Dick Cheney - wrong then, wrong now

This was put together by the White House. Nice, huh? And they barely even mentioned the part about the Iraq War 'paying for itself.'

Maybe that was some other faith-based war-monger in the Bush Administration? But they didn't mention torturing prisoners of war either, and Dick Cheney was definitely involved with that.

Republicans are still lying to you

(Opposing Views)

Jeb Bush is campaigning to be the next president of the United States. I still find that just... astonishing. How in the world could he think that America would be ready for another Bush?

(Yes, I know that he hasn't "officially" announced his candidacy. He did, however, admit that he was running for president - accidentally - before reversing course after remembering that the law on campaign donations changes after a candidate declares his candidacy.)

Now, he's had a bad week, saying that yes, he would have invaded Iraq even knowing what we know now. Even Republicans were taken aback by that, so he's been hemming and hawing ever since, attempting damage control. At one point, he claimed that even answering the question would show disrespect to our military!

Finally, he threw in the towel. Knowing what we know now, he agreed that it was a mistake to invade Iraq. (He still doesn't admit how that action created ISIS, though, or helped Iran, or... well, much of anything else. After all, he actually says he gets his foreign policy advice from his brother! And most of the people on his staff were involved in that terrible, terrible decision.)

The other Republican presidential candidates - and there seems to be a million of them, already - were happy that Jeb Bush stumbled. And most Republican leaders - though not all - have come to a consensus on the Iraq War issue.

But as Josh Marshall at TPM points out, they're still lying to us:

As the GOP has quickly settled into a new consensus that the decision to invade Iraq was - at least in retrospect - a mistake, it has come with a willful amnesia bordering on a whole new generation of deceit about exactly what happened in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. To hear Republican presidential candidates tell it, Americans believed Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction which justified and necessitated the invasion. Since he didn't, there was no reason to invade. The carnage and collateral effects we've seen over the last dozen years only drives home the point: knowing what we know now, the invasion was a mistake. We wouldn't do it again.

While it's welcome to see the would-be heirs of President Bush, including his own brother, acknowledging the obvious, this history is such a staggering crock that it's critical to go back and review what actually happened. Some of this was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. Some was only obvious to reporters covering the story who were steeped in the details. And some was only obvious to government officials who in the nature of things controlled access to information. But in the tightest concentric circle of information, at the White House, it was obviously all a crock at the time.

While it is true that "WMD" was a key premise for the war, the sheer volume of lies, willful exaggerations and comically wishful thinking are the real story.

Let's start by reviewing some essential history and the several categories of willful lies that paved the ground for war.

First, it is true that US intelligence agencies believed well before President Bush even entered the White House in January 2001 that Saddam Hussein likely continued to possess or be developing some chemical and possible biological weapons capacity, as he had prior the Gulf War in 1991. Other Western intelligence agencies believed the same. But the nerve gas that Saddam used against Kurdish civilians in the 1980s never posed any imminent threat to the United States or really any direct threat to the United States mainland at all. These junior WMDs were a real issue. And that is why there was a broad consensus in favor of re-instituting the inspections regime that had been in place into the 1990s.

It was from this kernel of truth that the Bush administration and numerous neoconservatives policy experts and propagandists spun up a web of lies and willful exaggerations that goaded the country - already traumatized and angry after the 9/11 attacks - into war.

Marshall goes into details about this. If you don't remember this as clearly as I do, it's a good read. I don't want to copy it all here, so let me just finish with this:

It is very important to remember that before we invaded, Saddam Hussein actually did allow inspectors back into the country, thus undermining the key argument for following through with the threat of invasion in the first place. But the critical point is that we didn't invade Iraq because we had "faulty" intelligence that Iraq still had stockpiles of sarin gas. The invasion was justified and sold to the American public on the twin frauds of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance and the Saddam's supposedly hidden nuclear program. As much as the White House and the key administration war hawks like Vice President Cheney tried to get the Intelligence Community to buy into these theories, they never did. And to anyone paying attention, certainly anyone reporting on these matters at the time, it was clear at the time this was nonsense and a willful deception.

At the time, I did buy into some of that. (I was trying to pay attention, but I'm not a journalist.) I accepted our government's claims that Saddam Hussein wanted to get nukes, though it was clear that it was a long-term problem, if so. (I knew that an Iraq-al Qaeda connection was a crock. If you knew anything at all about Iraq, that never did make any sense.)

I still opposed the Iraq War, for at least three reasons:

1. We were already engaged in a war in Afghanistan. If at all possible, why not finish the war you've got before starting another one? (Note that Afghanistan might not have turned out so badly if we'd kept our eye on the ball. We took people and equipment out of Afghanistan in order to fight in Iraq, and that let the Taliban recover.)
2. UN weapons inspectors were searching for WMDs in Iraq, so why not let them continue? Sure, Saddam was playing games with them. But he really couldn't stop them. Threatening invasion in order to get them back in the country was fine, but that made an invasion completely unnecessary (even if Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction).
3. We were still keeping a no-fly zone over Iraq, so Saddam Hussein couldn't really do anything, anyway. There was absolutely no need to invade the country, certainly not any pressing need.

Even if the Republicans in the Bush Administration hadn't been lying to us, the war would still have been a bad idea. But they were lying to us. And as Josh Marshall's column points out, they're still lying to us.

The Bush Administration used deliberate lies, exaggeration, and implications they knew were untrue in order to drum up support for what they wanted to do. And knowing what we know now, they almost certainly would still have invaded Iraq, don't you think? After all, Bush got re-elected.

Mission accomplished, right?

Tehran, if Republicans had their way

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

This is hilarious, isn't it? Also, depressingly true.

OK, here's the first part of the show - good, but I really wanted to post this bit with Hasan Minhaj. He's got the Republicans down pat.

The cost of war

This is only the financial cost of our wars, of course. It doesn't include our costs in blood, honor, and reputation. And it's only the cost so far. We'll be paying for years and years to come, certainly for our young people who've been maimed in combat.

Remember when the Iraq War was supposed to "pay for itself"? (Hey, we couldn't pass up a free war, now, could we?)

Remember when the Bush Administration fired Lawrence Lindsey for suggesting that the cost could be as high as $100-200 billion dollars? The cost has been far, far, far higher than that, and we still don't know how high it will go.

Again, this is only the dollar cost, but that has been enormous. But were our wars at least successful?

We invaded Afghanistan in order to get Osama bin Laden, supposedly. Only that didn't work. We invaded an entire country in order to get one man, and we didn't even do that. By the end of the Bush Administration, the president was saying he wasn't even interested in Osama bin Laden.

Well, what else could he say? It was pretty embarrassing to get America into a war - the longest war in American history - for nothing, wasn't it?

It took Barack Obama to show us how we should have gone after Osama bin Laden in the first place - without a war, without an enormous cost in money and lives. Of course, it wasn't as much fun as a war, right? Certainly not for defense contractors.

And, of course, we based our invasion of Iraq entirely on a lie. Saddam Hussein had never attacked us and was no threat to us whatsoever. He was the enemy of Al-Qaeda, and he did not have weapons of mass destruction. (And no, he wasn't trying to acquire nukes, either.)

Everything the Bush Administration told us about Iraq turned out to be a lie. We invaded an innocent country. (And then, to put the frosting on the cake, we tortured prisoners of war. Just think of what those chicken-hawk Republicans did to my country!)

America's infrastructure is crumbling. Our schools need help. Our students are suffering, and college graduates end up deep in debt. Meanwhile, we've wasted a fortune waging two unnecessary and unwise wars,... for nothing.

No, not for nothing. The rich made out like bandits. The military-industrial complex has been ecstatic. America lost money - and blood, and honor - but defense contractors have been very, very happy with the politicians they've bought.

Warfare queens

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

Insane, isn't it? When it comes to war, Republican leaders don't care about the cost - either in money or lives.

Well, they're not going to be fighting it, and they're not going to be paying for it, either. (You don't think they're planning to raise taxes to actually pay for a war, do you?)

In everything else, they pretend to be worried about government debt. Of course, that's only because they don't hold the presidency. They certainly didn't care about the deficit during the Bush years! But even today, war is just so much fun, they simply don't care what it will cost.

The Bush administration didn't even budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's how little they cared about the costs. Of course, Iraq was going to "pay for itself," remember. Hey, if it's one thing we can't pass up, it's a free war! Am I right, or am I right? (Of course, it didn't actually pay for itself, not even close, but 'truth' is whatever Republicans want to believe.)

And Afghanistan,... well, we had to get Osama bin Laden, didn't we? Not that Bush ever did get Osama bin Laden by invading Afghanistan - or any other way, either. No, that was left to Barack Obama to accomplish, ten years later. (Yet they have the gall to complain that it took Obama a year and a half after Benghazi to capture Ahmed Abu Khattala.)

Meanwhile, we're still at war in Afghanistan, with no valid exit strategy. Yeah, we're tired of that war, and we're tired of the war in Iraq, which we only started because the first one got boring, and Bush wanted to get reelected. (I've heard a lot of other excuses for Iraq, but not one that held up under scrutiny.)

But these same Republicans who vote against everything in Congress, with the argument that America is too poor to be a civilized nation these days, can't wait for the next war. They've been pushing for war with Iran for years, even trying to sabotage negotiations between our countries, so that war will seem like the only option.

(Ironically, those same Republicans have been Iran's biggest friend. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, and his Iraq was Iran's worst enemy. Now, Shiite Muslims run Iraq, as well as Iran. Republicans gave the Iranian government the best gift they possibly could, and now they help the mullahs keep control over the country by their continued talk of war.)

Of course, Iran is far from the only place Republicans want to wage war. In fact, it often seems like any war will do. Are they really that entertained by war? Are they really that scared of everything, everywhere? Or is it mostly that defense contractors make lots of money from war - money that comes back to Republican campaign coffers?

I suspect that it's all three. But we can't allow frightened and corrupt old men to push us into war, especially as they work tirelessly to destroy America from the inside. We have to stand up to these warfare queens.

Mess O'Potamia

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

You know, our problem isn't so much that Republican Party leaders are ignorant, but that so many of the American people are ignorant enough to be taken in by these tactics.

These people were wrong about everything when it came to Iraq (and most everything else, too), but that apparently doesn't make any difference. The media never call them on it, and they've all still got a soapbox (and not just on Fox 'News,' either).

It was George W. Bush who invaded Iraq for no good reason. Yeah, now they claim that it was to 'plant the seeds of democracy,' but that's not what they said at the time. Now, they're simply trying to cover up the lies they did use to get us into Iraq.

And as Jon Stewart points out, it was George W. Bush who signed the agreement to leave Iraq without leaving troops behind. Republican leaders must know that. They're not that stupid.

But hey, if they can pass the blame to Barack Obama, that's not anything that will keep them up at night. Not if they've been able to live with everything else they've done. Whatever works, right?

But it's to our undying shame that this does work with so many Americans. For the most part, it's willful ignorance, too. And far too much apathy, as well.

Why We Did It

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

These are two of my favorite people, so how could I not post this video clip? More importantly, how could I not advertise Rachel Maddow's new documentary, Why We Did It (which airs tonight on MSNBC)?

The Iraq War was a horrific mistake - wasteful of lives and money, both. Remember how we were going to be greeted as liberators? Remember how the war was going to "pay for itself"? Like everything else the Bush administration promised us, these things were lies.

And so was the rationale for starting the war. Iraq was no threat to us and never had been a threat. Iraq didn't attack us. In fact, Saddam Hussein was the enemy of the people who did attack us on 9/11. He also had no weapons of mass destruction.

Furthermore, we were already in a war in Afghanistan - a war we might have won, and then gotten out, if we hadn't directed our attention and our efforts towards a foolish war in Iraq, giving the Taliban time to regroup.

Yet the George W. Bush administration had been looking for an excuse to invade Iraq since they day they took office. 9/11 didn't give them that excuse, because Iraq had nothing to do with that. But 9/11 gave them the opportunity to lie to the American people, because the news media wasn't willing to question anything after that. 9/11 gave them the over-the-top 'patriotism' which translated into letting the president do whatever he wanted.

The Bush administration didn't even raise taxes to pay for these wars. (Of course, Iraq was going to "pay for itself," right?) For the first time in our history, we were going to wage war entirely on borrowed money. They didn't even bother to budget the costs of these wars. Hey, free war! How could we resist?

Of course, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld - nearly the entire Bush administration and the neocons cheering them on - had avoided war like the plague when they had the opportunity to fight, themselves. (Heck, Ted Nugent deliberately crapped his pants in order to fail the physical in the Vietnam era.) But this was going to be a free war in another way, too. There was no draft, so no danger of a protest movement. And these guys weren't going to be in the field, anyway, so they wouldn't be in any danger.

Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow make a good point in this interview - one I've wondered about, myself. All of those right-wingers who cheered for the invasion of Iraq, that's not the only thing they've been wrong about - demonstrably wrong.

No, we weren't greeted as liberators. No, the war didn't pay for itself. No, Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. No, invading Afghanistan was not the way to get Osama bin Laden. (Ten years later, Barack Obama showed us how it should have been done in the first place.) No, tax cuts for the rich did not "pay for themselves." No, the Bush tax cuts not only didn't eliminate the deficit, they shot the deficit through the roof. And no, bankers would not effectively "regulate themselves."

These right-wingers - politicians and pundits alike - have been demonstrably wrong about everything, if seems, for years and years. So why do the news media still act like they've got some particular expertise? Why do these pundits still have a job? Why are they still in demand? Why does anyone ask Dick Cheney about anything? (At least Bush stays secluded, as he should.)

I don't get it. For right-wingers, there doesn't seem to be any downside for being wrong, even disastrously wrong. I mean, everyone is wrong on occasion, but these people were wrong about... everything, pretty much. Over and over again, they were wrong - horribly wrong, catastrophically wrong. At some point, shouldn't that have consequences?

Syria - What to do?

Believe it or not, I don't comment on everything here. Well, OK, maybe I do. But I don't think I have the answer to everything. How's that?

Sometimes, I don't know what to do. Sometimes, I don't see any good options. Sometimes, I lean one way,... but not very confidently.

Syria - to attack or not to attack - is probably one of those issues. But I was reading this column by fellow Lincoln resident Clay Farris Naff, I made a comment (of course!), and I thought I'd post it here, somewhat expanded.

Right now, we're tired of war,... and rightly so. George W. Bush not only leaped to war in Afghanistan (when he could have considered the 9/11 attacks to be a criminal matter, a police matter, as we have every other terrorist attack in America), he also had us invade a completely innocent country, Iraq - a nation which had never attacked us and was no threat to us whatsoever.

Now, Barack Obama wants to strike Syria from the air - no invasion, no ground troops - to punish Bashar al-Assad for using poison gas on rebel populations.

Right-wingers - who'd normally be overjoyed at the thought of any war they didn't have to fight, themselves - are reluctant because Obama wants it and they've vowed never to support our first black president in anything. Liberals tend to be more consistent in their opposition to war, though our recent experiences with the Bush administration are certainly having an effect there, too.

But there's one big difference here which hasn't been getting enough notice. We invaded Iraq because of the rosy expectations of right-wingers in the Bush administration. We'd be "greeted as liberators." The war would "pay for itself." Iraq would become a prosperous (oil-rich) modern democracy and, yes, this would open up a perfect opportunity for Christian missionaries, too!

War with Iraq was such a good opportunity, how could we afford to pass it up? (Even if they had to invent a reason for it, which they did.)

But there's none of that with Syria today. There aren't any rosy expectations. The Obama administration doesn't see any good options, whatever they do (or don't do). They're simply between a rock and a hard place.

Since World War I, we've pretty well drawn a line in the sand when it comes to using poison gas in war. But we let it go when Iraq used poison gas against Iran, so what did that tell Assad in Syria? If we let it go again, when he's gassing his own citizens, what will that tell other dictators? How many more will see poison gas as an option?

After we witnessed the horrors of poison gas attacks in World War I, the world came together in revulsion against it. We vowed that it wouldn't happen again, and we've done fairly well in keeping that promise, despite the fact that poison gas is very easy to manufacture and easy - these days - for almost any regime to use.

Poison gas is the poor man's choice in weapons of mass destruction. If dictators could get nuclear weapons, they would. But they can get poison gas - if they dare to use it. The question is whether the world will let them use it with impunity.

There are no good choices here; there's only the lesser of two evils. Doing nothing is also a choice. Doing nothing will demonstrate to other dictators that we don't care. Now, maybe there are better options than a military strike on Syria,... but I don't know what they'd be.

Frankly, I don't have any good ideas here. There aren't any good ideas, not as far as I can tell. And I think the Obama administration feels the same way. (I must say, I like that a lot better than the magical thinking of the Bush administration, whether I agree with their decisions or not.)

In this case, striking Syria might not seem... glorious, but I think it might be necessary. We are not expecting miracles, we really aren't. I don't think that anyone is expecting miracles, not in this case. But not acting might be the worst thing we could do.

That's my thinking right now, but I'd be glad to hear what you think.