Some more data points to help us all celebrate the tenth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Liberation.
* Spy officials say that the next head of CIA’s clandestine branch is savvy, talented and up to her eyebrows in torture. Apparently she worried a bit about accountability for the dozens of prisoners whom we tortured to death. Thank god we chose to look forward. Just think how accountability could destroy the promising careers of those talented rapists torturers.
* LA Times, summarizing every analyst they interviewed:
Ten years after Iraq war began, Iran reaps the gains
Speaking of, former Iran spook Robert Baer noted that Iran was Israel’s best and most reliable friend in the mideast, largely due to strong and shared feelings about Sunni dictators in the region. It helped that Iranians felt minimal connection with the Sunni Palestinian militants. Eliminating Saddam turned Iran’s incentives on their head; now they had a shot at empire with only two real rivals for regional hegemony: Saudi Arabia, a military joke with an overfed family of Sunnis uncomfortably ruling a lot of volatile Shi’ites, and Israel.
Of course we could have asked Juan Cole before the war. He would have explained all this without the need for debt, death and geopolitical humiliation.
Villago Delenda Est
The stupid. It kills.
Raven
And today is the 40th Anniversary of us unassing Vietnam.
LosGatosCA
You have to admit all the right people got rich from the war though. So it wasn’t a total loss.
People shouldn’t be focused on just ‘what’s best for the country’ or ‘what’s morally correct’ or other inflexible views of our excellent Iraqi adventure.
Emma
Of course we could have asked Juan Cole before the war. He would have explained all this without the need for debt, death and geopolitical humiliation.
Information, logic and common sense. As if (as the old farts used to say)
Mark S.
We didn’t fail in Iraq. We just didn’t succeed.
weaselone
Turkey doesn’t count as a regional power?
Corner Stone
Hey, I’ve got an idea. We’ve pretty much played out the whole Bombing the Shit Outta MENA thing. Let’s go with the everything old is new again theme and get in another land war in Asia.
I hear N Korea is rattling some sabers or a couple tin pots together. Whatever it is, they must be dealt with.
raven
@Corner Stone: Fucking relax will you?
Just as sure as spring is coming, most seem to find it entirely normal that warnings of thermonuclear war, annihilation and utter devastation punctuate this, the season of joint U.S., South Korean military maneuvers.
Corner Stone
@raven: It’s not the action, it’s the mindset.
catclub
@Corner Stone: ” N Korea is rattling some sabers’
Did it strike you as not very brave that the B-2 Bombers flew over to Korea,… and then returned to their base in Missouri.
They are so expensive they do not dare even land them outside the US.
Villago Delenda Est
@raven:
Team Spirit. Always good for some NK saber rattling. They’ve been doing this fucking dance for decades now.
catclub
We (starting with Bush and Cheney, but ending with everybody) got played six ways to sunday by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iranian paymasters. This is another reason that admitting the Iraq war was wrong cannot be done.
Chris
Better tell Bibi that. But, yes. Israel played a key role as the middleman in Iran-contra for precisely that reason, because they were more worried about Iraq winning the war than Iran.
Not sure I completely agree with this. The thing about the Iranian government is that while they aspire to leadership of the Muslim world, being a Shi’a regime puts them in a very definite minority. Posing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause is what gives them legitimacy as an Islamic and not merely a Shi’a actor.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
Well, there are only a handful of them, because they’re so expensive, and they’re all based at that one base in Missouri because they’re a maintenance nightmare.
There are no boondoggles like USAF flying boondoggles.
BretH
Every now and then Conservatives need to find some dirty hippies and punch them.
What the hippies need to see is American boys and girls going house to house, from Haight-Ashbury to Berkeley, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.’
Bubblegum Tate
@Mark S.:
Or, as Sarah Palin would put it, we succeeded in a different direction.
Cathy W
Juan Cole was, in fact, explaining all of this to anyone who would bother to click on his blog. The problem was that he didn’t have a wider audience than that.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@catclub:
A minor nitpick from an aircraft person here. The B52 isn’t expensive; production began in the early Fifties and the last of them rolled off the line in 1964. The aircraft has been in service so long that it’s older than the crews who fly it.
The reason that they flew the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fucker) to Korea and back was to demonstrate they could.
gene108
@Mark S.:
Revisionist history.
We succeeded. We freed the Iraqis to choose their own path. We made the Middle East safe for Democracy.
America cannot fail. America can only be failed.
@Villago Delenda Est:
What’s sad about the NK situation is all the right-wingers made fun of Clinton for “appeasement”. Then Bush & Co. got tough and six years after Bush & Co. got tough, North Korea developed an atomic bomb.
No one in the media or otherwise faults the failure of neo-con/Republican foreign policy for this and basically pretends Bush & Co. had no responsibility to enforce the NPT.
If that happened with a Dem in office there’d be no living it down.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@gene108:
You didn’t mention that we freed them from the bonds of secularism.
Mark S.
Doesn’t it take a lot of fuel to fly bombers halfway around the world?
Chris
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Not B-52s, B-2 Spirits, the stealth bombers that were developed starting in the late seventies and first used, I believe, in Kosovo.
catclub
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I am pretty sure I was talking about B-2 ( the giant delta wing, radar evading, $500M per plane model), not B-52 (the band name, Slim Pickens Dr Strangelove, model).
BUFF’s I have no problem with.
smintheus
Every historian I knew predicted that Iran would be the big winner if we invaded Iraq, and that we would just find ourselves in a quagmire. This was not a hard call to make.
catclub
@catclub: I lowballed.
Wikipedia: “the cost of each aircraft averaged US$737 million (in 1997 dollars).[3] Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft, which includes spare parts, equipment, retrofitting, and software support.[3] The total program cost including development, engineering and testing, averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Villago Delenda Est: Isn’t the B2 another glorious Regan legacy?
Carter: manned long range bombers in a nuclear war are as useful as a bi-plane and the B52s are plenty useful in a conventional war, project canceled.
Regan: Oh ya? Well we’re building them anyway.
Pococurante
We don’t have to go to an empty suit like him for that lesson. There were plenty of qualified people who gave the same warnings and have credibility and expertise.
Cole’s daily contribution to insanity is uncritically regurgitating extreme articles. He managed to outdo himself this week with articles that continue the lie that there is no historical basis to Hebrews in Eastern Mediterranean.
I follow his blog. His contributors are sometimes interesting. But Cole himself is vacuous.
Omnes Omnibus
@Pococurante: Link?
Chris
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
No, I can see the logic in the B-2. It’s a stealth aircraft. Having a delivery system that can’t be detected until pretty much the moment it drops the bomb is a capacity I can understand us wanting to have.
You’re thinking of the B-1, which was not stealth and whose purpose no one could really seem to explain.
Snarki, child of Loki
Yeah, but he was a “premature anti-stupid”, and hence ignorable.
Tim F.
@Chris: the B1 was designed to fly at treetop level at night across mainland Russia, pull up at the last moment abd drop a nuke wherever with minimal warning. Basically it was proto-stealth, using low altitude and insane computer-guided maneuverability rathet than sci fi building materials. Not a bad idea but a bit wearing on the mental health of pilots.
Chris
@Snarki, child of Loki:
He has no one to blame but himself. If only he wasn’t so damn liberal, we wouldn’t have tuned him out like we did. So really, it’s his fault that Iraq was invaded.
/wingnut
Chris
@Tim F.:
When you put it that way, it makes more sense… but I’d maintain that the B-2 fulfills the same “nuke with no warning” objective without the need for heart-attack-inducing nap-of-the-earth stuff.
Narcissus
Heart-attack-inducing nap-of-the-earth stuff is so cool though
Lurking Canadian
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not sure what Procurante was thinking about, but http://www.juancole.com/2013/03/palestinians-christian-settlement.html
contains excerpts from one article that says that there is no such thing as a historical Israeli state. I don’t know if Cole makes a habit of saying this kind of thing, but I found it rather shocking.
Lurking Canadian
@Lurking Canadian: I have investigated further. The guy quoted in the article referred to an Israeli historian named Shlomo Sand. Sand is famous (or notorious) for a book in which he argues that the cultural Jewish people are not a “nation”, because not descended from Jews exiled in the diaspora, which he claims didn’t really happen in the sense of an entire people being expelled.
Then there is also the idea I had seen before that the Ashkenazim are actually descended from the Khazar nation, who converted en masse sometime in the first few centuries of the common era. I don’t know how commonly accepted by historians this Khazar hypothesis is, but I’ve been surprised ever since I first heard it that it was not more controversial.
handsmile
@Lurking Canadian:
Huh?
The link you provided to Cole’s “Informed Comment” blog presents translations from several Palestinian media sources, e.g., news agencies, daily newspapers, websites, expressing dismay with Obama’s recent statements on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Cole identifies each source by title, publication date, page, and its political affiliation. It would be “shocking” if these Palestinian representatives did not express such sentiments.
Other than an introductory paragraph (and selecting these particular accounts), Juan Cole is “saying” nothing in this post. Yes, he does conclude his paragraph, “In other words, the Likud Party won.” Which seems to me indisputable on the matter of settlements.
Once more, “Cole makes a habit” of bringing to an American, English-language readership news and opinion from the Middle East that is rarely found elsewhere.
Tim F.
@Chris: To be honest both the B1 and the B2 kind of fail at the ‘no warning’ part. You can’t see either one coming, at least at night, but you can damn well know where the B1 has been when people start losing their TV aireals and have blown windows from the near-sonic air blast. Similarly, stealth planes are much less stealthy from behind (jet wash is jet wash), and the main problem for air defenses is that the missile has to catch up rather than intercept. If we really wanted to hit Moscow I think that the Russkis would get the general drift at about the same time as if we launched an ICBM. My guess is that both planes are best used against intermediate states that do not have quite as much continental landmass. It’s also best if we do not fly them in the SAME GODDAMN FLIGHT PLAN night after night like we did over Serbia, when Milosevic claimed a lucky hit on a F-117.
stickler
@Tim F.: Wasn’t that also our brilliant plan in Vietnam? Same flight path, same time every day (to make maintenance easier)? Operation Rolling Let’s-See-How-Good-Those-Soviet-SAMs-are, baby!
electricgrendel
Oh- don’t be coy with the strike-throughs. I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out we used rape, or at least the threat of it, in some dark little corner of the world.
Captain C
@Tim F.:
I could never figure that out. It’s a combination of ineptitude and laziness that shouldn’t exist in any military agency, at least any that claim competence.
mclaren
All hail Torture Nation! Only a matter of time until the president of the United States gets inaugurated with a child sacrifice. Shithole America has turned into a nation of Morlocks.
El Cid
Blah, blah, blah. You talk as if we need to ask all sorts of “questions” and establish “basic facts” and “estimate likely outcomes” before we do some majestic big foreign policy.