Evoking images of Frankenstein's castle
Edward Luce of
The Financial Times warns us that
America’s neocons have been jolted back to life, refusing to die, like contagious zombies from hell, coming back from their presumed deaths, trying to infect us with their virulent ideology of destruction and chaos.
Like a corpse that sits bolt upright when electrocuted, US neoconservatives keep springing back to life. The electric charge comes at regular intervals – Syria’s use of chemical weapons, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, China’s growing maritime assertiveness, and now the return of Sunni extremism in Iraq. Their rehabilitation is abetted by the television networks: whenever there is a global setback, the same old faces run for the cameras and claim it is 1939. That is what they do. And the media loves them for it. ... Churchill’s definition of a fanatic is someone who can’t change their mind and won’t change the subject. Every now and then the subject turns their way.
There are three things behind their growing self-confidence. First, the US public has stopped listening to Barack Obama, their supposed nemesis. ... Second, memories are short. ... Mr Bush’s Iraq invasion took place before Facebook existed and before anyone had heard of Mr Obama. ... Yet his enablers are returning to respectability. Washington’s TV studios now play regular hosts to the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon group that was formed in the 1990s. None make any apology for their previous views on Iraq. Their closest friend is the media’s amnesia – or perhaps its appetite for infotainment. Mr Cheney may be discredited, even among his own crowd. But those who lent him intellectual respectability are back.
Third, ...they claim America is in decline. On this point they may be right – though not for the reasons they state. The economic rise of others has diluted its relative dominance. The neocons say that US decline is the temporary effect of a weak president. They believe it can be reversed by a simple act of will. ... On this they are wrong. But the facts tend to fit with their world view. ... Mr Obama is seemingly powerless. ... The reality is that it is a world they have hastened into being. America’s global power derives almost as much from its credibility as from its economic and military might. The TV networks may have moved past Abu Ghraib, water boarding and Lynndie England. The Arab world has not. ... On Iraq, as with Vietnam, the act of remembering is essential.
We need to not only remember, but grab our pitchforks and torches, and luckily for our movie plot line theme, Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid jumps to the head of the crowd to give us an inspirational pep rally.
Burgess Everett of Politico recounts Harry Reid slams neocons on Iraq, and urges Americans to ignore GOP hawks and neocons who pushed America into the “biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country.” From the Senate floor Senator Reid called out Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, columnist Bill Kristol, and even Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell for criticism.
“After all these years, their suggestions haven’t changed. They are in a time warp. Those who are the so-called experts are so eager to commit American soldiers to another war. Why is their advice so valuable?” Reid said. “To the architects of the Iraq war who are now so eager to offer their expert analysis, I say … ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ Unfortunately, we have already tried it your way and it was the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country.
Reid did not mince words in his response, describing Wolfowitz’s critiques of Obama’s Iraq policy as “bizarre” and clarifying that he was talking about “Billy” Kristol the writer, “not the comedian” Billy Crystal. But he saved his strongest broadside for the Cheneys.
“If there is one thing that this country does not need, it’s that we should be taking advice from Dick Cheney on wars. Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is to be on the right side of history,” Reid said.
I love it when Majority Leader Reid's old pugilist trash talker comes out from his days as a boxer, and he give the Republicans hell. I wish he'd do this every day. When he gets rolling he can knock em back better than anyone else we have, which I find funny, and uplifting, for some reason.
Retired Ambassador
Joseph C. Wilson,, who played a major role in the drama, challenging many of the neocons' falsehoods, writes in
The Huffington Post Iraq: The Way Ahead Requires Understanding the Past, warning us against falling back into the delusion that we can fix Iraq if we only do, the "next great idea."
We cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again, not with 300 military advisers, not with air strikes. There are a number of avenues we can and should pursue however. Iraq is a regional problem and potentially a global one. Secretary Kerry is right to be actively engaging the neighbors, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League, and the UN Security Council, and we should listen to their considered views. ...
The situation in Iraq is destined to become much worse and remain so for a long time. We need to prepare for the possibility of a looming humanitarian crisis and ramp up efforts to cope with the potential displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including establishing safe havens, and pre-positioning food, supplies, and personnel. We also need to do all we can to bolster the efforts of our friends in the region, who will bear the brunt of any refugee exodus. Jordan and Turkey are already overburdened by refugees from the Syrian conflict. Supporting them in saving Sunni lives is a much better use of our resources than air strikes that would no doubt kill innocents and make even more enemies.
We know how to do this. In the 1990s, in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, National Security Adviser Susan Rice was instrumental in creating the African Crisis Response Initiative, specifically to provide succor to vulnerable populations caught in the crossfire of a civil war. The lessons learned from that experience are relevant to the current situation in Iraq. The objective then was to stop the killing and save the innocents. That should be the same US goal now --- stop killing innocent civilian Sunnis; instead try to protect and save them.
Ambassador Wilson endured many attacks from Dick Cheney and his minions, but his credibility seems to have endured and be steadily building as he speaks from common sense and his statements seem to be backed up by the facts.
As the neocons test the limits of credulity by trying to say "I told you so," in response to chaos in Iraq, the sheer audacity if their bizarre claims becomes too much even for fellow conservatives.
Brad Knickerbocker of
The Christian Science Monitor reviews some of their opinions in
Neocons, critics fight over who’s responsible for Iraq mess.
“I think the same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq War,” Sen. Rand Paul said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “You know, 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?”
Sen. Paul also accused supporters of the war in Iraq of “emboldening Iran.”
“Time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well, sir,” Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly told Cheney during an interview.
Appearing on ABC’s “This Week," Sunday, the former VP defended himself.
"
“If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face,” Cheney said. “Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist. He doesn’t believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world. I think it’s absolutely essential.”
Dick Cheney seems to have self-imploded, with even Republicans demanding that he keep quite before he does even more damage to the Republican Party.
Cynthia Tucker for
Tallahasse.com writes that she always thought that when a person screwed up really badly, they would reflect, apologize, repent, and try to learn from the experience. Dick Cheney has changed her worldview as she describes in
Cynthia Tucker: Armchair hawks cling to Iraq fantasies.
I’ve long recognized my naivete, but Dick Cheney has recently reminded me just how wrong I was. ... Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops and more than 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives during a misguided occupation that Cheney helped to mastermind. Now, that country is disintegrating, torn apart by bloody sectarian warfare that was a foreseeable consequence of the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Yet, Cheney and his neocon allies have come out blasting President Obama for Iraq’s woes.
That is breathtaking in its deceit, its gall, its malevolence. Before George W. Bush invaded Iraq, al-Qaida in Iraq was just a jihadist fantasy. ... But the damage the neocons did, not only abroad but also at home, lives on. The United States is left with a huge budget deficit, a result of Bush’s two wars with tax cuts, and thousands of veterans who still suffer severe physical injuries, significant emotional trauma or both.
Polls show that Americans’ trust in their government has fallen through the floor; in a recent survey, only 19 percent of people told Gallup they trust the “government in Washington” to do the right thing most of the time.
She's not the only one today who blames the neocon for damaging even the core fabric of our people's trust in the fundamental institutions of our government. Which is a perfect escalation of perspective and consequence to prepare ourselves for our heavy duty finale piece.
Our own
Meteor Blades writing for
The Daily Kos calls our attention to the intentional deception, fraud, and even war crimes involved in our entry into the Iraq war in
Stop pretending the invasion of Iraq was a 'mistake.' It lets the liars who launched it off the hook, the implications of which will be reverberating for some time.
All this occurred because the likes of Dick Cheney and his pals brewed truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, outright fabrications, disinformation, misinformation, omissions, inventions, deceptions, deflections, revisions, excisions and other serpentine resourcefulness into a propaganda barrage specifically designed to persuade enough people not to stand in the way of their squalid project.
Consequently, thousands of Americans are now dead because war criminals sent them abroad fraudulently in the name of liberation, security and prevention. The Iraqi people got none of those things.
And because too few people who should have stopped these war criminals, who were in a position in the U.S. Senate to stop them, mustered the courage to stand in their way. They let them get away with their scheme. A few eagerly encouraged them.
Uncounted thousands of Iraqis are dead because of slime who waved the bloody shirt of 9/11 in one hand, Old Glory in the other, and simultaneously managed to shred our Constitution and decades of international law. People who, if this were a just world, would long ago have appeared in shackles to be tried for war crimes.
MB's essay leads me to believe that we need to propose again that our whole nation adopt the model of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees used by South Africa both to take responsibility and accountability for its crimes of apartheid. We can not just keep shrugging our shoulders and making the "gallows humors" joke "I hate it when that happens," as we have done for the last six years.
Perhaps, there are other better ways to hold the neocons accountable in criminal courts, I do not know. What impressed me about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committees is that they also enabled South Africa to to heal and to move forward, at a time when a palpable fear of violent bloodshed pervaded the country.
We should ask Reverend Bishop Desmond Tutu and others from South Africa for help in how both individuals involved in fraudulently and illegally taking the United States into the war in Iraq, and our nation, can go through some national process of accountability for responsibility in these war crimes in exchange for amnesty in our country, (we can not immunize them against charges in the ICC), or face indictments. We need to acknowledge and learn from our mistakes or we shall certainly we shall repeat them.
After reelecting Bush in 2004, the whole nation collectively owns these crimes. In addition, I believe we should probably reconsider and debate here the idea of adopting a group resolution to suggest to President Obama, and other Democrats, that they communicate to those in Spain that are said to have initiated the process to charge Bush and Cheney with war crimes in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, that they should do so again, and that this time the Obama administration will not intervene to shut the process down.
Until we engage in some process of accountability, which includes those responsible specifically acknowledging and apologizing for their crimes, in exchange for amnesty, our nation will be like the Catholic Church, which rotated pedophile priests in Boston, rather than turn them over to police, enabling them to molest children again.
If someone as credible as MB believes our President and Vice President committed war crimes that resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis, and 4,500 American solders, the destruction of a sovereign nation, the violation of the Geneva Conventions, and international law, and we then do nothing, then we become even further complicit in actively undermining "the rule-of-law" not only domestically, but internationally.
Respect for the "rule-of-law" over the ideology of "might-makes-right" is as fundamental a distinction between the progressive and right-wing world views as there is. If we, as progressives, do not believe this principle is worth fighting for, what other principles justify our existence as a group without this pillar?
And, to properly complete this essay, given my choice of a title and opening line hook, I'm required to say for my last line kicker:
"Go back to hell, you miserable neocon zombie devils!
Die, you neocon zombies, die!"
Aaaaaaaawwwwwwwoooooooooooooo!!!!!!! (Fearsome and eerie HoundDog howl to the moon - que exit music.)