Cross-posted from Mike Malloy
And -- what was the mission again? To find WMDs? To free the Iraqi people from an evil dictator (that we backed)? To stabilize the region and make it safe from al Qaeda? Gee,that's not working out too well, is it? What a hideous mess. What a terrible sham to play on the American people. A trillion dollars later, and thousands of dead and maimed US soldiers, and 10 times (or more) that number of butchered Iraqis -- what mission has been accomplished?
How many times did Raisin Brain say the word "victory" in regard to Iraq, but when pressed, he admitted that there was, literally, no way to "win" a war on terror. The best plan became to train the Iraqi military to defend itself after US forces left... if they left.
And there's the rub. Once we invaded Iraq and killed Saddam, the ensuing carnage and chaos was inevitable. The only question that remained was how many US troops would stay after the "official" troop withdrawal. But a reasonable "status of forces" agreement could not be reached with Nouri al-Maliki, the new quasi-dictator we installed following Saddam, so there was little choice but to withdraw all the troops (which should not have been deployed there in the first place) and wait for the newly-reinvigorated al Qaeda forces to swoop into place.
Enter the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a Sunni extremist group that is happy to exploit the violent situation the Bush Crime Family created and begin a fresh round of slaughter of innocents. Iraqi "troops," which were never successfully trained, are abandoning their uniforms and their posts and are running from the onslaught. (Those, that is, who are not being executed and dumped into mass graves.) Who can blame them? They never asked for any of this nightmare.
Meanwhile, Neocons at home and abroad are scrambling to achieve their trifecta: a) blame Obama, b) justify their 2003 invasion, and c) disavow any suggestion that the current crisis might be somehow, somewhat, perhaps, slightly, their responsibility. Lindsay Graham went as far as to suggest that if a repeat of 9-11 occurs, it will be Obama's fault for the troop withdrawal (which was according to Dim Son's timeline...but I digress).
Across the pond, Tony Blair, the infamous UK Prime Minister who earned the nickname "Bush's Poodle" for his back-bending to accommodate every bloodthirsty Bush Crime Family whim, has posted an odd, rambling statement on his website, urging his followers to point the blame elsewhere for the Iraqi disaster.
The BBC reports:
"Mr Blair said the idea that Iraq would be stable if the UK and US had not intervened 'just isn't true' and that the current crisis involved the wider region as a whole."In an essay on his website, he said the violence in Iraq was the 'predictable and malign effect' of inaction in Syria. But Michael Stephens, from the Royal United Services Institute, insisted the Iraq War had a part to play in the recent upsurge in violence.
"'I think Mr Blair is washing his hands of responsibility,' he said. 'But at the same time, I do agree with him that we can't just ignore this....We do have some kind of role to play in terms of trying to make sure that both Iraq and Syria do not fragment and just move on into sort of unending violence.'
"Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003, said the handling of the campaign against Saddam Hussein was 'perhaps the most significant reason' for the current sectarian violence. 'We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule.'"
It does seems ludicrous that the US (with help from the so-called "coalition of the willing") could unleash a decade of shock and awful and then refuse any responsibility for the aftermath. Kind of like driving your Hummer over your neighbor's vegetable garden, repeatedly, for a week or so, then saying the damage didn't matter because the rabbits were going to eat it all anyway.
Or something like that.
