There is a saying, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” The only problem with the Iraq War dogs is that they never went to sleep.
Even after the disastrous consequences of their ill conceived — conceived on a lie is a better term — ill planned, ill executed invasion and occupation of what once was the sovereign country of Iraq, they have continued to yelp for the United States to attack other sovereign nations or “militarily intervene” in several instances, among them Iran, Libya, Ukraine, Nigeria and now, Iraq, again.
Note:
Just Google “Republicans call for military action in…” and you will get “About 6,250,000 results.” The number of results is only second to “Republicans think Obama not born in the U.S.” with a whopping 11,300,000 results, but it beats “Republicans call for Obama’s impeachment,” with about 2,470,000 results.
Of course, the dogs of war barked when we left Iraq after eight long years of a costly and bloody occupation of a country that was supposed to have greeted us with “candy and flowers;” after training an army — after first disbanding it — that now sheds its uniforms, abandons the weapons we supplied and runs for cover at the first sight of a band of bandits and after a government that we helped install has now degenerated into a reign of thugocracy and kleptocracy.
The dogs of war barked again when Americans decided, after 13 equally long and bloody years of training and supporting another army — this time an army that has launched several despicable “blue on green” attacks on those helping them — that it is now time to leave Afghanistan to the Afghan people.
And now, the same pack of dogs of war who gave us that disastrous war, the same dogs of war who broke Iraq, the same dogs of war whose near-criminal actions resulted in the deaths of 4,500 American troops and of more than 100,000 Iraqis and in a war that nearly broke our treasure, that same pack — a little older but not any wiser — not only wants to re-fight that war all over again, but also has the temerity, the shamelessness, to blame the current religious/sectarian warfare in Iraq on President Obama.
Perhaps the best description of the vicious pack mentality of these ageing dogs of war is by Dick Polman at Newsworks.
In his “Iraq redux: The dogs of war are barking again” — I call it desperately yelping — Polman says:
It’s predictably pitiful that the Bush-era architects of our Iraq disaster have resurfaced to insist that the current sectarian bloodbath is all President Obama’s fault.
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They have no shame. In the words of Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst, these dogs of war precipitated “one of the biggest and costliest mistakes in American history” – and yet here they are, indulged anew in the press, shirking accountability and shifting blame and presuming to offer advice. This spectacle would be hilarious if it were not so nauseating.
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My post headline today draws its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I: “Cry havoc!…and let slip the dogs of war.” The neoconservative warriors – so deluded in their belief that America could quickly craft a Middle East democracy, so clueless about the sectarian realities of Middle East history – wreaked havoc and opened Pandora’s box. What’s happened today is a direct result of their hubris, and they don’t even have the good grace to go away, like Bush, and paint puppies.
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Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Pentagon whiz who declared in ’03 that Saddam had WMDs and that the U.S. war would be quick and cheap, popped up yesterday on Meet the Press to say that we should commit U.S. troops to Iraq, just as we “stuck with South Korea for 60 years.” William Kristol, the neocon cheerleader who infamously predicted “a two-month war” and said there was “almost no evidence…at all” that Saddam’s removal would spark sectarian conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis, said yesterday on ABC News (without a shred of irony or shame) that the current sectarian conflict (supposedly Obama’s fault) is “a disaster for our country.” And don’t get me started on John McCain.
Read more on Bush’s folly, his praise of al-Maliki and the true facts surrounding the negotiation of the Status of Forces Agreement by Bush, not Obama, and much more here.
Finally, just in case the reader does not get to Polman’s conclusion, here it is:
So when the shameless necons and Bush amnesiacs and clueless trolls bleat about “Obama’s fault,” it’s like hearing a pyromaniac whine that the fire department didn’t bring enough hoses to his four-alarm blaze.
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Do I have a magic elixir for the raging Iraqi fire? Nope. Nobody does. But here’s a fanciful idea: Let’s dispatch the dogs of war to Iraq, and compel them to clean up their mess. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, McCain and his fellow congressional hawks, Kristol and his fellow cheerleaders…they should all stay until they forge a solution. And if they argue for a new U.S war, young members of their own families should fight it.
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As Colin Powell warned his Bush teammates in ’03, “you break it, you own it.”
The only thing I would add is that there is at least one dog of war who has not been barking, yelping or whimpering: George W, Bush. I tip my hat to him and urge the other dogs of war to think about purchasing a muzzle or, as Polman suggests, a ticket to Iraq.
Lead image: Shutterstock.com
