“It’s not like we haven’t seen over the last five or
six months these terrorists moving in, taking control of Western Iraq. Now
they’ve taken control of Mosul. They’re 100 miles from Baghdad. And what’s the president
doing? Taking a nap!”—John Boehner (pictured), R-Ohio, Speaker of the House, during a news
conference at the Capitol, quoted in John Parkinson, "John Boehner Slams President Obama for ‘Taking a Nap’ on Iraq,” The Note (ABC News), June 12, 2014
Somebody please tell John Boehner that, if he’s at all
serious about what he says about Iraq, he’ll put down that golf club he loves
so well, then pick up a rifle he can use over in Iraq. Barring that, he should
stop his nonsense about what President Obama isn’t doing in that troubled nation that shows all signs of no longer
being a “nation” in any sense in the future.
That talk about “taking a nap” is pretty rich, for instance, coming from a party that still venerates a Republican President of 30 years ago who was rather famous for the same pastime. (Yes, it was The Gipper whose practice of leaving the Oval Office by 2:30 pm each Friday for R&R ed the West Wing to schedule that slot as “Staff Time’—or, as some wags put it, “Staff Time for Bonzo.”)
But there are other
problems with Boehner’s statement.
Let’s start with the ultimate
responsibility for this situation, shall we? In a Vice-Presidential debate of
1976, Bob Dole raised many hackles by referring to “Democrat wars.” Leave aside
the offense to grammar and examine his point: World Wars I and I, as well as
the Korean and Vietnam Wars, began with Democrats in office.
If the GOP could cheer
Dole for that statement, then surely turnabout is fair play, and the Democrats
have more than enough right to refer to Iraq as a “Republican War.” It began
under George W. Bush; in the House of Representatives, 213 out of 296 votes for
the resolution authorizing Presidential use of force in Iraq came from
Republicans; and in the early days of the war, when things appeared to be going
swimmingly, GOP candidates, under the guidance of strategist Karl Rove, were
not shy about bludgeoning Democratic opponents of the conflict, even ousting a
wounded Vietnam War vet, Senator Max Cleland, in the process.
Second, the war did not
end up going as advertised, has it? The Bush administration outmaneuvered,
outmuscled, and, when all else failed, muzzled those who questioned whether
enough troops would be available to secure Iraq, a country of 31 million people
with traditions profoundly different from ours. One of these questioners was
General Eric Shinseki, and GOP lawmakers must share responsibility for his
mistreatment for not protesting his dismissal from command because of the
issue. (They still couldn’t stand the knowledge that events proved him
right—one of the reasons they made him the scapegoat for longstanding
bipartisan failures at the Veterans Administration, when he joined the Obama
administration to head the department.)
No, George W. Bush,
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, despite their longstanding conservative
skepticism about government’s ability to do anything right, were sure that theirs could erect an island of
pluralistic democracy in a region with nothing close to this tradition. It
would be like Douglas MacArthur in Japan in 1945 all over again. MacArthur’s
staff, however, not only planned for this contingency but proceeded to carry it
out. In contrast, as James Fallows demonstrated in an article for The Atlantic Monthly a decade ago, the
Bush administration went “Blind Into Baghdad” by ignoring the plans already in place. It was a case of let the
chips fall where they may, the foreign-policy counterpart to the casino
capitalism that would leave the American economy in tatters by the end of
Bush’s second term.
For more than three years,
the Bush administration ignored the tell-tale signs that disorder was spreading
in Iraq. Their apologists, notably the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, point to the quiescent state achieved by 2009, after the
removal of Rumsfeld at the Defense Department and the subsequent implementation
of Gen. David Petreus’ “surge.” Everything that happened since then was Obama’s
fault.
All of this constitutes
history as wishful thinking.
The GOP, scenting blood
in the water as they scan daily headlines about Obama’s poll standings, fevered
by the thought of something else to bludgeon the President with besides
Benghazi, online Obamacare, the IRS and the Veterans Administration, think they
are going in for the kill on Iraq. In fact, they are engaged in massive
overkill on this issue.
As someone with no
particular brief for the GOP, but a strong believer in a two-party system, I
can’t urge the elders of the Republican Party strongly enough to stop pursuing
this avenue back to the White House.
Many in the party probably consider this as golden an opportunity as the “Who lost China?” debate ignited during the administration of Harry Truman. But the difference between the 1940s and this past decade reveals at a glance why the analogy is worthless.
The GOP could charge
(albeit recklessly) that Truman and his State Department were responsible for
the fall of China to the Communists because their party was nowhere within
smelling distance of the White House for a generation—from 1932 to 1952—and,
therefore, their fingerprints could be found nowhere on the corpse of the
government of Chiang Kai-shek. But the first six, formative years of the Iraq War all
took place under GOP auspices.
One Republican who has
failed to draw the proper lessons of history is, not surprisingly, Dick Cheney.
Dubya, having painted his successor into a diplomatic and economic corner, is,
to give him credit, content now to stick with real brushes and canvasses and
not make a noise on every occasion. Not so his Veep. This past week, in an op-ed piece (co-written with daughter Liz) for The Wall Street Journal
that bids fair to become the most overheated pronouncement by any White House
official in the last century, Cheney writes: “Rarely has a
U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Leave aside the
cheap-imitation Churchillian rhetoric. Even leave aside (though it’s going to
be harder) the idea of a man who requested and received five student deferments
in the Vietnam War deciding events 40 years later “at the expense of so many.”
No, what is galling (no other word remotely suffices) about all of this is
that, after being loudly, completely, and repeatedly wrong about the course of
events a decade ago in Iraq, Cheney expects to be taken seriously a decade
later. But then again, this is the same man who, though never seeing a second
of combat himself, told his boss that refusing to pardon aide “Scooter” Libby
on perjury and obstruction of justice charges was like “leaving a soldier on
the battlefield.”
You would expect liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne to call Cheney out on
this. But the surprise last week was Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who, following her smackdown of Karl Rove’s delusional
Presidential election predictions a year and a half ago, has now burnished her
reputation as the one figure at her cable colossus who, at least once in a blue
moon, is willing to say that the pronouncements of some conservatives are
simply too rich for her blood.
"Time and time again, history has proven that
you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir,” Kelly told Cheney on the air last week.
“You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the insurgency was in its
last throes back in 2005, and you said that after our intervention, extremists
would have to 'rethink their strategy of jihad.' Now, with almost a trillion
dollars spent there, with almost 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you
say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so
many?"
In their eagerness to
lambaste Obama, Cheney, Boehner and much of the rest of their party have conveniently
forgotten one major player: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki. Where do you start with his follies? With the decision to push the
U.S. out of his country, without any treaty provision that would leave even a
residual American military force? With a turn toward the
Islamist regime in Iran, the longtime enemy of his nation? With the alienation
of his nation’s Sunnis? With human-rights violations that sound like another
Saddam Hussein in embryo? (As Amnesty International listed them, as summarized by Justin Marozzi for The Huffington Post: “peaceful protesters shot dead, thousands of detentions,
hundreds of death sentences after unfair trials, dozens of executions, torture
and ill treatment ‘rife.’”)
The result of all these actions by al-Maliki, the
man whose name the Republicans dare not say? After a decade in which Americans
tried assiduously to train them to take over the defense of their own
country, more than 200,000 active-duty Iraqi soldiers crumbled in the face of a mere 4,000 fighters with The Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). It is like the slew of South Vietnamese
leaders who squandered U.S. lives and largesse in the Vietnam War through their
own corruption and incompetence, leaving a force that crumbled within a couple of years after the last American soldier went home.
I am not much of a fan of President Obama. He was
far too timorous about reforming the excesses of Wall Street after the Global
Financial Crisis of 2008, and fumbling the rollout of online Obamacare
mercilessly exposed his managerial failures. He has only one real saving grace,
though it is not minor in the current crisis: his small-minded political
enemies (after all, they regard him
as such, rather than as a rival) make him look far larger and more adult by
comparison.
For 20 years after the
onset of the Great Depression, Americans judged GOP performance in relation to
that economic calamity as so wanting that they did not elect a Republican for
President. Shouldn’t a similar dismal performance in the Oval Office on a
comparable horror show in the foreign-policy realm warrant a similar judgment
today?
The ancient historian
Tacitus depicted a barbarian leader rallying his soldiers by warning them of
the consequences if the Romans won: “They make a desert and call it peace.” At
this point, it’s fair to say that the Republicans have made a desert and called
it Iraq.
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