Neo-Cons Torched the House, Now Blame the Fire Department
Joseph Wyatt
Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, John McCain and others now blame the president for the meltdown in Iraq. They blame their hangovers on the guy who is fixing them breakfast. They torched the house, and now blame the fire department that battles the flames.
“Tragically, all we have fought for in Iraq… (is on the verge) potentially, of vanishing,” Romney advised a Utah meeting of the GOP in June.
All we fought for? We were told that our brave troops fought to get the evildoers of 9/11, although neo-cons knew at the time that none were Iraqi. Bush and Cheney said we fought to eliminate WMD, which they had reason to know did not exist, and so that we could deal with them over there instead of over here, although Iraq lacked the military capability to bring a fight to our shores.
We fought because the war would take less than six months, although it lasted eight years. And we fought because Iraqi oil would pay for the effort, although we now find ourselves on the hook for something north of $2 trillion for our trouble.
And we fought to eliminate al-Qaida from Iraq, even though al-Qaida had no detectable presence there to begin with. Along with all that, we were advised that we fought to Westernize Iraq, which neo-conservatives like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others reassured us would be easy, even though we learned the hard way that a relatively open lifestyle can’t be forced on people who prefer hidebound theocracy. And, allegedly, we fought for validation of the domino theory of democracy, which turned out to be as fatuous in Iraq as was the domino theory of communism in Vietnam.
As if to echo Romney, now Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have slithered out of their roiling swamp of self-delusion. They rush madly from the ineluctable judgment of history as they write in the Wall Street Journal that the president “…seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al-Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States…”
In contrast to such self-serving, empty headed sops to the cognition impaired, we would be wise to review what we did not fight for in Iraq:
We did not fight so that nearly 4,500 troops would die and more than 30,000 would be wounded in order that neo-conservative ideologues like them and the chest thumpers at FoxNews could deal better with their daddy issues. And we did not fight so that Osama Bin Laden could run free for years until President Obama would flatten the ringleader of 9/11.
And we did not fight as a means to galvanize the anti-America hatred of every potential terrorist this side of the Himalayas, although that is what happened. Nor did we fight to turn world-wide support for the U. S. following 9/11 into the widespread contempt that ensued.
We did not fight so that ISIS (nee, al-Qaida in Iraq) would emerge as a product of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy disaster, but there it is.
And we did not fight so that the likes of Sen. John McCain now would say, “We had it won (in Iraq)…If we had put a stabilizing force in Iraq like we had in Japan and Korea…” all would be well in Iraq.
Memo to John McCain: When George W. Bush was president, Iraq’s Prime Minister al-Maliki insisted that our troops be out by 2011. President Bush and al-Maliki signed an agreement to that effect in 2008.