Quote of the Day (Bruce F. Murphy, on the Miscalculations of Dictating to Other Nations)

"Neither international law nor the United Nations charter allows for a country to export its political system to others, and certainly not through war. It may be reassuring to some Americans to think of our country as above the community of nations and beyond the footling machinations of minor states. But the tendency to think we can ignore history and the feelings of others leads to gross miscalculations, like the failure to anticipate Iraqi resentment of American occupation. [Neoconservative thinker Robert] Kagan may be right that ‘it is reasonable to assume that we have only just entered a long era of American hegemony.’ It is also reasonable to conclude that the rest of the world will fight this hegemony tooth-and-nail—at the UN, on the Internet, in the vastly expanded media, and, unfortunately, through violence. Other people may accept, under duress, that the United States is the most powerful nation. But it is unlikely that they will accept the premise that we are the best nation that has ever existed, with a providential right to dictate to others.”—American essayist, poet, and freelance writer Bruce F. Murphy, “The Last, Best Hope? The Perils of American Exceptionalism,” Commonweal, Oct. 8, 2004

Clearly, in targeting Iran a generation after we thought we could shift the power dynamics of the Mideast for the better, this country did not learn a major lesson of the Iraq War: the folly of what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called replacing “a policy that aimed at peace through the prevention of war by a policy aimed at peace through preventive war.”

Donald Trump distinguished himself from the rest of the Republican candidates for President in the 2016 primaries by declaring the Iraq War a disaster. Many of those who voted for him in the next three fall Presidential elections assumed that he would keep the nation out of future conflicts.

But after his nearly half a century in the public eye, could anyone reasonably assume that a personality so bellicose in dealing with others would not sometime, somewhere resort to an actual war putting lives at risk? 

And can anyone now assume that, after he loudly dissed our allies since January 20, 2025, we will be strong enough to go it alone and never need their support again?

Quote of the Day (Mike Royko, on an Earlier War Over an Oil-Rich Mideast Nation)

“In two or three years, Kuwait will be close to looking as it did before Iraq looted and plundered it. But I guarantee that the West Side of Chicago, much of the Bronx, and the slums of Newark, Gary, New Orleans, and other American cities will be the same mess they are now. That’s because Kuwait sits atop an ocean of liquid gold. It can hire the giant Bechtel corporation and other globe-hopping companies to perform a miraculous rehab job. Unfortunately, nobody is drilling gushers on the West Side of Chicago or in Detroit or the Bronx. And Bechtel doesn't take our IOUs.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997), “Kuwait’s Future Brighter Than Ours,” originally published in the Chicago Tribune, Mar. 12, 1991, reprinted in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko (1999)

Operation Desert Storm concluded 35 years ago this past Saturday. The outcome made a national hero of General Norman Schwarzkopf, briefly boosted President George H.W. Bush’s approval rating, and even now retains something of a retrospective glow: a conflict with comparatively few American casualties, with a limited objective—Saddam Hussein’s occupation forces thrust out of Kuwait.

But every war has unintended, often deleterious, consequences, and the 1990-91 Gulf War was no different. To ensure that Saddam would not threaten a key oil-rich ally, Bush stationed American forces in Saudi Arabia, which Osama bin Laden saw as an “infidel” offense against Islam’s holiest sites. He launched al Qaeda in an attempt to drive them out.

Right on the anniversary of that first Gulf War, another Mideast war of choice was launched. Already there are casualties, and sites have been hit not only in Iran, but elsewhere in the Mideast.

Even if the war concludes with an outcome that President Trump proclaims favorable, we won’t know for years—as also with the replacement of a prior leader with the Shah of Iran in 1953—whether this will be in long-term American interests.

The region has a long memory, and you can bet it’ll remember that Trump told The New York Times back in 2016 how his policy for fighting the Islamic States would differ from Barack Obama’s: “I’ve been saying it for years: Take the oil.” It’s impossible to ascribe good motives to a country that’s elected a leader who so unashamedly proclaims self-interest.

I wish Mike Royko were alive to comment on all this. Long ago, when Trump was only a tabloid fixture, the columnist, in a hilarious February 1990 piece, informed readers, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that Marla Maples was not the aspiring mogul’s mistress but, according to “a very high-ranking source in the Trump Organization,” his personal laundress:

“And that, pure and simple, is the reason Mr. Trump kept her nearby, in a hotel room one floor below his, and brought her to Aspen and took her on his yacht and had her accompany him to parties and other social events.”

But in this “Quote of the Day,” Royko got serious, pointing out what remain American problems: neglect at home while millions are spent on foreign conflicts. 

(Though progress has been made in some neighborhoods in the areas mentioned, too many remain symbols of urban decay. And before long, the pain spread beyond the inner city: from 1980 to 2016, the Great Lakes region lost ground economically, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and western Pennsylvania performing particularly badly, according to Indermit Gil’s 2019 analysis for the Brookings Institution.)

Much like “Make America Great Again,” the notion of “America First” was a chimera, a propaganda slogan conceived to create a scapegoat—aid going to foreign governments or, worse still, foreigners coming to this country—for this nation’s underinvestment in its own material and human resources.

Don’t imagine for a moment that this situation will be redressed in that den of scorpions, the Middle East. Even the quick takeover of Venezuela ended up costing $3 billion for its late August-to-early February military buildup, according to Becca Wasser, a military strategy expert at the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank.

The Iranian campaign is already longer than that, even beyond the walkover stage, courtesy of an administration equally lacking competence and conscience. We’d better hope that this conflict won’t devolve into the quagmire that the Second Gulf War became under George W. Bush.

Quote of the Day (Maureen Dowd, on ‘Sarahcuda’ Palin)

“With [Sarah] Palin and [Donald] Trump, a failed reality star and a successful one, gall is divided into two parts. There has been a lot of talk this campaign season about how women pols bring superior qualities to the table: collegiality and listening skills. But Sarahcuda shows that we are truly the equals of men, capable of narcissistic explosions, brazen hypocrisy and unapologetic greed. She had barely finished the endorsement Tuesday when she began using it to raise money for SarahPAC, so she can take her show on the road.”—Maureen Dowd, “Sarah Palin Saves Feminism,” The New York Times, Jan. 24, 2016

Sarah Palin threatens to put out of business Saturday Night Live as a source of electoral satire. After all, how can the SNL parody of her Donald Trump endorsement compete with her own self-parody?

“Just what is it with Sarah Palin?” a relative of mine, by no means a liberal, asked me the other day. What, indeed? After listening to her speech supporting Trump, can you, Faithful Reader, recall another public figure who ever sounded so incoherent without being drunk or high?

Michael Barbaro’s New York Times piece about this landmark in political dissuasion could barely restrain itself in recounting the former Vice-Presidential candidate’s multiple offenses to sense and sensibility. He picked out 10 of the “most memorable lines” from the speech, then, kind soul that he is, translated it for the benefit of readers. This passage is a particular favorite of mine:

“And you quit footing the bill for these nations who are oil-rich, we’re paying for some of their squirmishes that have been going on for centuries. Where they’re fighting each other and yelling ‘Allahu akbar,’ calling jihad on each other’s heads forever and ever. Like I’ve said before, let them duke it out and let Allah sort it out.”

It’s hard to know where to start with something like this. Already, “squirmishes,” in all its artlessness, shows signs of becoming a permanent part of political slang. (If Palin had a working cerebellum at this point, she might be squirming at the thought that she butchered a common-enough word like “skirmishes.”)

There once was a time, from one end of our sprawling country to another, when teachers instilled in their students how to build, step by step—words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, all held together by consistency in pronouns, verbs and tone—structures of larger thought. That has gone sadly missing in the three sentences—or what purport to be three sentences—in Ms. Palin’s quote above. 

It is extremely doubtful whether any professional speechwriter would ever want to be credited with having written this grammatically loose, meandering address. The logical conclusion is that Ms. Palin herself winged it, right on the stump. No self-respecting politician improvises in this fashion, lest he or she risk merciless exposure, as Ms. Palin did in this case.

It is, in fact, a dreadful commentary on modern audiences that a speech like this elicited resounding cheers rather than appalled silence. Within my own memory, politicians once delivered coherent addresses. They might be cliché-ridden, they might be even masterfully evasive, but they attempted to present arguments and convince audiences of their value.

What “Sarahcuda” presented last week did not even meet this minimum standard. In fact, it doesn’t even match the level of the 30-second soundbite so derided by so many contemporary political commentators.

But leave aside questions of sound and sense. A woman whose principal national-security expertise derived from seeing Russia from her Alaska home executed, in the sphere of foreign policy, a triple-axel that would have astounded Olympic skaters.

Consider this: In September 2008, then-Governor Palin told a church audience that the “Iraq War is a task that is from God.” More than seven years later, she sounded like Sen. Rand Paul in demanding that the U.S. stop “footing the bill for these nations who are oil-rich.” In the interval between these statements, she never explained her reversal.

Nearly a decade ago, she did not criticize the President who put these soldiers in harm’s way, in a conflict started on faulty premises and pursued without forethought: George W. Bush. Now, shockingly, she blames Barack Obama—who has consistently sought to wind down the disastrous conflict inherited from his predecessor—for the post-traumatic stress disorder she sees at the heart of her son Track’s recent act of domestic violence that led to his arrest.

In that accusation against the President, Palin not only demonstrated that she fails at English and history, but also at logic. Track Palin’s tour of duty in Iraq began in 2008, before Barack Obama became President.  

As for the idea that Obama is “indifferent” to veterans such as Track: The long wait times for veterans' care that burst into public view last year were, according to this article from Mother Jones, known as far  back as 2005, but continued for the remaining four years of the Bush administration. Yet, even as veterans’ problems began to pile high in the second term of George W. Bush, the administration stuck to its plans to cut funding for their  health care, according to this 2007 piece from the Washington Times.

In 2008, Sarah Palin proved to be scandalously uninformed and unprepared to assume the Presidency. The nation dodged a budget when she and the man who named her to the ticket, John McCain, did not win the election. This year, however, reveals a scandal of a different kind: the continuing adulation she still receives from an oblivious portion of the American public. In 1997, William Kristol and David  Brooks wrote an essay in The Weekly Standard calling for "National Greatness Conservatism." Nearly two decades later, Sarah Palin can lay fair claim to leading another, increasingly more sizable, wing of the movement: Clueless Conservatism.

The GOP on Iraq: They Made a Desert and Called It Peace

“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.

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on the Iraq War’s Cost to the U.S. and GOP)

“No one quite knows or will probably ever know the exact financial cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is interesting in itself. Some estimates put it at $1 trillion, some $2 trillion…. [NBC national affairs writer Tom] Curry cites a Congressional Budget Office report saying the Iraq operation had cost $767 billion as of January 2012. Whatever the number, it added to deficits and debt, and along with the Bush administration's domestic spending helped erode the Republican Party's reputation for sobriety in fiscal affairs.”— Peggy Noonan, “Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?” The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2013

You can read from here to eternity all the analyses of what ails the Republican Party. The general tone about its problems with Hispanics, gays, women, you name it—i.e., that the party has just sustained a huge gash in its well-heeled ocean liner, and that all aboard have spilled into the icy waters, where they’ll drown in the near future—sounds awfully familiar to me. I read similar obituaries about the GOP in 1977, after a shellacking over Watergate and an intraparty nomination slugfest left it without control of the White House and Congress. Come to think of it, I heard the same thing about them four years ago, before they assumed control of both houses of Congress. Much of the same wailing could be heard about the Democrats, in fact, in the 12 sorry years before Bill Clinton was elected.

Think of it another way: The party fielded a hapless candidate that New York Times columnist David Brooks rightly likened to Thurston Howell III of Gilligan’s Island, and it still polled 47% of the vote in the last Presidential campaign. A full-fledged economic or military disaster tagged to the Obama administration would put the Oops! (sorry, I mean Opposition) Party back in business.

But Peggy Noonan’s column, I think, is onto something important. Tones, even policies, on social issues can be adjusted. But the Iraq War delivered a body blow that the Republican Party, and the nation, could ill afford to sustain.

“Did the Iraq war hurt the GOP? Yes,” the former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan bluntly admits. “The war, and the crash of '08, half killed it. It's still digging out, and whether it can succeed is an open question.”

The damage to U.S. lives is, in comparison with other U.S. wars, not so steep: roughly 4,000 deaths, plus another 2,000 for Afghanistan. The two combined are roughly comparable to losses sustained in the Spanish-American War and the far less-well-known subsequent struggle to quash the Philippine independence movement. But they pale in comparison, both in absolute terms and as percentages of the total population, with deaths in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the American Revolution, Korea, Vietnam, WWI, WWII, and the Civil War.

But the cost in other ways is as bad as these other wars, perhaps even more so. Noonan’s column—which should be required reading at GOP headquarters—takes note of how the war affected perceptions of its foreign policy, the meaning of conservatism, the dominance that began with Reagan, dissent within the party, and the reputation of its Washington establishment.

But the fiscal damage caused by the war—the one alluded to in this quote--might be most insidious. Following the war, no Republican really had the right to complain about deficits caused by President Obama—they began on George W. Bush’s watch. More than a few longtime party members knew this, which is why, for instance, Noonan's normal criticism of Democrats was considerably more muted in the '08 Presidential campaign, and why Christopher Buckley, son of the founder of the modern conservative movement, came out and actually endorsed Obama. The rising tide of right-wing discontent about Dubya’s domestic spending would not have risen so sharply without war-worsened budget deficits. That energized the libertarian/Tea Party wing of the GOP, with consequences its Establishment members are still trying to contain.

The low-level civil war now occurring among Republicans nearly claimed a prominent victim a few weeks ago. For years, Chuck Hagel had a well-deserved reputation for fiscal and social conservatism, and had even supported President Bush’s invasion of Iraq 10 years ago. But his increasing criticism of the conduct of the war and those who supported it left him, in a real sense, as a man without a party. His onetime Senate friends on the Republican side of the aisle can't abide that he was right to question the disastrous military policy perpetrated by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, or that his disgust with the Iraq War was so complete that he refused to endorse old friend John McCain for Presidents. He begins his term as Secretary of Defense with neither bone-deep loyalty from Democrats nor good will from his former GOP colleagues.

There are other costs to the Iraq War, as we take stock this month 10 years after the Bush administration turned the War on Terror into a bridge too far:

*A more polarized electorate. Even as the GOP Establishment has been discredited and the Tea Party emboldened, the most socially liberal faction of the Democrats has taken firmer control on the other side of the partisan divide.  Increasingly limited space exists for political centrists of either party, not to mention the spirit of compromise.

* A politicized intelligence unit. Dick Cheney conclusively demonstrated how easy it was to shift intelligence estimates toward the conclusions that one highly influential administration official wished to draw. It is a foregone conclusion that the citizens of other nations, already ambivalent (or worse) about America, might recoil from any suggestion that we might be facing a mortal threat. Now, U.S. citizens, remembering those phantom WMDs, are likely to do so, too, even if the suggestion comes from a Democratic President.

* Strengthened isolationism. Reluctance to use military force is a good thing, but now that they are back in power, the Democrats are facing increasing pressures against using non-military means as well. At this point, foreign aid is squarely in the sight of budget-cutters. Now, it is China that is in a better position to use its financial resources to further geopolitical aims. Rest assured that those aims will not be for humanitarian purposes. And that brings us to the biggest victims of all in the Iraq War…

*The Iraqis themselves. Now, after a decade of death, dysfunction and division, they face their future—though the word “they” must be highly qualified in a country now experiencing the ethnic cleansing of Christians and other minorities by Islamic militants, harassment and worse against women’s rights activists, and a government still all too internally fractious.

God help the Iraqis—because, courtesy of a former Republican administration and its then-compliant, now-confused, Iraq-wrecked allies in the legislative branch--the United States is no longer of a mind to do so again anytime soon.