Rand Paul got it
Right
There, I said
it and I meant it! I'll probably never utter those words again, since I
actually view almost everything about Rand Paul as about as intellectually instructive
as the "Wally gets a Zit" episode of Leave it to Beaver. All that said, recently Paul
did make some statements re: Dick (Vader) Cheney that resonated.
These comments
were made recently in response to yet another episode of the Far Right' s
favorite game "Blame it on the Black Man." Paul said those who have questioned the
president's approach to the recent surge in violence should ask the same
questions of those who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq: "Were they right in their
predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? Was the war won in
2005, when many of those people said it was won? They didn't, really, I think understand the civil war that
would break out," Paul said.
The real
tragedy here is that Rand Paul is dead
on with respect to his doubts and allegations concerning
the obfuscation of truth and subplots thereto which resulted in the
destabilization of the Hussein government. The larger tragedy is that one of, if
not the preeminent, principal involved
in the decision had, only 12 years earlier warned against just such a desert
adventure. Yet last week he was singing a radically different tune.
Darth Cheney, writing
an op-ed in 2015 (last week, in the NY Times, specifically) said: "Rarely
has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too
many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is 'ending' the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan -- as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing
into reality...he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched
from the jaws of victory."
{editorial note: The "abandonment" referred to is the current President's
actions required by a written commitment
made by his predecessor to the Iraqis in the form of a "status of forces
agreement signed, oddly enough, on November
27, 2008. This was, conveniently, after George W. Bush knew his President Elect
Democratic successor would have to deal with his (Bush's) mess and commitment
to depart.}
Cheney's
statements also attracted the attention of Senator Barbara Boxer: "That
is sick, when you really look back at the record," Sen. Barbara
Boxer, D-Calif., said of Cheney's criticism Sunday on 'Face the Nation." "The
fact is, what we're seeing now is an outgrowth of that bad policy the neocons
got us in, that crowd, on false pretense that said, go in there. And, as a
result, ISIS was born. Let's face that fact," she continued.
"It was Vice President Cheney and Condi Rice working for George W. Bush
and Rumsfeld and all those folks -- that's just like, you know, a
nightmare come back to haunt me, just frankly -- who are basically telling us,
get right back in there again. The American people don't want it. The president
doesn't want us in."
Are we just piling on Cheney, using
hindsight to beat him up? Not at all. Dick Cheney in his own words, perspicaciously
enumerated most, if not all of the
reasons for not toppling the
Hussein government in 1991, following the successful and surgical removal of
Iraqi forces from Kuwait. A summary
follows:
On April 7, 1991 Cheney appeared on ABC
news’s This Week. Then U.S. Secretary of
Defense in the George H.W. Bush Administration, Secretary Cheney was asked by
the late elder statesman of ABC News, David Brinkley, why the U.S. government
did not invade Iraq proper after the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert
Storm. The conversation was exactly as shown:
BRINKLEY:
"One other question — it keeps coming up. Why didn’t we go to Baghdad and
clean it all up while we were there?"
Sec.
CHENEY: "Well, just as it’s
important, I think, for a president to know when to commit U.S. forces to
combat, it’s also important to know when not to commit U.S. forces to combat.
I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war
inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who
would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a
Sunni government, a Shi’a government, a Kurdish government? Would it be
secular, along the lines of the Ba’ath Party?
Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States
wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the
responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all. If
you can take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily see pieces of
Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have in the West. Part of
Eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim – fought over for eight years.
In the
North you have the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds
in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
Rarely, if ever, has a politician been more
prescient or more hypocritical. Never, has one reversed his course more
diametrically and then blamed another when his predictions become reality. For Dick
Cheney to blame President Obama for the disaster that Iraq has become is
similar to jumping off the Empire State building and blaming the sidewalk below
for the result.
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