He loves the smell of doublethink in the morning.
UPDATE: Welcome Crooks and Liars readers, and thanks Heather!
From the safety of his impregnable Neoconservative fastness high atop the New York Times, tireless Iraq War cheerleader and professional revisionist, David Brooks, has written a column blaming the collapse of Iraq on Barack Obama's unwillingness to shovel even more of the sons and daughters of Americans-who-are-not-David-Brooks into the bottomless well of misery and sectarian horror created by George W. Bush.
...We’ll never know if all this effort and progress could have led to a self-sustaining, stable Iraq. Before the country was close to ready, the Obama administration took off the training wheels by not seriously negotiating the NATO status of forces agreement that would have maintained some smaller American presence.The administration didn’t begin negotiations on the treaty until a few months before American troops would have to start their withdrawal. The administration increased the demands. As Filkins writes, “The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no small measure because of lack of engagement by the White House.”...
Since the bloody, serial wrongness of Neoconservatives like Mr. Brooks never caused so much as a stutter in their rise through the ranks of the Very Serious People who get paid enormous sums of money to frame our public debates -- and since our Elite Media has energetically conspired to protect Neoconservatives like Mr. Brooks by shoving the entire corpus of their bloody, serial wrongness down the memory hole and agreeing to never, ever mention it in public again -- it was inevitable this day would come.
You know, someone should really write a post about it.
Or maybe two posts.
Or maybe, say, several thousand posts about it.
Over the course of a decade.
Yeah.
That should do it.
8 comments:
Ya know, I always had a hunch the reason the Iraqi government wouldn't make concessions to the US was THEY DIDN'T WANT US THERE.
Except for some guy named Curveball I don't recall that we got an invite. We kinda just kicked the door in and hollered, "Honey, I'm home!"
I think those poor people have enough troubles without our help.
"We’ll never know if all this effort and progress could have led to a self-sustaining, stable Iraq."
Ten fucking years was not enough??
The Friedman Unit Limit was apparently reached somewhere along the way.
Christ on toast, this is going to be so annoying. Stand by for a metric fuckton of media conversations about who lost Iraq. Not once during this process will what is implicit be acknowledged, that the only way to avoid a crackup in Iraq would be to station a hundred thousand US troops there indefinitely. Scratch that, one of two ways to avoid the crackup. You could have not gone there in the first place.
--Nonny Mouse
As Jimmy Cliff once wrote:
"Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam."
I miss that sort of simple repetition, of the flavor where everyone who wasn't already sick of the word, soon were.
What a deceitful, vile piece of crap this is.
First off, it's a near total ripoff of the Dexter Filkins piece Brooks cherry-picks from, a New Yorker blog entry critical of Obama ending talks with Maliki in 2011 -- and Brooks leaves the impression that Filkins was a full-time Iraq correspondent, which he was not. Filkins used to to work in the LAT's Orange County edition when I worked there and his first Iraq assignments came when he was at the LAT. And I am pretty sure Filkins didn't go directly to Iraq when he signed on with the NYT, either, but I can't be sure.
Brooks begins his own column by essentially rewriting the top of Filkins' third graf, but softening the language to make it sound like the Bush-Cheney administration was engaged in a humble eight-year learning experience instead of scrambling to mitigate the disaster Filkins described more bluntly:
``When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state—its military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most everything else that might hold a country together. They spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace the one they crushed.'' THEN Filkins writes ``By 2011...''
The first reason, by the way, that Filkins cites for the current disaster, is the Syrian conflict, which has helped the ISIS, in Filkins' words, to effectively ``erase'' the Syrian-Iraq border that Brooks mentions in passing. Somehow Brooks thinks that it's still possible for the United States to aid Syrian ``moderates,'' in unerasing the border that ISIS controls, without identifying who represents said moderates.
Filkins again: ``The second factor—probably the dominant one—is the policies of Nuri Al-Maliki, Iraq’s Prime Minister. Maliki is a militant sectarian to the core, and he had been fighting on behalf of Iraq’s long-suppressed Shiite majority for years before the Americans arrived, in 2003.''
See there? Al-Maliki, the guy that Bush-Cheney ended up with, is a hard-core Shiite, an Iran sympathizer and would-be partner, whose every effort has been bent on exacting payback from the Sunni minority that Saddam used to suppress Iraq's Shiite majority. But in Brooks's mealy mouth, Maliki has ``sectarian tendencies.''
Then there's the classic disingenuous Brooks touch when discussing why Obama chose to pull out of Iraq: ``President Obama adopted a cautious posture, arguing that the biggest harm to the nation comes when the U.S. overreaches. American power retrenched. The American people, on both left and right, decided they could hide from the world.''
No, you son of a bitch, this was not a ``retrenchment.'' This was Obama recognizing that enough is enough, the country's broke and recovering from a phenomenal economic meltdown engineered by the same incompetents who started this war on false pretenses; and this was Obama listening to an American citizenry that was sick of stringing out THIS bloody disaster any longer. ``Hide from the world,'' my ass. What a colossal fuckstick.
`Hide from the world,'' my ass. What a colossal fuckstick.
I can't say I am surprised by Brooks' nauseating hypocrisy on this issue. Did anyone seriously think this shithead would show a shred of intellectual or factual honesty about the cheer-leading he did to help create this bloodbath, much less resist the temptation of blame it all on Obama?
"We’ll never know if all this effort and progress could have led to a self-sustaining, stable Iraq."
The argument of the con man selling snake oil as a cancer cure, a trillion dollars and thousands of dead per dose.
Post a Comment