The Bush Pipe Dream

No one expected Iraq to turn into Denmark.  What the Bush administration expected was that by having elections, giving people an opportunity to choose their own leaders, Iraq would become a modern democracy.  They were foolish and I predicted that they would fail. 

 

But neither is there any reason to believe that “Muslim Arabs alone of all peoples are destined to live in tyranny forever, unable to sustain any kind of halfway-decent halfway-democratic government” without an interim period of benevolent rule by people who believe in decent democratic government.

The problem with Muslim society is Muslim culture which has several thousand years of embedded experience of tyranny and corruption reinforcing all the actions that militate against the decent democratic government.

The belief that Muslim countries can convert the modern democracies on the European model is as much a pipe dream on the Right as the belief on the Left that Socialism will work if only we give it another try.

Japan is an example of a country with no history of democracy being converted into a decent democracy.  Germany – with the failed example of the Weimar period – had no history of being a successful democracy, yet it is today.  But before they were “turned loose” as it were, they experienced decades of military occupation following the Second World War.  In fact, to this day, there are American military bases in both countries.

Britain left behind it scores of countries they once colonized and then set free, many of which have become stable, decent democracies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. 

The big difference between the success of the British Empire and the Allied victory in World War 2 was the imposition of decent rule by a foreign agent who believed in honest, representative government at home and the imposition of good government on a people and culture who were not familiar with any of the basic tenants of a decent representative republic.  

The experience in Iraq demonstrates that in a culture ruled by a dictator you will have rampant corruption and – in the case of most Muslim countries – a tribal system in which the first loyalty is to the tribe rather than to the nation.  Combine that with unreformed Islam and all you will get from an election is the elevation of the next theocratic dictator whose objective is to gather wealth for himself and his tribe. 

Coulter: remember when the media and the Democrats criticized the intelligence agencies. That ws SOP until Trump did it.

They [the media and Democrats] also spent decades defending Russian dictators.

Abandoning every position they've ever held to attack Trump is standard operating procedure these days.

In addition to Trump's not challenging Putin to a fistfight in Helsinki, the media have gone bananas over the fact that he cited the findings of our intelligence agencies -- but then added that Putin denied the charges.

HE'S BELIEVING PUTIN OVER OUR OWN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES? Moral equivalence! Treason! High crimes and misdemeanors! Kristallnacht! Trump might as well have trampled on a portrait of George Washington. (Or, since we're talking about liberals, Stalin.)

But the way I remember it, elected Democrats -- even Democratic candidates for president -- have criticized our intelligence agencies pretty ferociously, particularly regarding the Iraq War.

The media turned that clown Joe Wilson into a national hero for ridiculing the findings of our intelligence agencies.

At the inception of the war, U.S. intelligence, British intelligence and the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam Hussein had been seeking massive quantities of uranium from Niger.

But Joe Wilson was sent by his wife, a non-covert, paper-pushing CIA agent, on a trip to Niger, where he looked government officials directly in the eye and asked them: Did Saddam send envoys to this godforsaken country that has nothing to sell but uranium in order to buy uranium? Be honest! I have absolutely no way of knowing if you are lying, and powerful, nuclear-armed nations will be really mad at you if you say "yes."

It was on the basis of this conversation that Wilson concluded, as he wrote in The New York Times: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Far from condemning this unpatriotic lout for crapping on our intelligence agencies, the media made him a star! Only a fool like George W. Bush would believe our inept intelligence agencies over the word of a government official from Niger.

So doing an about-face on a previous, long-held position is no problem for liberals, provided it serves the larger purpose of getting Trump.

This is a good time to remind us of the Ace of Spades comment on the Ruling Class:

This kind of blatant double-standard on the part of the left is a feature, I think, not a bug.

The inconsistency may reveal that the left inflicts "rules" on its enemies that it feels free to ignore itself. But that itself is a demonstration of the left's power-- I think they get off on openly announcing that they are free to make up rules to impose on others and completely violate those same rules with impunity.

It's a demonstration of how much power they have, and maybe more importantly, how much power you don't have.

They want you to know who's in charge, and who you must bow to, and this sort of blatant, not-even-hiding-it demonstration of their power to unilaterally print up entire tomes of new rules and also unilaterally suspend operation of those rules when they choose is nothing if not a reminder of who is the ruler, and who is the ruled.

Reflections on Terrorism, Dumb and Smart

Peggy Noonan’s observation in the Wall Street Journal that the most recent jihadist mass murderer is “an idiot”—unlike the men who perpetrated 9/11, but like all who have struck us since—provokes more thought than likely went into it.

Noonan correctly notes that 9/11 led us to expect more attacks with comparable planning and execution. Instead, we’ve been hit by random idiots, the most sophisticated of whom (the Bataclan murderers) operate at an elementary infantry level.

So what? Our ruling class concludes that more and better policing has precluded attacks on the scale of 9/11, limiting Islamist terrorism to a level with which we can live. But this lumping of terrorism into a single category misunderstands how very different 9/11 was from what has followed—different kinds of perpetrators, different bases of support, a different relationship with Islamism, and different in the dangers they comport for us. Hence they misunderstand what military and police action can accomplish.

Focusing on these differences—especially in the light of the recently released Osama Bin Laden documents and their emphasis on al-Qaeda’s latter-day relationship with Iran—invites us to cut through the establishment’s parrot-chorus of “what everyone knows” about terrorism and to unravel the complexity what we are really up against. The following is the first of a four-part attempt to do this.

Far from idiots or zealous amateurs working from Afghan caves, the men who planned and ran the 9/11 attack forged passports, and used the international banking system, sophisticated intelligence, and logistics. With the sole exception of Mohammed Atta, they did not expose themselves to danger. So good was their security that, to this day, we do not know who most of the hijackers were: The names on the passports they used to board did not match the security camera photos and, whereas Atta sent the remainder of the money from the plot to an account linked to Bin Laden—openly—the world’s banking sleuths have been unable to determine from which accounts the money had come.

Wiping out records of money transfers is akin in sophistication to producing and altering passports—the kinds of things done not in Afghan caves, but by sovereign countries’ intelligence services. Though we don’t know who provided the passports with which most of the 9/11 hijackers came to America, we know that Saddam’s Iraq provided the ones with which Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Rahman Yasin came to America for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that the crew who organized 1993 ran 9/11 as well. We know that, unlike the “idiots” who have hit us since, these people had no history of Muslim devotion. They were professionals, with the resources of sovereign countries’ intelligence services.

The billions of dollars in barbed wire, badges, intelligence, and policing inflicted upon America since 9/11 have neither prevented nor thwarted any plans to attack the United States with the sophistication and on the scale of 9/11. The primordial fact is, no one has tried.

And.

The Muslim world’s states and terrorists have always lived symbiotically. Because mobilizing for full-scale war exposes these states’ congenital internal fragility, they have always fought through proxy groups. Hence, willful ignorance has been required for the American ruling class to maintain the fiction that terrorist groups are independent. That fiction has served our ruling class’s ideological predilections and has provided terrorists the sine qua non for their operations. That is why the Bin Laden papers’ discussion of al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran (about which more in another article) is such a valuable reminder of reality.

Newt up: Reflections on Terrorism: Iran and Bin Laden

DEMOCRATS ON THE IRAQ WAR

So this is the Howard Stern Interview Where Trump is Supposed to have Come Out with a Full Throated Support of Invading Iraq

So, why does Donald Trump accuse George Bush of lying about WMDs in Iraq?

I totally disagree with Trump on this one, and so do many other Conservatives.

As Bud Norman says in:  The Pinkest Republican

Even if you’re not satisfied by the sarin-tipped rockets and other chemical weapons that were found in Iraq, or discount the many plausible accounts of more weapons being shipped to Syria, and conveniently forget the many other persuasive casus belli offered for the Iraq war, and assume that an absence of more widely publicized evidence is evidence of absence, an allegation that any president knowingly lied to the American people about non-existent weapons of mass destruction to launch a war for still unstated reasons carries a burden a proof. One would have to explain why such a diabolical president would launch a war on a pretext he knew would be exposed, or why such a diabolical president wouldn’t plant some evidence to cover his crime, which shouldn’t have been too hard after recruiting the intelligence agencies of every American ally in Europe and the Middle East to bolster his made-up claims, not to mention getting all those inspectors from the United Nations to say they had their own suspicions about what was going on in Iraq, and we’d like to think it’s still hard to make that case to a majority of Republican primary voters.

I think the errors Bush made in Iraq came after Saddam was toppled; and the disaster came after Obama was elected and abandoned that fragile and still unstable country. He lost the war that Bush won.

But that does not explain Trump’s position. Perhaps he really does believe that the Bush administration lied about the certainty of WMDs. But more important, the “Bush Lied, People Died” meme is now firmly embedded in popular culture. With the exception of people like me, who believe that Saddam was an existential threat and needed to be removed, not just contained, many on the Right, including congressmen, now think that the Iraq war was a mistake.

NBC News reports that:

Seventy-one percent of Americans now say that the war in Iraq “wasn’t worth it,” a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll shows, with skepticism about the lengthy war effort up substantially even in the last 18 months.

In my opinion, Trump is doing what successful businessmen do; they give their customers what they want: the border sealed, stop exporting jobs and bring those jobs back to the U.S., protection from Muslims on Jihad, and an America that’s “Great Again.”

During this election they don’t want to re-fight the culture wars that seem to have been lost to the Left, even if they agree with Conservatives that the culture is important. At this point in time, the existential threat to America and to its middle class is too great.  They don't think that the Political class understands the situation or knows what to do.

At this point Americans may we willing to make the same deal they made in World War II: ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Can we fix the culture once the country is back to an even keel? We don’t know, but Trump believes that the majority he needs to win the election has its priorities.

I’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for the Republican in the general election, no matter his name. After that, we’ll fight the culture wars.

Mark Steyn Nothing Another 42,000 Airstrikes Can't Fix

At Friday's Department of Defense press briefing, Brigadier General Thomas Weidley gave it the full Baghdad Bob:

In Ramadi, after a period of relative stability in the tactical situation, Daesh [Isis] executed a complex attack on Iraqi Security Forces today. These forces were able to repel most of these attacks, but some gains were made by Daesh in previously contested areas...

Iraqi Security Forces, as well as federal and local police, continue to control most of the key facilities, infrastructure and lines of communication in the area. Ramadi is a major population center, the provincial capital of Iraq's largest province, and a location where Iraqi Security Forces, police and local tribes have been working together for nearly a year to defend.

Since the beginning of OIR [Operation Inherent Resolve - seriously], the coalition has provided precision air support for the ISF with approximately 420 airstrikes in the Fallujah-Ramadi area. In the past month, we've conducted 165 airstrikes in support of Iraqi Security Forces in Ramadi, which have destroyed operational resources and facilities such as Daesh-controlled buildings, fighting positions, armored and technical vehicles...

Recent efforts by the government of Iraq to enroll Sunni tribes within the popular mobilization forces will provide additional needed combat power to Ramadi ISF commanders. As well, the coalition remains steadfast in support of the government of Iraq within Ramadi...

We firmly believe Daesh is on the defensive throughout Iraq and Syria, attempting to hold previous gains... They no longer field large conventional formations; they travel in civilian vehicles, they travel in small numbers, which, again, slows their -- their ability to move in and around the battlespace, and their ability to maneuver is very, very limited at this point...

Again, we see the lack of training and the rush to deploy inexperienced replacements to the battlefield...

Etc. Americans interested in an honest assessment of what's happening are better off skipping the Pentagon briefing and listening to the locals hightailing it outta there:

"Ramadi has fallen," Muhammad Haimour, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Anbar, told AP Sunday. "The city was completely taken. ... The military is fleeing."

Indeed. The Pentagon has an unrivaled comic genius when it comes to naming its operations. General Weidley is Chief of Staff, Joint Task Force for "Operation Inherent Resolve". If one had to name the single quality most obviously lacking in local ground forces, in the "60-nation coalition" and in US strategists, that would be it. Iraqi troops fled their US-supplied government buildings and then, at the edge of town, abandoned their US-supplied Humvees to melt into the local population, hopefully with nothing US-supplied about their person to give them away. The Humvees and the buildings are now in the hands of Isis. That's the great thing about taking on a "60-nation coalition". When you roll over them in nothing flat, the stuff they leave behind is world-beating state-of-the-art.

Almost exactly twelve years ago, I spent two days in Ramadi - one coming, one going. I wandered around the streets, browsed the shops, ate in the cafes, all in the same suit-and-tie get-up you can see me in on stage and telly. And I got the odd surly look but no beheading. Because, in the spring of 2003, the west was still believed to be serious. Now they know we're not.

That's a terrible thing to tell your enemy. And once you do, alll that's left is to boast of the scale of your ineffectualism. As General Weidley assured us:

The coalition has provided precision air support for the ISF with approximately 420 airstrikes in the Fallujah-Ramadi area. In the past month, we've conducted 165 airstrikes in support of Iraqi Security Forces in Ramadi...

That and $4.75'll get you a decaf latte at the CentCom Starbucks.

In America Alone (personally autographed copies of which, etc, etc), there's a passage where I'm on the highway to Ramadi through the western desert, and, over the charred ruin of an Iraqi tank, pondering the words of Sir Basil Liddell Hart - that what matters is to destroy the enemy's will, and, if you're not prepared to do that, destroying his tanks makes no difference. Nor do 420 sorties, nor 420,000 sorties. "Sortie", by the way, is French for exit. Maybe something's getting a little lost in translation here, but it's hard to tell the difference between a sortie strategy and an exit strategy.

And, of course, when you let one enemy know you're not serious, everyone else gets the message, too - from Putin in the Ukraine to Beijing in the South China Seas to Assad bringing his temporarily mothballed chemical weapons up from the basement to every ragtag jihadist militia minded to overrun a US consulate.

What does Isis on "the defensive" look like? They're now in Afghanistan, and controlling Libyan seaports. Any reason why they should stop there? From today's Daily Mirror:

Terror group Islamic State are using human trafficking gangs to smuggle militant extremist to the west.

The jihadi organisation is utilising the Mediterranean refugee crisis to sneak their fighters into Europe, an investigation has revealed.

Intelligence sources say ISIS are working with the cruel people-smuggling network to hide terrorists, bent on destruction, on boats among stricken refugees.

Experts claim ISIS is also capitalising on the emergency in the region to fund its terrorist activities by taxing people smugglers.

Abdul Basit Haroun, an adviser to the intelligence service of the Libyan government, said he had spoken to boat owners who operate in IS-controlled areas who told him the group takes a 50 per cent cut of their income.

The Mirror and the rest of Fleet Street are tapdancing around the genius of what Isis is doing: They conquer territory, terrorizing the locals, beheading and raping on an industrial scale, and sending millions fleeing - and then, having caused a "humanitarian catastrophe", they turn it into a cash cow. In effect, Isis is now running the humanitarian rescue from Isis. They're simultaneously the Nazis and Schindler - if Schindler's list were full of crack German agents he were smuggling into Britain. Which is a hell of a business model.

Where do these guys want to flee to? Europe.

No problem, says Isis. We'll become co-owners of the human-smuggling racket. It's all upside: we overwhelm EU refugee procedures, ensure that among all the losers in the hold are plenty of the savvier jihad boys - and use the cash to fund expansion in other areas.

Once you start ceding territory, where does it stop? Why should Piraeus prove any more of a fortress than Ramadi? Richard Fernandez writes:

Like the monster in the movie, it's taken "three billion electro-volts of energy and it's still coming on"! Why have none of the previous heavy blows slowed ISIS or any of the affiliated rebel groups down? Why is the jihadi organism inexplicably resistant to leadership disruptions, whether caused by drone strikes or the murderous work of rivals from other factions? How can it stand against the Olympian thunderbolt? This is an important question to answer.

It's resistant because it is not a state.

No it's not made of "solid nuclear material". But unlike a state, headed by an Emperor of Japan or Fuhrer, Islamic militancy has the apparent ability to reconfigure itself on the fly.

There's a lot of truth in that. A state needs territory, but Isis doesn't. Having stolen everything it wants, killed everyone it hates and destroyed everything in sight, it can abandon Ramadi for new killing fields. The Islamic State is less a state than a state of mind.

Then again, most western nations are not states, either - not in the conventional Westphalian sense of coherent entities pursuing state strategy. Unlike Britain, America has chosen to run its global order not through conventional expressions of national interest (the British Empire) but through post-Westphalian institutions - the IPCC for "climate change", the "60-nation coalition" for war. The UN-style post-state model strikes me as all but useless. By comparison Islamic imperialism has come up with a form of post-state transnationalism that's boundlessly flexible, encompassing conventional war, global crime syndicates, and the ability to spontaneously ignite "lone wolves" from Sydney to Copenhagen to Garland, Texas.

Meanwhile, our official no-Islam-to-see-here brings only the certainty of further retreat. Even if one accepts the view that this is a "tiny minority" of "bad apples", absolving Islam of responsibility for the cancer that nests within it ensures that there's nothing left to do but what Liddell Hart tells us is strategically pointless: bomb vehicles and buildings. And, given that western taxpayers paid for those vehicles and buildings, it's even more stupid.

Where's our wit and nimbleness and "ability to reconfigure on the fly"? After 14 years, we've learned nothing. Announcing another 473 bazillion sorties and marveling at how swimmingly the US-funded Iraqi Army Please-Don't-Run-Away-Quite-So-Quickly Program is going is not only a sign that we're losing, but that we don't even know enough to know we're using the wrong metrics.

"Knowing what we know now".

"Knowing what we know now".  Is a stupid question.

To illustrate, let's ask a current candidate, "Knowing what we know now about the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iranian regime, its nuclear weapon quest and its support for terrorism, would you have fought like heck to keep the Shah of Iran in power in 1979 instead of doing what Jimmy Carter did and hustling him off to the Bahamas?"

If the candidate said "no," would that mean he or she supports Iran's dictatorship? And a "yes" answer would not change the Iranian conundrum we confront in 2015.

My "what if" question connects to Iraq 2003 what-ifs. Saddam Hussein used the shah's fall as an opportunity to invade Iran and seize the oil province of Khuzistan. His 1980 invasion failed. The Iran-Iraq War's eight years of trench warfare bled both nations physically and economically. In 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, to loot it, spike oil prices and perhaps topple the Saudis. Invading Kuwait brought him into direct conflict with the civilized world. Operation Desert Storm drove Saddam from Kuwait. "Mr. or Mrs. Candidate, knowing what we know now, should George H.W. Bush have toppled Saddam in 1991?"

What the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

Obama Tweet: "President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

Remember this Obama tweet?

Barack ObamaVerified account ‏@BarackObama

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

• Retweets 2,762
• Favorites 708
• 

9:21 AM - 22 Oct 2012

As the MSM are doing everything possible to blame the disaster in the Middle East on Bush, let's remember how Team Obama was bragging on the 'success" of their foreign policy.

As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Given that before the troop pullout in 2011, even the Obama Administration was touting Iraq as a big success — if you had it to do over again, would you yank the troops out and leave Iraq to ISIS?

Glenn Reynolds has a question that will never be asked of Hillary.

I’m More Hateful Than Pamela Geller

But first, a confession. I’m far more hateful than Pamela Geller. In fact, I’d argue there’s no way that she could hate jihad more than I do. I’ve seen jihad up-close, in an Iraqi province where jihadists raped women to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, where they put bombs in little boys’ backpacks then remotely detonated them at family gatherings, where they beheaded innocent civilians while cheering wildly like they were at a soccer match, and where they shot babies in the face to “send a message” to their parents. I’ve seen the despair in the eyes of the innocent victims of jihad, and — believe me — that despair is infinitely greater than the alleged “anguish” caused by a few cartoons.

Simply put, to know jihad is to hate jihad. And if you hate jihad, you will likely do more to help actual Muslims — to save them from death and misery — than the most politically-correct newspaper editor or the most hand-wringing academic.

Thoughts on the Middle East Wars

Whenever a discussion involves the war in Iraq, there are inevitably many people who argue that the entire enterprise was a failure - or worse - a geopolitical catastrophe that has upset the Middle East apple cart. They are wrong. At the article by the American Interest I made this point in response to a comment by someone who believes that there is no " ... good strategy for success in either Afghanistan or Iraq." Saying we "need to be realistic." The point is that there is a recipe for success and it's not that difficult.  And we have been very unrealistic, but not in the way that most people believe.

Herewith my comment (with a few edits):

“We need to be realistic” is a great tag line, but very little realism has been exhibited by either the supporters or the opponents of the invasion of Iraq. The first unrealistic assumption is that “"of course" people everywhere would choose Western-style democracy and freedom if given the chance.” I never thought so and was worried by the Bush administration’s emphasis on this idea. I suspected that Bush 43 was too naive and this troubled me.

There is little evidence of that Western-style democracy is the default position in developed countries and absolutely none in underdeveloped countries. The idea that the people of Iraq, with absolutely no experience with Western-style democracy, would embrace it was appealing but absolutely unsupported by reason or experience. The fact that the Bush administration was promoting this idea I attribute to one of two reasons: (1) they really believed it (bad), or (2) they were attempting to counter the Left’s theme that the war was a mistake and wanted to use Iraqi elections to counter that propaganda (also bad).

History is a great teacher if anyone bothers to study it. It doesn’t have to be ancient history. Within the last century we defeated Germany and Japan, both first world countries, and have troops there to this day. Japan had no history of Western-style democracy. After defeating the Empire of Japan we did not allow them to have elections and leave. We stayed to make sure that the kind of government we approved of grew up in the rubble of the war. General Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan as an American Proconsul until the Korean War. Modern Japan was largely created by Mac Arthur, not by Japanese elections.

Germany had a brief, unhappy history of democracy between the wars, but after WW2 the conquerors imposed military rule on the country which did not end until 1949. We had a veto power over who was elected and what policies were followed.  As an incentive, the US and other allies maintained a military presence in Germany ever since then.

So what political genius decided that after invading a country with no history of democracy, with a religion that’s hostile to Western-style democracy, all that was needed was a new constitution and a good election to become just like us?

The problems began when the Bush State Department decided to disband the Iraqi military and much of its civilian political structure, creating several million people without jobs and no way of making a living. In comparison, after WW2 the West left most of the German and Japanese political infrastructure in place, and a big enough military presence to quell whatever resistance arose.

Despite these blunders the US won the Iraq war, peace was mostly restored after a brutal struggle and winning the peace would be the challenge. Bush hinted that he understood by his references to the long struggle ahead as he left office.

Then the election of 2008 brought Obama to power. The man who said invading Iraq was a mistake.

Exit the Bush administration, and enter Obama. He declared Iraq was the unnecessary war but Afghanistan was the good war, took a victory lap and - ignoring the fact that Iraq, a disarmed country, was rapidly coming under the control of Iran – left zero military forces behind. With no military influence we could not change destructive Iraqi government policy, we could not dissuade Iran from increasing its influence, we could not even do anything to stop ISIS – the group Obama called the “JV” team – from taking the military gear we left behind and begin its reign of terror.  Today Iraq is rapidly becoming a client state of Iran unless ISIS (the JV team) takes over the entire country.

Obama threw away Iraq. He’s losing the war in Afghanistan. He’s managed to transform Libya from a country with a bad dictator who kept the crazies under control to a failed state that’s a safe haven for every Jihadist who wants a break from beheading infidels. He desperately wanted to turn Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood (slogan: “Death to the Jews”). He’s busy helping Iran become the hegemonic power in the Middle East (slogan: “Death to America”). And if he has his way, one day Jerusalem will be the target of the Persian atom bomb, solving his Jewish Problem™.

No war goes according to plan, especially a new kind of war with enemy combatants that look just like the farmer in his field, the passenger on the bus or the woman out shopping. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to leaders who want to protect Americans and defend American interests. But the current administration is in the process of shunning traditional allies and accommodating traditional adversaries.  Nixon to China was an example of a major change in American foreign policy. It has born much fruit. However,when these initiatives don’t seem to make thing better questions arise.

At some point, if you are looking at things in a clearheaded way – shedding rose colored glasses – you begin to wonder if it’s all a series of bad decisions by political neophytes or done with deliberate malice. You hope it's the former, but hope is not a plan.

Media Gives President a Pass Again … for Losing Afghanistan

Walter Russell Mead

Once again, be very glad we don’t have a Republican president right now. If we did, we would be treated to a merciless media pounding, night-and-day, on the series of strategic failures, mistakes and false starts that have characterized America’s war strategy in Afghanistan since 2009. ...

President Obama has been permitted to fail in Afghanistan quietly and off center stage. We hear nothing anymore about the months of agonized reflection before choosing strategies that didn’t accomplish their goals. We never see mentions of his 2008 campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan—”the necessary war”—against which we might be asked to measure what has actually been achieved....

But the heavy media bias against Republicans and for mildly to solidly left-of-center Democrats isn’t just a question of conscious and malicious bias. When the press puts Republicans through the wringer while giving Democrats the best deal it can, it’s often a reflection of the groupthink that comes naturally and almost inevitably to those who’ve spent their lives as bubble babies in the ultra-liberal world of the contemporary American campus where intellectual homogeneity is considered a virtue....

The news articles and opinion pieces they write aren’t biased in the sense that they are consciously telling untruths or twisting facts. They are reporting the world as they see it. And in that world, Obama is a master strategist, a visionary diplomat, and an innovative thinker out to change the way the world works.

Jay Rosen thinks that the Press has a deep dark secret.

“The Washington press corps is like that big extended family with a terrible secret that cannot be confronted because everyone knows how bad it would be if the discussion ever got real.”

And what's the secret that' making them neurotic?

I’m sure you have your ideas. Here is mine. I know it will sound crazy (and provide a few chuckles) to those in the room tonight at the Washington Hilton, but I don’t care because the event is itself one gigantic neurotic symptom that begs for some interpretation.

The Washington press corps is like that big extended family with a terrible secret that cannot be confronted because everyone knows how bad it would be if the discussion ever got real. The event at the center of this neurotic system: the failure to detect a phony case for war in 2002 and 2003 and more generally to challenge the Bush forces after 9/11. And this wasn’t just any failure. For a press that imagines itself a watchdog, failing to detect a faulty case for war, then watching the war unfold into the biggest foreign policy disaster in memory… that is an event so huge and deflating that it amounts to an identity crisis.

Now add to that very specific failure a larger lesson that is also too painful to face: in Washington access journalism has been a bust. It doesn’t work. Its practices made possible the spectacular fall down in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Under Obama it’s been so thin that Politico is this week asking: is the White House press corps becoming obsolete?) After a maximal failure like 2002-04 there needed to be a critical reckoning with the whole idea of “access to inside sources as reliable route to scoops.” You can’t maintain that idea and think of yourself as a watchdog, an adversarial force. Not with what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Got it? The thing that's making the press corps crazy is their guilt for failing to stop Bush from invading Iraq. Ever since then, the press has been dysfunctional.

When you read that you realize how deluded Rosen - a handy symbol of the press - really is.

After being challenged, Rosen gets testy. It's fun to read the comments.

How Obama Abandoned Democracy in Iraq

Nothing that happened in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was pre-ordained; different futures than the one unfolding today were possible. Recall that violence declined drastically during the 2007 U.S. troop surge, and that for the next couple of years both Iraq and the West felt that the country was going in the right direction. But the seeds of Iraq’s unravelling were sown in 2010, when the United States did not uphold the election results and failed to broker the formation of a new Iraqi government. As an adviser to the top U.S. general in Iraq, I was a witness.

Read the whole thing.

Obama’s race to chaos

Reading Michael Goodwin's article I though a better headline would have been Obama's Race to Armageddon.

If you’re confused about the Saudi Arabia-led air attacks against Islamist rebels in Yemen and can’t tell one group of head-choppers in Iraq and Syria from another, don’t despair. All you need is imagination.

Close your eyes and imagine that those countries and terrorists have nuclear weapons. Imagine their barbarism going nuclear as they blow up cities, wipe out ethnic and religious groups and turn the region into cinders.

Now open your eyes and realize you’ve seen the future, thanks to President Obama’s policies. It is a future that will be defined by Obama’s Wars. Yes, plural.

Read the whole thing because it's real.

What the Democrats were saying before the Iraq invasion

"Smart diplomacy" strikes again - Middle East version

ISIS torches oil field near Tikrit... 

'Bulldozes' ancient Assyrian city...

Iranian role in fighting alarms Washington...

Libya chaos deepens....

What I find infuriating about the way Bush handled Iraq

The problem with the Bush philosophy regarding a conquered Iraq is that he wanted to believe that it would be possible to transform this little part of the Middle East into a democracy in a few years.

This was wrong and it led to unnecessary bloodshed and inevitably to the Obama disaster of total disengagement.  Leading to ISIS.

For some reason I believed that Bush was a realist and would see that it would take decades of American control and education.  Just as it took a long time to transform Japan and Germany, countries that were hundreds of years ahead of the Middle East in terms of cultural development.

Jerry Pournelle is a realist, describing how to settle the problem of ISIS ...

And their [ISIS] weakness is that unlike al Qaeda ISIS cannot fade into invisibility: you are not Caliph if you do not have territory in which to impose Islamic law, including slavery, beheadings, and cutting off hands. If you do not impose these things you are not, according to the Caliphate Muslims, a Muslim, and can and indeed must be corrected or deposed. So it goes.

Which means, just now, that a division of US regulars and all the warthogs, with some Marine air, and USAF anti-missile air superiority planes, could in a year destroy the Caliphate. We give North Iraq to the Kurds. Central Iraq to whomever we select among the factions. Syria – not clear, but possibly to the dictatorship, with what conditions we choose to impose. It doesn’t matter because it’s fantasy: Obama will do no such thing. But we could do it if we had a President.