for the military but only a primitive understanding of military affairs. He seemed to have learned little from Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran.

This is not how US forces saw the matter. As part of their “de-Ba’athification” effort to rid the country of every last trace of Saddam, the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer, eliminated the upper ranks of the Iraqi military. Thousands of generals, colonels, and lieutenants were fired en masse, forcing them to look for work. Though the military was not without blemish, it was relatively stable, and its stability likely owed something to the fact that Saddam didn’t manage it too closely. Had the command infrastructure remained, it could have provided the CPA with a foundation for establishing a more stable Iraqi society. Instead, the streets were flooded with disgruntled military officers looking to put their skills to use. And they did: many of them were absorbed into the insurgency forces that coalesced into ISIS. Second-guessing is perhaps too easy when it comes to history, but it is likely that this decision — made by Bremer, who carried out orders from Donald Rumsfeld — did much to fortify the Islamic State that terrorizes Iraqi citizens to this day.

If Saddam wasn’t overseeing the military, what was he doing? Writing novels, of all things. He considered himself a man of letters, naming The Old Man and the Sea as his favorite book. He tells Nixon, “A man, a boat and a fishing line. These are the only ingredients to the book, but they tell us so much about man’s condition. A marvelous story.” In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Saddam spent his time not preparing for war, but going over the manuscript for his latest historical epic, sending it out to one of his ministers for a critique. The Romans fiddled as their city burned. When Baghdad went to war, Saddam workshopped his fiction.

Saddam, so everyone said, was a cancer on the Iraqi body politic. This gets Saddam right, but mischaracterizes the patient. There is an episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns visits a doctor and learns that he is “the sickest man in the United States,” afflicted with every disease known to science along with a few ones unique to him. However, the diseases are so numerous that they keep one another in check, preventing any one from overtaking Mr. Burns’s health. A harmony of sickness, you could say. This is not unlike the political situation in Iraq, a complex state that US warmongers failed to appreciate, spectacularly so.

Saddam didn’t see himself as a cancer, of course. He was the great leader that Iraq needed, the heir of Mesopotamian glories. But he discerned the other diseases afflicting the country with far greater acuity than anyone in the Bush administration. More than Iran, more than the majority Shi’a population, Saddam feared the Wahhabist-influenced extremists who were making a name for themselves throughout the Arab world. What Saddam found so worrisome about such fundamentalists was that their ideology was religious more than nationalistic, allowing them to appeal to marginalized communities in many different countries with failed despotic leaders. Likely because he was such an ardent nationalist, with delusions of Iraqi grandeur, he saw the threat that transnational extremist groups posed to his own country far more accurately than leaders ensconced in the Beltway. Get rid of Iraq’s leader, dismantle its military, and fundamentalists would swarm the country like locusts. In this regard, time has proven Saddam exactly right.

So the United States had sketchy intelligence regarding the political situation before the war. But once Saddam was captured and thoroughly debriefed, weren’t leaders better equipped to handle the growing insurgency? Answering that question is where Nixon’s book becomes not just compelling, but enraging.

After completing the debriefing process, Nixon returns to the United States, working a desk at Langley again. The final chapters detail several encounters with the Bush White House itself, briefing the president on several issues unfolding in Iraq. No matter the topic at hand, whether it’s rising Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or Iraqi sovereignty, Bush proves himself again and again to have little interest in the nuances and subtleties that constitute foreign policy. If it’s not cut and dry, he’s not interested. This worldview has been well documented, but Nixon has the unique perspective of one who has sat in rooms with George W. Bush and his avowed enemy. The way he writes it, they seemed to be made for each other:

One of the great ironies of the Iraq War was that brutal dictator Saddam Hussein and freedom fighter George W. Bush were alike in many ways. Both had haughty, imperious demeanors. Both were fairly ignorant of the outside world and had rarely traveled abroad. Both tended to see things as black and white, good and bad, or for and against, and became uncomfortable when presented with multiple alternatives. Both surrounded themselves with compliant advisers and had little tolerance for dissent.

Nixon is frustrated by Bush’s insistence on easy answers, but what really draws his ire is the CIA’s willingness to dole them out. From its inception, the CIA’s stated goal has been to inform the president, enabling him to perform his duties. But the way Nixon tells it, the CIA used to approach the president like a doctor would a patient, delivering unpleasant truths for the benefit of his own health. Now the “service” approach is enshrined as best practice, and the president is treated as less of a patient and more of a customer. According to Nixon, “The service approach can have disastrous results when a president has strong preconceptions, a short attention span, and little time until the next election.” This co-dependent dynamic led to the perfect storm of hubris, mismanagement, and disinformation that became the legacy of the war. Nixon writes:

Discarded reporting was suddenly presented as solid intelligence. The era of analytic mediocrity had begun, and Iraq was its first casualty. It made the CIA complicit in the tragedy of Iraq.

Where does this leave the CIA today? Say the Agency rethinks the service approach and takes a more hard-nosed approach to briefing the president. Will the president even hear it, or will he simply dismiss intelligence, substantiated or otherwise, as fake news?

Adam Fleming Petty’s writing has appeared in The Millions, the Christian Courier, and Cultural Society.

Babylon Invades Iraq Again

The Number of U.S. Troops in Iraq Is Approaching 6,000

Posted on Sep 25, 2016

By Juan Cole / Informed Comment

The U.S. plans to send another 500 troops to Iraq to help with the massive Mosul campaign, which will involve the Iraqi army and its allies, the Kurdistan paramilitary Peshmerga, hard line Shiite militias, and Sunni Arab tribal levies. US troops will not engage in war-fighting at the front, but will help call in air strikes on Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) targets and provide tactical advice and training. Some of them are stationed at a newly recaptured airbase, Qayara, just south of Mosul.

The exact number of US troops in Iraq is hard to calculate, since units are transferred in and out with some frequency, but the number is heading for 6,000. All US troops had been withdrawn from the country at the end of 2011 because the Iraqi parliament would not grant them immunity from prosecution if they killed Iraqi civilians in the course of carrying out joint operations with the Iraqi Army.

After the fall of 40% of Iraq to Daesh in 2014, all of a sudden the Baghdad political elite had no trouble at all with the return of US troops to the country and I can only imagine that iron clad guarantees have been given behind the scenes that US troops have de facto legal immunity or extraterritoriality. (The hard line Shiite militias such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Peace Brigades and the League of the Holy Family have in fact menaced US troops orally, but these threats appear to be empty. Ironically, the US has occasionally given them air support in the fight against Daesh, as at Amerili two years ago).

The question is when US troops can again leave Iraq? Will it be after the fall of Mosul? Or will Iraq need years of “stabilization” in the aftermath, according to Washington? (This kind of talk is so ironic since the US destabilized Iraq in the first place). If we look over at the 15-year war in Afghanistan, where there is no prospect of victory and where there are still thousands of US troops (some of them still do some war-fighting from time to time), it might be an omen for what we can expect in Iraq.

The only difference is that I think Iran will be pretty eager to see US troops leave after Daesh is defeated (at the moment Iran and the US are de facto allies in Iraq), and it has many levers of power with the Shiite elite in the Iraqi government.

US tactical cooperation with Iran and the Shiite militias could have been turned into a diplomatic deepening, but apparently it is just too embarrassing for Washington and Tehran to admit. And so, likely, down the line the US will get pulled right back into Iraq, because it refuses to recognize the real power dynamics there at the level of policy rather than just of tactics.

Babylon The Great And Iraq (Ezekiel 17)

25 years ago: US stages new provocation against Iraq

US President George HW Bush threatens Iraq at his address to the United Nations, September 23, 1991
On September 24, 1991, the United States dispatched a Patriot missile team from Germany to Saudi Arabia in a new threat to Iraq. The force was comprised of some 24 launchers, 100 missiles and 1,300 soldiers to operate the systems.

Little more than six months after the United States ended its bombing of civilians and massacre of retreating Iraqi soldiers, the Bush administration stage-managed a provocation for the purpose of justifying a new war. A team of United Nations inspectors, armed with intelligence supplied by the United States and headed by a former State Department official, seized documents with the names and addresses of Iraqi government employees and nuclear scientists and refused to supply copies to the Iraqis, or even a list of what they had taken.

When the Iraqi authorities refused to allow them to leave without showing them what they had grabbed, the US provided the inspectors with a supply of food and satellite telephones so that they could broadcast to the media their accusations of hostage-taking and their claims that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons.

This incident followed two months of provocations. At the end of August, Kuwait fabricated an alleged Iraqi incursion onto Bubiyan Island. The previous week, Bush and the UN Security Council threatened military action to enforce their demand for unrestricted helicopter flights over Iraqi territory. Finally, the Bush administration decided to stage the latest stunt and exploit the bogus issue of nuclear weapons to more effectively manipulate public opinion.

The New York Times on Thursday, September 26, virtually acknowledged the orchestrated character of the crisis. “Was the United States deliberately trying to increase tensions with Mr. Hussein as a way of provoking a military confrontation and giving it an excuse to resume the war, this time with more ambitious objectives?” the Times asked. It went on to cite an unnamed government official as saying, “Mr. Bush is driven by complex political pressures, including his desire to hold together the anti-Iraq coalition, to maintain the United States’ role as the enforcer of the peace in the Mideast as he seeks to drag the region’s fractious people into a peace conference, and to maintain a strong American military presence as the agreement to keep a rapid-deployment force in southern Turkey nears its Sept. 30 expiration date.

Clearing The Way For The Antichrist

After Saddam Was Hanged
 

The author loved Iraq. His rage and despair at the brutality that has seized his country comes through on every page of his novel.
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
March 15, 2016 6:47 p.m. ET
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, no voice arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had greater moral weight than that of Kanan Makiya. As Dexter Filkins put it in a 2007 New York Times Magazine profile of the Iraqi-American intellectual, he “made the case for invading because it was the right thing to do—to destroy an evil regime and rescue a people from their nightmare of terror and suffering. Not for oil, Makiya argued, and not for some superweapons hidden in the sand, but to satisfy an obligation to our fellow human beings.”
Mr. Makiya, a secular Shiite who came to the United States in the 1960s to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had spent years reflecting on Iraq’s slide into savage sectarianism. All his work beginning with the “Republic of Fear” (1989), his seminal account of Saddam’s Iraq, has had an overarching theme: that the culpability for the Arab world’s barbaric predicament was not primarily the fault of foreigners, though they weren’t guiltless, but that of its ruling elites. It was they who bulldozed civil society, creating ever more ghastly military regimes that have now collapsed into Sunni-versus-Shiite slaughterhouses.
The enormity of the chaos that followed the American invasion paralyzed Mr. Makiya’s pen. He lived in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 and watched things unravel, but wrote little. With “The Rope,” he has broken his silence. The novel is unrelenting in its thinly camouflaged condemnations, particularly of the country’s Shiite leaders. Mr. Makiya loves Iraq—or the idea of what a new Iraq could be—and his rage and despair at the brutality that has seized his country comes through on every page.
The novel’s central character is an unnamed Shiite, who becomes deeply involved in the Mahdi Army, the militant movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is at the forefront of fighting both Americans and Sunni Iraqis. We meet him dressed in the “freshly minted” uniforms of the new Iraqi Army, standing on the jury-rigged platform where Saddam Hussein is set to be hanged. He looks down at the mob, “drunk with excitement and thirsty for blood.”
“When the Tyrant dropped through the trapdoor, wildly bucking his bound feet, fighting to the very last millisecond of his life, I saw myself as though for the first time, with my entire being. Something in me had rotted.” No one “could reverse the stench I now emitted.” The young man’s profound unease with the crudeness of the execution starts him on a journey back through time, to his childhood in Najaf, the holiest of Iraq’s cities, the final resting place of the Caliph Ali, the founding father of Shiite Islam.
“There is nothing like a holy city, and pious visitors, to make a city’s normal residents thoroughly unholy and consistently impious,” Mr. Makiya writes of Najaf. The city is the location of the novel’s defining crime: the real-life murder in April 2003 of Abd al-Majid al-Khoei, the son of Iraq’s most influential cleric of the 20th century, Abul Qassim al-Khoei.
Majid—in reality and in the novel—returned to his birthplace from exile in London ahead of the invading American troops. Mr. Makiya suggests that he hoped to help strengthen the moderate forces within the all-critical Shiite clergy. He was savagely knifed to death by unknown assailants, attacked near the threshold of Ali’s shrine. Majid’s killing—how he died, why he was murdered, who lied about his death, who ignored it—foreshadows, in Mr. Makiya’s telling, the deterioration of Iraq after Saddam.
Mr. Makiya‘s young narrator happens to discover Majid’s sliced up body in an alleyway. He doesn’t know who the bloodied man is. His uncle, an important man in Sadr’s organization, insists he is “an American agent” because he was “carrying dollars, lots of them.” But there were no dollars on the mangled body—only 100 stab wounds.
The novel explores the bloody divisions within the prestigious clerical families of the Shiite world and, more fundamentally, between a Shiism of mercy and a Shiism of revenge. The secrets of the young man’s family are slowly revealed and finally bring him face to face with Saddam, sardonic and still commanding, in a jail cell waiting for the rope. The young man learns that he is still living in Saddam’s ruins, “a nation of sick and spite-filled men, of selfish men, of hollow men, of treacherous men who would whisper ill of their fathers and brothers, and sell them to the devil for a pittance.”
Mr. Makiya’s writing is sublime when his subject is the slide from decency to evil. His depiction of the descent into barbarism of Haider, one of the central character’s closest friends, is as good a portrait as we are likely to get of Iraq’s post-Saddam savagery. “Fighting Sunni terror transformed him,” the young man reflects after Haider becomes the most notorious of the Mahdi Army’s killers. “His name popped up whenever a new pile of Sunni corpses was found with holes drilled into their hands and feet, and especially when the coup de grace took the form of a hole drilled all the way through the victim’s skull.”
Despite such darkness, “The Rope” leaves the reader with a sliver of hope that individual acts of dignity matter. “Love, so long as it hides, feels itself in great danger, and is only reassured by exposing itself to risk,” the young man’s father writes to his wife and son, knowing that a hideous death soon awaits him.
“The Rope” is not a perfect novel: Mr. Makiya’s writing is sometimes in tension with a novelist’s imperative to show, not tell. I suspect that he chose to use fiction as a vehicle as it spares his friends—if not himself—from the direct criticism that would have been unavoidable in a work of nonfiction. But the book is an indispensable guide into the “warehouses of cruelty” of the modern Middle East and gives us a better idea of why Iraq failed after being liberated from a tyrant, and why Sunnis and Shiites now so eagerly kill each other.
Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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.

Finally The Truth: It Was All A Lie (Rev 13)

 
George W. Bush’s CIA briefer admits Iraq WMD “intelligence” was a lie

Joanna Rothkopf

A flurry of politicians quickly declaring their candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination has meant that the Bush administration’s Iraq War is back in the national conversation. Jeb Bush has been forced to answer for his brother’s mistakes, while others like Marco Rubio have toed the party line — knowing the information that the administration knew at the time, they too would have invaded Iraq.

The thing is, the Iraq War was not the result of an intelligence goof — rather, the country’s top office systematically misled the public about Iraq’s nonexistent WMD program, as well as Saddam Hussein’s link to Al Qaeda.

On Tuesday night, former CIA Deputy Director and Bush’s intelligence briefer Michael Morell appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” where he, under an amount of good cable news duress, admitted that the administration intentionally misrepresented intelligence.

The show played a clip of Cheney saying, “We know [Saddam Hussein] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

“Was that true or not,” host Chris Matthews asked.

“We were saying–”

“Can you answer that question? Was that true?”

“No, that was not true,” he finally said.

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

Israel Cannot Stop The Iranian Horn (Dan 8:3)

Not a false alarm: Iraq as a metaphor


Newsletter Thursday February 19, 2015
Omer Dostri

Efforts to portray the Iranian threat as some kind of electioneering campaign are nothing new. Former security officials desperate to remain in the limelight have repeatedly claimed that the Iranian threat is being exaggerated and used for personal political purposes. These days various media outlets are trying to rewrite history and downplay the threat once posed to Israel during the reign of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and present the geopolitical reality under Saddam’s Baath party as having been better for Israel than the current reality. By doing so they imply that to get involved in Iran would be to repeat a past mistake that will likely negatively impact Israel’s security.

But this implication, and those claims, crumble when held up to reality and history. The Baath party tried to get its hands on weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear arms, since day one. In the 1970s, Saddam said that as long as Israel has nuclear arms, Iraq would not be able to attack it freely, and that he planned to use that kind of weaponry to “drown the enemy in rivers of blood.”

Saddam Hussein’s first attempt at acquiring nuclear arms failed in 1981, after Israel bombed the nuclear reactor in Osirak and carried out numerous other operations to hamper Iraq’s progress toward an atomic bomb. Months after the Osirak strike, Iraq appealed to France to purchase another reactor, but the many sanctions imposed on Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war made it difficult.

After running into trouble trying to get Western assistance, Saddam decide to develop a secret uranium enrichment program in Iraq. This new program, with its many facilities, spread throughout Iraq in secret underground compounds, requiring a budget 15 times that of the Osirak reactor.

Between 1981 and 1987, Iraq’s nuclear efforts revolved around research, and only between 1987 and 1990 did they advance to an operative phase of actually developing weapons. The nuclear program was halted by the entry of coalition forces into Iraq during the First Gulf War.

In 1998, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered the launch of Operation Desert Fox, a four day bombing and missile strike campaign against Iraqi targets in response to Iraq’s refusal to comply with a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for American inspectors to come make sure Iraq was not developing weapons of mass destruction. The stated goal of that operation was to diminish the Iraqi regime’s capacity to produce, store or use such weapons. Operation Desert Fox paved the way for the Second Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Iraq during George W. Bush’s presidency, which resulted in the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The claims that Iraq is now more dangerous than before and that the Islamic State group developed as a direct result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq are simply wrong. Iraq currently has no desire or ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the country poses no threat to Israel. This crucial change allows Israel to invest its resources in more pertinent and volatile areas.

Secondly, Islamic State is the result of many factors, and not necessarily a direct response to American involvement. It is possible that the group would have never formed, even after the U.S. occupation ended, had the U.S. acted more wisely. It is not unreasonable to think that had U.S. forces stayed in Iraq longer and bolstered the central Iraqi government, instead departing early and abandoning the land, they could have thwarted the rise of Islamic State.

If the U.S. had imposed a Western/American standard of civilian involvement in the central Iraqi government, and allowed for better representation of the Iraqi population, it could have prevented the sectarian tension that currently exists between the government’s Shiites, sponsored by Iran, and Sunnis who were brutally oppressed after the fall of Saddam — another factor that contributed to the establishment of Islamic State.

In retrospect, Israel’s call for intervention in Iraq, and the subsequent intervention by the U.S., served to defuse a very serious threat facing Israel. When confronting Iran, the same approach should be adopted. Iran must be forced to give up its nuclear ambitions, at any cost

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.