BUSH, OBAMA, AND ISIS

The American Interest:  "The Parallels Between Bush and Obama."

As President Obama begins to bomb Syria (with no UN authorization and with a coalition of the willing), he is still bombing Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan; he has U.S. forces spread out across Africa; some are heading back into Iraq; and Guantanamo is still open. It’s hard not to wonder whether in a quiet moment President Obama sometimes thinks he was too smug and too callow back when he poured contempt on President Bush. (After all, even the New York Times isslowly coming to grips with the similarities between how certain events have unfolded. Surely President Obama has noticed them in passing as well.)

Reason:  "6 Ways Obama Contradicts Himself in Waging War on ISIS."

Shep Smith on Foxnews to a State Department spokesperson:  "You guys have basically adopted Dick Cheney’s theory of preventive war now, huh?"

OBAMA CREDITS BUSH-CHENEY?

From The Weekly Standard.

President Barack Obama said last night at a Democratic fundraiser in Rhode Island that the terrorism from ISIS "doesn’t immediately threaten the homeland." The reason? The security measures taken by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Obama.

First the president said the situation in the Middle East is "scary," according to a transcript of the event released by the White House.

"I don’t have to tell you, anybody who has been watching TV this summer, it seems like it is just wave after wave ofupheaval, most of it surrounding the Middle East. You’re seeing a change in the order in the Middle East. But the old order is having a tough time holding together and the new order has yet to be born, and in the interim, it’s scary."

Then he told the Democratic donors not to worry because measures put in place by Bush and Cheney "make us ... pretty safe."

But he obviously doesn't mention Bush or Cheney in his speech.

HAS WASHINGTON LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THE LIBYA INTERVENTION

From the Hoover Institution.  "Chaos in Libya."  The Obama administration's NATO involvement in Libya has created a worse situation today.  I think some of the lessons learned could also be applied to Bush sending troops into Iraq or Obama upping US involvement in Afghanistan.

A lesson—immediately relevant as the United States now conducts air strikes in Iraq to protect vulnerable populations from slaughter by barbaric militants—is that successful humanitarian intervention requires a viable reconstruction plan. That may seem like an obvious statement, applicable to many types of military adventure, but it is easy to dismiss when faced with a short-term opportunity to stop the most flagrant atrocities.

IMPEACHMENT

The Democrat congresswoman who co-sponsored a bill to impeach George W. Bush now says, "we never tried to impeach Bush."  A lie or a very short memory?  I would hope for a higher level of representative in Washington, but this is probably typical.

OBAMA'S SMART DIPLOMACY "IMPLODING"

First, Madeline Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, says the "world is a mess."  So what made the world such a mess.  Bush has been out of office for almost 6 years.

Russell Mead takes the Obama administration to task for the failure of "smart diplomacy."  Everything seems to be exploding.

Luckily for America’s self-esteem, it was liberal Democrats that produced this particular shambles. If Republicans had done this, the media would be on the administration non-stop, perhaps comparing Samantha Power to Paul Wolfowitz—a well-meaning humanitarian way over her head who wrecked a country out of misguided ideology. There might also be some pointed questions for future presidential candidates who supported this fiasco. But since both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have their fingerprints all over Libya, there isn’t a lot of press hunger for a detailed, unsparing autopsy into this stinking corpse of policy flub.

If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be saying ad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did—or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

But luckily for Team Obama, the mainstream press would rather die than subject liberal Democrats to the critiques it reserves for the GOP.

LEFT FANTASIES ABOUT ASSASSINATING BUSH

Michelle Malkin lists the various scenarios by leftists regarding the assassination of George W. Bush.  Most people forget the venom the Left spewed out about the president.

FAILURE OF "RESET DIPLOMACY"

From Michael Rubin at World Affairs.  Maybe Obama and Hillary spent too much time blaming Bush and Cheney than trying to understand Putin.  The issue is how to negotiate with one's enemies or rivals.  In addition the Russians (Soviets) have been excellent at diplomatic deceit (and I might add the Iranians, North Koreans, and others are just as good).  Americans diplomat seem to believe whatever they are being told at the bargaining table.

The idea that diplomacy with rogue regimes is cost-free is a relatively new idea, one that may sound good in the abstract but is less durable in reality. Policymakers often advocate diplomacy with rogue rulers and even terrorist groups because other options seem unattractive. As our recent experience in Afghanistan and Iraq shows, war extracts a tremendous price not only in terms of blood and treasure but in terms of national morale as well. The American public is exhausted by these conflicts and wondering if their price was worth paying.

Sanctions don't work because dictators don't care about their people.

Obama sought Russian cooperation in Syria, for example, to resolve a horrendous human rights tragedy, but for Putin, the only question was how to achieve an outcome that diminished American influence.

Putin is a modern-day Machiavelli, unapologetic about saying and doing whatever is necessary to regain the glory and respect he believes the Soviet Union enjoyed. With his tireless efforts to engage and pour emollients on fundamental disagreements, Obama has acted as a modern-day Chamberlain. Simply declaring the Cold War over does not make it so unless both parties seek a new beginning. Obama sincerely wants peace, but so long as Putin seeks the restoration of an imperial Russian past, peace will never occur. Hitting the reset button should not mean allowing an opponent to use diplomacy to wage war by other means.

This is the first author to link Obama and Chamberlain that I have come across.

HILLARY'S FOREIGN POLICY

Peter Beinart criticizes Hillary Clinton's foreign policy vision stated on the Daily Show and applauds Obama for having a more accurate vision of America in the world.  But I believe I side with Hillary on this one.  I sense she is trying to affirm America in spite of our mistakes.  Not everything the U.S. has done since World War II is bad for the world.  He goes on to accuse Hillary of siding with the right in America.

For Hillary, America’s current problem is that once the Cold War ended, we “withdrew from the information arena.” As a result, across the world, a new generation no longer remembers the great things we supposedly did in the past, and America has stopped telling them about the great things we are still doing today. Her answer: “get back to telling” the story of America’s greatness, not only to the rest of the world but “to ourselves first and foremost.”

Really? Is America’s biggest post-Cold War foreign policy problem really that we’ve failed to adequately remind others, and ourselves, how good we are? After all, George W. Bush told Americans endlessly that the “war on terror” was another grand American crusade for freedom, in the tradition of World War II and the Cold War. In his second inaugural address and other thundering rhetorical displays, he announced to the world that America would champion liberty far and wide, as in days of old.

WHY WE LOST IRAQ

Ali Khedery, who served in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad until 2010 when he resigned in protest about U.S. policy, has a lengthy critique on why we lost Iraq.  He blames the Obama administration for going with Maliki when there were better alternatives for Iraqi leadership.  In addition when the U.S. withdrew its military forces it lost any leverage it had with Maliki.

The crisis now gripping Iraq and the Middle East was not only predictable but predicted — and preventable. By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated. Iraq is now a failed state, and as countries across the Middle East fracture along ethno-sectarian lines, America is likely to emerge as one of the biggest losers of the new Sunni-Shiite holy war, with allies collapsing and radicals plotting another 9/11.

Victor Davis Hanson argues that it was Obama's fault for what we see today and he is trying to find someone else to blame.  He pulled out peace-keepers in his "mission accomplished" (Bush) moment.  But Vice President Biden said Iraq would be Obama's "greatest achievement."  Is it?

But what exactly was the new Obama strategy that supposedly had all but achieved a victory in the larger War on Terror amid Middle East hostility?

Fuzzy euphemisms replaced supposedly hurtful terms such as “terrorism,” “jihadist,” and “Islamist.” The administration gave well-meaning speeches exaggerating Islamic achievement while citing past American culpability.

In short, the Obama administration put politics and ideology ahead of a disinterested and nonpartisan examination of the actual status of the 2009 Middle East.

From the Daily Beast.  "Why the White House Ignored All Those Warnings about ISIS."  Maliki asked Obama to send some troops back.  U.S. intelligence knew there were problems but the White House would not act.

On November 1, 2013, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the White House, and made a rather stunning request. Maliki, who celebrated when the last U.S. troops left his country in 2011, asked Obama to quietly send the military back into Iraq and help his beleagured Air Force develop targets for air strikes; that’s how serious the threat from Sunni insurgents led by the extremist group ISIS had become.

Twelve days later, Brett McGurk, a deputy assistant secretary of state and the Obama administration’s senior U.S. official in Baghdad since the crisis began last month, presented to Congress a similarly dark warning. ISIS was launching upwards of 40 suicide bombers a month, he said, encouraged in part by the weakness of Maliki’s military and the aggressively anti-Sunni policies of the Shi’ite prime minister. It was the kind of ominous report that American intelligence agencies had been delivering privately for months. McGurk added that ISIS had “benefited from a permissive operating environment due to inherent weaknesses of Iraqi security forces, poor operational tactics, and popular grievances, which remain unaddressed, among the population in Anbar and Nineweh provinces.”

DID SADDAM HUSSEIN HAVE WMD?

With ISIS closing in on Baghdad news reports stated that ISIS forces were closing in on an Iraqi WMD facility. Obviously this raises many concerns about how terrorists would use these weapons.   But we have been told for years by the media and liberals that Saddam did not have WMD, which obviously undermines Bush's reason for invading Iraq in 2003.  Liberals and the media have argued that Bush lied, destroying the neo-con rationale for the invasion.

But now we hear that there was a WMD facility of some kind so did Saddam have WMD or not?  Obviously he used something to kill Kurds.  A Frontline PBS (liberal) report indicated that Saddam did have some kind of WMD program which was more than just a plan or a few buildings.

CNN has an interesting timeline which indicates that in 2002 Iraq submitted a 12,000 page (!) report on its WMD programs.  And in January 2003 some WMD warheads are discovered, but they are largely empty (but could presumably be filled with agents).  In February Secretary of State Collin Powell gave his speech to the UN saying that Iraq lied to UN inspectors.  By March the US has invaded.  CIA director George Tennant said, regarding Iraqi WMD, that it was a “slam dunk.”

Hot Air (conservative) argued in 2010 that WikiLeaks proves the US found WMD in Iraq.  But the Guardian (liberal) in 2004 stated that UN and US inspectors found no credible program.

In 2012 Time  (liberal) reported on the CIA’s confession that it was “bamboozled” when it reported Saddam had WMD.

Commentary (conservative) argues that the weapons ISIS finds will not be usable, but reflects on how the weapons could have been used if Iraq had not been invaded.

What does all of this mean?  It would appear that Saddam Hussein did not have a massive delivery capability for WMD, but he did have something and may have been working on building more.  Whether Bush should have invaded can still be debated, but the media myth that there was no WMD is not supported by the evidence.  However, it would not appear to be a massive buildup of WMD that could be used to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

7/12/14 UPDATE.  From Wired:  "WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq -- With Surprising Results."

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

HURRICANE KATRINA vs. HURRICANE SANDY

Responding to hurricanes:  You heard a lot about how George W. Bush botched Katrina aid in New Orleans, but you don't hear the same criticisms raised about Washington's failure to deal with hurricane Sandy.

When the storm hit in 2012, damaging around 200,000 homes in New York and New Jersey, President Obama said, “My message to the federal government: No bureaucracy, no red tape.”

But seventeen months later, the reality has been vastly different, according a new WSJ piece. Of the 15,000 New York residents who have applied for relief, only 352 have received it; of the 11,500 eligible New Jersey residents, only 2,032 have been able to start rebuilding or repairing their homes.

DEMOCRATS ON IRAQ

While this is a GOP production, it does show the verbal support given George Bush when he first invaded Iraq.

And here is Biden in 2010 about the administration's success in Iraq.

THE IRAQ MISTAKE

From Reihan Salam at Slate. He argues that Bush going into Iraq was a mistake, but also that Obama's withdrawal in 2011 from Iraq was a mistake as well.  Obama did not work hard enough to build a strong Iraq. . .but there is the question of whether Obama's foreign policy is working anywhere.

The notion that we were wrong to go in but that we were also wrong to get out is hard to comprehend for many people. Once Americans collectively settled on the idea that the Iraq War was a disaster, it was perhaps inevitable that we’d want to wash our hands of the whole ordeal. President Obama appeared to do just that when he declared in December of 2011 that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” knowing full well that we were doing no such thing. The disaster that is the Iraq War did not end when the last convoy of U.S. combat troops left the country more than three years ago, as many of us are now learning as the fragile Iraqi state loses ground to Sunni extremists.

Brent Scowcroft argues that Obama did not give Iraq time to develop democracy.

And the radical Islamist leading the ISIS in Iraq was released in 2009 as a non-threat.

Michael Totten on the end of Iraq. . .perhaps a regional war.  At some point the US will get sucked in.

God only knows what happens next, but this much is clear—the Syrian war is no longer the Syrian war. It’s a regional war. It spilled into Lebanon at a low level some time ago. It sucked in Iran and Hezbollah some time ago. Now it is spreading with full force at blitzkrieg speed into Iraq and has even drawn in the Kurdistan Regional Government which managed to sit out the entire Iraq war.

VA SCANDAL UPDATE

The media has noted that "al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo treated better than our vets."  You can't fire incompetents in the VA and they actually end up being promoted or given bonuses.

The Left has bragged about the VA as a model for medical care, but this socialist model has failed.

The "secret" of the VA's "success," Krugman argued, "is the fact that it's a universal, integrated system." That saves on administrative costs and allows for efficient record-keeping. Krugman acknowledged that the VA had a history of mismanagement and mediocre care, until "reforms beginning in the mid-1990's transformed the system." But wait. Hasn't it been a universal, integrated system all along?  This sounds like it could be a prophetic statement about Obamacare.  At least in a private care system you can sue the doctor or hospital for malfeasance. And Krugman opposed Republican proposals allowing vets to use VA benefits in private care systems.

From WND.  Obama failed to fix problems left over from the Bush administration even though he promised to.

Map showing an "epidemic" of VA incompetence.

FIGURING OUT PUTIN

From the New York Times.  Peter Baker discusses how three presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Obama) have tried to work with Putin.  None of them have been particularly successful.

Bill Clinton found him to be cold and worrisome, but predicted he would be a tough and able leader. George W. Bush wanted to make him a friend and partner in the war on terror, but grew disillusioned over time.

Barack Obama tried working around him by building up his protégé in the Kremlin, an approach that worked for a time but steadily deteriorated to the point that relations between Russia and the United States are now at their worst point since the end of the Cold War.

On Putin:  “He’s not delusional, but he’s inhabiting a Russia of the past — a version of the past that he has created,” said Fiona Hill, the top intelligence officer on Russia during Mr. Bush’s presidency and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “His present is defined by it and there is no coherent vision of the future. Where exactly does he go from here beyond reasserting and regaining influence over territories and people? Then what?”

GENERAL MOTORS BAILOUT

The US government (taxpayer) took a $9.7 billion bath on the bailout of General Motors.

TRANSLATION ERRORS?

This is hard to believe.  A UN inspector says the Bush administration made the decision to go to war in Iraq on a mistranslation. . .using Google Translate from Arabic to English!

According to Kay, who headed up the Iraq Survey Group and acted as a weapons inspector in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, mistranslations of Arabic to English is what went wrong in 2003 when then Secretary of State Colin Powell on behalf of the Bush administration made the case to go into Iraq at the United Nations.

FOREIGN POLICY LEADERSHIP: OBAMA vs. BUSH

From The Telegraph.  The British don't seem very happy with Obama's leadership.

Barack Obama is proving an embarrassing amateur on the world stage compared to George W. Bush.

I wonder if they have been listening to conservative Charles Krauthammer?

Krauthammer said on Fox News that the inability to draw together allies to take military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad marked a major diplomatic failure for President Barack Obama.

CLINTONS & MONEY

For Maureen Dowd (liberal progressive) all the Clintons are about is money, money, money.  They certainly do not have Jimmy Carter's "heart" to help people or even George W. Bush's humanitarian concerns.

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker, Bill Clinton earned $17 million last year giving speeches, including one to a Lagos company for $700,000. Hillary gets $200,000 a speech.

PRESIDENTS PORTRAYED AS MONKEYS

President Obama was recently portrayed as a monkey which created quite a negative reaction among progressives.  No Pasarani has a historical analysis on how presidents have been portrayed as monkeys.