iraq war

This is one of those posts where I feel a need to cut through the bullshit out there and call out both sides when it comes to Iraq.

Yesterday President Obama marked the actual end of the Iraq War. There was no aircraft carrier landing or "mission accomplished" banner. Instead it was done in a very dignified way. Sadly though the troops aren't coming home to the type of celebration and parades that this country experienced in August of 1945 during VJ Day. Instead they will just come home, be greeted by loved ones and then get to enjoy a horrible economy.

That welcoming home of our troops should come as no shock. The most Americans had to sacrifice for Iraq was either fighting in the war or having a loved one fight the war. During the war Americans saw their taxes go down at the cost of things like protective gear for our soldiers. Republicans kept pushing for lower taxes as well - something that never happened during war time in our countries history. It's no wonder Bush had to keep raising the national debt level.

But I don't want to focus on that. Instead I want to talk about what brought us to the end.

This week both Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have been on the television blasting President Obama as having lost the war because of this pull out. Either recent history or a need for the facts have escaped both as they fail to mention the December 2011 pull out date was actually set by President Bush. You think that Bush's vice-President would be aware of such a fact, but we live in a time where the attempted zinger against the other party trumps the truth.

Leave it to Fox Nation to come up with the most idiotic arguments one can ever think of.  Just check out this headline:

Fact: Bush Had 2 Times More Coalition Partners in Iraq Than Obama Has in Libya

Oh my – Bush must have been far more loved by the world than Obama! I mean Bush had 30 coalition countries and Obama only has 15.

But what does that really prove?

Well the first thing it proves is that FOX can’t even comprehend the difference between a full war and a no-fly zone. Why don’t we compare like scenarios instead? How about when the no-fly zone was put into effect in Iraq in 1992? Then the first President Bush only had a coalition of 9! He couldn’t even break into double digits and the only countries actually doing anything were the US, France and Britain.

Then we get to the issue of the actual build-up to the Iraq war. I know I’ve been very busy the last few weeks, so I might have missed it, but did Obama send Hillary Clinton to the U.N. to do a presentation about WMD’s Gadhafi was manufacturing? Did we have a State of the Union address where President Obama said Gadhafi was trying to get yellow cake uranium from Niger? In other words – did President Obama go on a huge campaign to lie the world into war? Absolutely not!

I finally get a morning to sit here, drink some coffee and watch a little early news. I turn on Morning Joe and have heard one theme all morning – the White House fell for an edited video posted on the web by Andrew Breitbart. Joe Scarborough has been on fire blasting the White House for this.

Good! They deserve to be blasted for falling for some crap posted by internet-fraudster Andrew Breitbart, but isn’t there more blame to go around? How about the media? How about Joe’s own employer or even Joe himself?

I’m sitting here reliving 2002-2003 and the lead up to the Iraq War. The media gets a story and runs without, fact-checking be dammed. It’s like high schoolers thinking “oh I got some juicy gossip to tell”.

It hasn’t been that long ago that the country fell for another Breitbart edited video, one against ACORN. I remember watching Morning Joe and them blasting the Democrats and White House for not taking it seriously. Now that they did take a video seriously, they are blasting them again.

When it comes to the media talking about the Shirley Sherrod story, only one has the right to talk about it now and that is Keith Olbermann, who gave this special comment last night and even apologized on behalf of the media. He did the right thing, while the other’s, including Joe Scarborough, are to chicken to even admit that they did some wrong.

So I was reading this over at Power Line:

Whenever President Bush talked about immigration, his approval ratings went down. It was like clockwork: liberals never understood that the fatal decline in Bush's popularity during his second term had at least as much to do with his advocacy of "comprehensive immigration reform" as with war-weariness. Now President Obama has entered the lists, urging Congress to take up immigration. One can only wonder what Congressional Democrats make of this. Maybe they figure their own approval ratings can't possibly get any lower. But Obama's can, and they will if he keeps talking about immigration.

Yes Bush’s approval rating went down when he talked about immigration, but why? Well let’s think about it for a minute.

From the start of the Iraq War on, Bush’s approval rating was dropping. Most of that was coming from a loss of support amongst Democrats. In 2007, when Bush finally took up immigration, his approval rating was already in the low 30’s. His support amongst Democrats was down to single digits. Once Bush’s immigration plan came out his approval rating dipped into the 20’s, but his approval rating amongst Democrats stayed the same.

So while what John stated has some truth, the potential outcome he proposes is totally false. President Obama already has a dismal approval rating amongst the right, but if he pushes comprehensive immigration reform, he would see a boost from the left, increasing his approval rating.

One of the things the right has constantly done is tried to claim ownership of the phrase “immigration reform”. When they see polls reporting 60% wanting immigration reform, the right instantly believes that means they want THEIR immigration reform. But let’s look at a poll from last year:

Last night I posted the good news that December marked the first month since the start of the Iraq war that no U.S. service members died in hostile actions. I hope that is the start of a new trend, but given the recent developments of a judge dismissing all charges against Blackwater, I can’t be too optimistic:

Iraqis seeking justice for 17 people shot dead at a Baghdad intersection responded with bitterness and outrage Friday at a U.S. judge's decision to throw out a case against a Blackwater security team accused in the killings.

The Iraqi government vowed to pursue the case, which became a source of contention between the U.S. and the Iraqi government. Many Iraqis also held up the judge's decision as proof of what they'd long believed: U.S. security contractors were above the law.

"There is no justice," said Bura Sadoun Ismael, who was wounded by two bullets and shrapnel during the shooting. "I expected the American court would side with the Blackwater security guards who committed a massacre in Nisoor Square."

The Blackwater decision is the exact kind of fuel needed for extremists to rise. If Iraq starts to descend too much again, it will present a big problem for our exit and even for Afghanistan. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail in Iraq, but if history is any indicator then I doubt it will.

Well that’s apparently what Chuck Todd thinks if you read his tweets:

(source 1 and 2)

Cohen is more like a moderate Republican. He was an advocate supporter of the Iraq War and pretty much everything George Bush. Chuck Todd has done nothing but once again show his ignorance for about everything political.

The right is on an uproar over the size of the health care bill and the Politico is following suit:

The House health care bill unveiled Thursday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. With an estimated 10-year cost of $894 billion, that comes out to about $2.24 million per word. .

Wow those are some expensive words, but not as bad as $425.9 million per word. That would come from the authorization for the Iraq war (pdf document), which has cost over $925 billion and clocks in at 2,174 words.

Thankfully Democrats aren’t going to take the NRCC’s latest misogynistic attack on Speaker Pelosi lying down. Here is what Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to say about the NRCC ad saying General McChrystal needed to put Pelosi “in her place”.

"It's evidence they long for the days when a woman's place was in the kitchen. Now a woman is third in line for the presidency... But it's not surprising, coming from a party that's 80 percent male and 100 percent white,"

That reminds me of when Howard Dean, then chairman of the DNC, said the Republican Party was mostly old white men. The RNC complained, yet their actions since then have done nothing but etch that sentiment in stone.

There is an angle to this though I think the Democrats should take up. It’s been over three years now since we started seeing a barrage of retired generals come out and oppose the Iraq War. When that happened countless Republicans took to the airwaves and decried these generals words as being detrimental to the morale of our troops, and pushing for them to take their issues up privately through the chain of command, despite them being retired.

So why isn’t the view the same on McChrystal? He is more bound to the chain of command than someone of the same rank who is now retired.