Peter Bergen, CNN's national security reporter, writes a poignant column, entitled
Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq, where he notes that under the guise of eliminating al Qaeda from Iraq George W. Bush introduced, and entrenched, al Qaeda into the region.
From where did ISIS spring? One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. ... If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.
After the war we captured 34 million pages of documents from Saddam Hussein's government which after extensive analysis, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded show no evidence of Bush's and Cheney's assertion of partnership with al Qaeda.
Instead of interrupting a budding relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, the Iraq War precipitated the arrival of al Qaeda into Iraq. Although the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al Qaeda only formally established itself in Iraq a year and a half after the U.S. invasion.
Zarqawi's strategy was to hit the Shia so they would in turn strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian conflict in Iraq and later civil war.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, aka AQI, started attacks against "Shia religious processions, shrines and clerics," and as expected, the Shias struck back, escalating into an all out civil war.
Now the AQI control an area larger than New England - "(in) other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world.
As George W. Bush liked to congratulate leaders in his delusional fog, for botched jobs, "great job Georgey and Dickey."
Eric Alterman of BILLMOYERS.COM writes and outstanding indictment of Neocons’ stunning revisionism: Why they’re still divorced from reality
Alterman traces the alternative reality the neocons created for all of us back to Dick Cheney's manipulation of intelligence, and the media, to get us into the Iraq war. He reminds us of the roles played by Robert Novak and Judith Miller.
As we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war did everything possible to intimidate and, when necessary, discredit those in the intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war. Cheney and his deputies made repeated trips to Langley to challenge professional intelligence work and used pliant members of the media — including Robert Novak of the Washington Post and Judith Miller of the New York Times, among many, many others — to undermine the integrity of people like Joseph P. Wilson and Valerie Plame, lest the truth about the administration’s lies come out.''
By the way, in
The seven people who need to STFU about Iraq right now, David Ferguson of Raw Story,tells us that disgraced New York Times reporter Judith Miller has become a regular expert quest on Fox News, advising viewers about what we should do in Iraq.
Eric Alterman provides an extensive review of a rogues gallery of other conservative neocons we are now seeing on the talk shows pedaling the same garbage as they did before. Paul Bremer, Doug Feith, Marc Thiessen, Bill Kristol, and a host of others come up for special mention. You really must read the original article for a reminder of how wrong people can be, and then not learn a damn thing from the great price the rest of us have paid.
One often reads analyses these days that grant the no longer ignorable fact that American conservatives, especially those in control of the Republican Party, have become so obsessed by right-wing ideology and beholden to corporate cash that they have entirely lost touch both with reality and with the views of most Americans. As the famed Brookings Institution analyst Thomas Mann recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “Republicans have become a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.” ...
The conservative foreign policy establishment, it needs to be said, is no less out of touch with reality — and democracy — than the Tea Party fanatics who control the Republican domestic agenda (and are fueled by the cash of the Koch brothers and other billionaires who stand to profit from their victories). That so many in the media pretend otherwise, after all this time, all this death and all this money wasted, demonstrates not only contempt for their audience but utter disdain for knowledge itself.
Both of these well written articles paint a vivid picture of this bizarre psycho-social pathology we are witnessing again. While we can be moderately encouraged that journalists and other writers are not ignoring these gross falsifications this time around, I'm left with an uneasy concern. If our American society were an individual would we not have to admit that we have a serious illness - perhaps even beyond mere delusional fantasies, but possibly some kind of psychosis?
If we were a person wouldn't we be considering voluntarily checking ourselves into a mental facility for observation? What is the metaphorical equivalent for a nation?
What is our prognosis when so many of the thought "leaders" in our society seem unable to grasp, admit, or learn from their/our catastrophic errors from the past?
We have brief moments of lucidity, as when John Oliver gets us laughing with his depiction of 97 scientists debating 3 climate change-deniers. Then our collective eyes seem to glaze over and we go back into our normal mode of processing where we continue accepting absurd presentations of falsehoods as if they are plausible representations of reality or plans for our future.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Climate Change Debate (HBO)
We need to snap out of our slumbers and say, "enough is enough! It's time to get real." Let's take back reality!
And the first thing we can do is tell these neocons and science-denying con-men that while it may be their free speech right to be as stupid as they like, could they please do it elsewhere, because the rest of us have urgent problems we have to figure out what to do about.
Let's suggest to everyone who shares this concern that we rally ourselves to appear in mass at the elections this November, and vote out every Republican, or any other politician, neocon, and/or science denier, as a symbolic gesture of our commitment to dealing with reality with every bit of intelligence, compassion, and wisdom we can muster.
To imagine we can make serious headway into complicated policy issues when so many of our leaders seem ... unfit for office may be ... over-optimistic. Let's get out our vote like never before!