The neo-conservative, Right-Wing cabal in the Washington that contaminated the George W. Bush Administration with illusionary dreams of military glory and great-power hubris around the world has never apologized for its failed foreign and military policies. In the end the Iraq War cost America dearly in both lives and treasure.
Today, with another internal volatile war in Iraq, the same neo-conservative denizens of the Republican Party are once more beating the drums of war. From blaming President Obama for his "failure to lead" and others gleefully proclaiming that their political clairvoyance told them long ago this crisis would happen when US forced left Iraq, everybody is jockeying to make the evening news.
Indeed, the intellectual bankruptcy of the uber-right in the US government and its political myopia that only see national strife and unrest as solvable with an M-16 rifle or a cluster bomb, demonstrates that such approaches to foreign policy is naively simplistic at best and dangerous as worst.
The failure of United States military adventurism over the past 25 years is a chilling indictment and testament to simply seeing every foreign policy issue through the prism of a powerful military. Moreover, these weaknesses underscore the shortcomings and weakness of the imperial presidency.
President George W. Bush, his Vice President, Dick Chaney and Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, led the charge to war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They created the political conditions and hostile international climate that have morphed into the present situation on the ground in Iraq today.
These conditions, the seeds of which were planted when Dick Chaney, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld first laid eyes on Iraq's oil fields, were left to grow and hatch into a very dangerous situation that the United States cannot now ignore. The United States broke it and now they don't want to fix it.
These conditions, hitherto endorsed and touted by the neo-con elements in Washington, were never envisioned to inevitably lead to the probability that militants will successfully establish an Islamist mini-state straddling Syria and Iraq, the two most violent countries in the Middle East.
Should this happen then this new development will further destabilize the most unstable region in the world, drive the Israeli government to distraction, and become a new launching pad for terrorist strikes against the U.S. and other Western countries -- the very things that the United States and its allies used as the pretext to invade and stop in Iraq over 10 years ago.
While President Barack Obama cannot dodge complicity for the Iraqi debacle, the fact is that it was the warmongering trio of Bush, Chaney and Rumsfeld that created and laid the conditions for today's horrible state of affairs. Consider the following:
They launched an invasion of Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses.
They starved the invasion of boots on the ground while draining the vital post-9/11 war in Afghanistan of resources.
They created the conditions for a protracted Iraqi civil war by propping up Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite thug, while looking the other way as his "government" marginalized and persecuted the Sunni minority.
They tried to buy off Sunni militants by showering them with weapons, pickup trucks and televisions rather than demanding that Al-Maliki establish a genuine, inclusive coalition government.
Al-Maliki also undermined the combat readiness of the Iraqi Army by sacking well-trained and experienced top military officers, including generals, and replaced them but political military hacks that are loyal to him and not Iraq.
By keeping and maintaining a weak military Al-Maliki calculated that his political rule would not be challenged and he now controlled an armed force that he could use against his political opponents. A force that was and is ill prepared to fight the kind of insurgent war that now rages.
They helped crash the economy by giving the rich tax cuts while simultaneously fighting two wars.
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