Marco Rubio - Another Reepo Buffoon - Falls Into the Iraq Trap

Rubio pouts after mucking up an Iraq question from FOX's Chris Wallace.

What is it with these mentally deficient Republican presidential candidates that even after they behold the alleged "front runner'" stumble over an Iraq question ('if you knew what you do now would you still have invaded?') they still get tongue tied and end up spouting a dopey, half-assed response? The latest chowderhead is Marco Rubio, a junior Senator from Florida and Tea Party gadfly who somehow fancies himself another Obama. He isn't.  He barely qualifies as a 'Barney Fife' wannabe. (Google the name if you don't know it.)

Asked  on Sunday by a Fox anchor (Chris Wallace) a similar question, Rubio could only sputter:

"I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction.”

Bull Pockey! You dodged the question, you putz!

When Wallace pushed him to say whether he’d call it a mistake, even knowing about the faulty intelligence, he responded in classic 'Barney Fife' fashion:

“The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there…” .

Uh no, Barney, errr....Marco. In case you haven't noticed, a bunch of vicious terrorists called ISIS are running amuck - pillaging, murdering and raping- unleashed by Bush's folly - barging into a sectarian Muslim nation using a total BS ruse.. (More on this below)

When a CBS News political analyst was asked this morning what he made of these stumbles, he replied: "Well, none of these guys want to second guess the signature event of the last Republican president".

Which is beyond pathetic, given how 75 percent of the country now believes the Iraq invasion and occupation was not worth it - according to polls.  It also leaves open the possibility that any one or all of these losers would re- invade (Lindsey Graham calling for "10,000 troops" this morning to secure Anbar province) and make the situation even worse. I suppose one ought not second guess Reepo insanity - which is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result"

The brutal fact none of these monkeys can grasp? That Bush Jr. ought to have left Saddam alone, and not invaded to satiate little Georgie's pique that the "bad man" threatened his daddy. That is what it was all about after all, and the "WMD" bullshit was just an elaborate ruse and cover to justify invasion of a sovereign state.

True, Saddam was no angel, not one bit. But the Bushies'  2002 exploitation of the false "al Qaeda-WMD" narrative to justify an American invasion actually back fired, because now an even more malignant force - ISIS -  has taken up residence in the chaotic vacuum left behind. What the invasion did, which had been controlled up until then, was unleash the sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites which Saddam had controlled by his anti-religious, secular power. Once Saddam was removed from power, the Sunnis and Shi'ites were free to go at each others' throats - and all the American occupation did was delay it.

When the American phony program for Iraqi  democracy spawned a pseudo-dictatorship run by the Shia - the stage was set for a Sunni spinoff bunch of terrorists to wage bloody onslaughts - as they are now doing in Ramadi  - on the verge of taking it over. No one but a certified idiot could believe any of this shit would be going down if Saddam was still around and in control.

So this is what Rubio, Jeb Bush and likely some of the other Reeptard clowns don't get, and why they make mince meat of what should be straightforward answers to simple, direct questions. Which elicits the question of why anyone would want any of these dolts occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  I mean, are voters really that stupid to want the country expending more vital resources in Iraq Showdown II? I would hope not, or I'd have to seriously consider moving back to Bim.

But by all standards of reason and processing of history, there's no going back now. We already wasted $4 trillion there, which we could have better used to repair our crumbling infrastructure here at home. What one does hope is that in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan - we finally re-learn the lessons we ought to have learned after Vietnam. That is to stay the fuck out of places where our immediate domestic security isn't threatened.  Were all those troops" fighting for my freedom"? Hell no! They were fighting for Wall Street, the Bushie opportunist Oil imperialists and their privateer companies (like Halliburton and Bechtel) and the advance of Amerikkan Neoliberalism.

If you don't understand that then you don't know recent history and aren't paying attention.

The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushie PR and propaganda machine actually compared Saddam to Hitler! Never mind that Saddam was the one being pounded by the most devastating shock and awe attack since the Blitzkrieg launched by Hitler on Poland in 1939. But this sort of human evil had been strenuously reasoned and formally justified by Bushie Neocons like William Kristal, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney!  Most of whom Jeb Bush wants back on his "team" if he should become President. (He finally declared his candidacy in NV last week.)

In addition, the U.S. corporate media acted as a willing accomplice, fully complicit in spreading the WMD hysteria that led to the Iraq invasion on March 17, 2003.  Hence each and every one of these actors, agents  (such as then NY Times troll Judith Miller) share blame in manifesting and accommodating human evil, including the devastating costs exacted on Iraqi civilians. (Which the World Health Organization add up to 600,000 deaths or one hundred times more than even Saddam would have wrought if left in power)

A final bit of historical reference to jog the brains of the remaining Reepo herd re: Iraq. Its invasion didn't emerge all of a sudden but was planned as long ago as 1992,  This was as part of the Project for the New American Century" (PNAC) which had originally designated Iraq's seizure and Saddam's ouster for 1993 after an expected Bush Sr. election win. This plan had been originally designed by the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld to extend American power in the world starting in the Middle East, namely Iraq and Afghanistan. Oil also figured mightily into the planning, and no surprise a big Oil honcho like Cheney would be humping and pumping it to the nth degree. A secondary aspect was to oust Saddam which George Sr. stopped short of doing in the Gulf War.

All the best laid plans went askew after Clinton won the 1992 election, and so the PNAC plan had to be put on hold, specifically its plan for an Iraq invasion and occupation.  The plan sprung to life anew after the Bush Jr. win in the 2000 general election (though Al Gore won the popular vote). Cheney, Wolfowitz et al knew they needed an excuse for invasion, however, since "Americans are still suffering from Vietnam hangover" as Wolfie once put it.  The event for springing into action occurred with 9/11 - and all the Bushies needed was an invention (WMD) to link Saddam to it - even if it was all bullshit.

Will the Reepos learn from their mistakes? I doubt it as they haven't yet. Nor will they if elected. As Joan Walsh points out in a piece on Rubio at salon.com:

" Rubio’s been trying to challenge Bush for neocon support. Check out his campaign tagline — “Join Marco’s Fight For A New American Century!” – which suggests homage to the Project for a New American Century, peddlers of the Iraq war (Jeb Bush signed their founding document.)"

One can only hope voters next year will be brighter than these dim bulbs!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tina-dupuy/62255/the-bush-years-an-explainer

IRAQ WAR An Unnecessary Waste? Of Course!

It was sad yesterday morning watching the CBS Early Show to see a number of former American troops bemoan what's been happening in Iraq - with apparent "terrorists" and "al Qaeda" affiliates re-taking towns such as Fallujah. They decried the current events, and what they were seeing and even expressed some reservations about the value of invading in the first place. It is indeed good that they did so, because the entire operation was a sham and illegal from the get go.

As I observed in previous blog posts, evil predicated on an intent to "do good" is one of the mot virulent forms. It is virulent because it can operate as evil under the guise of a good cause, or a moral crusade. Such was the basis for the whole sordid Iraq invasion.   Bush and his minions truly believed they were doing good at the time they demanded congress vote on The Iraq War Resolution in 2002, never mind what we later discovered[1].

Bush’s aggressive foreign policies also exposed unsavory aspects about the U.S. as a nation.  For example, one willing to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive war by invasion as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland in 1939.  In the case of Fallujah, just over nine years ago, in November 2004, the United States military carried out an atrocious war crime at the behest of its civilian leaders. Having already committed what America's chief jurist at the Nuremberg trials called "the supreme international crime" -- aggressive war  (under Article IV)-- the American military now declared a whole city full of innocent civilians to be a "free fire zone" and proceeded to pulverize the town with bombs, missiles, chemical weapons and finally a ground attack by thousands of troops.

Is this anything to be "proud" of? On the contrary, it's enough to make a sober observer and true patriot  ( as opposed to the paper variety) - VOMIT.  Especially as the orders came  after the American military had cut vital supplies of food and water to the city -- another brazen war crime.  And by the way, let us bear in mind here that any given soldier has as his duty to FIRST follow his conscience rather any orders or commands from superiors. This was in fact, one of the higher injunctions in Article IV and was applied to all the Wehrmacht troops, as well as SS riff raff rounded up after World War II. They were informed in no uncertain terms that "following orders" could not be used as an excuse for what they did because they had the higher moral  duty to disobey those unlawful orders and heed their consciences.

But in the case of the Iraq "war" (actually an occupation, as contrasted with WW II which was a REAL war, the one my dad fought in, including several REAL battles such as the Battle of Buna (New Guinea) all the above applied with special force.

The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushie PR actually compared Saddam to Hitler! Never mind that Saddam was the one being pounded by the most devastating shock and awe attack since the Blitzkrieg launched by Hitler on Poland in 1939. But this sort of human evil had been strenuously reasoned and formally justified by Bushie Neocons like William Kristal, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney! In addition, the U.S. corporate media acted as a willing accomplice, fully complicit in spreading the hysteria that led to the Iraq invasion on March 17, 2003.  Hence each and every one of these actors, agents share blame in manifesting human evil, including the devastating costs exacted on Iraqi civilians. Far from malignant human evil emerging without rationality or reason, it instead erupted as if from multiple cancerous cells becoming malignant.


We the citizens also played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed unpatriotic or even "terrorist sympathizers."  Many of  us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example, references “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni[2]”  In a nutshell, too many Americans have “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions.[3]”

Back to Fallujah: So many of the former grunts seen on the CBS segment saw it as their stellar, singular "saving" battle,  in a glorious crusade against them terrible 'terr'ists  - and in addition, the
"most iconic moment" of their righteous , god fearin' campaign (now tainted because heir conquest hadn't held). But  they might want to attend to the facts of the event  - ass opposed to the Pentagon pushed PR and malarkey. So it is well that they see these facts detached in time from all the bravado and hype of the moment. In this case, they'd do well to pick up on  an eyewitness report of the attack from a BBC reporter in the city at the time:

Excerpt:

"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."

Is this something to be proud of? No, not at all. No more than the Nazi mass killings of Polish Jews in Warsaw and other ghettoes, or the slaughter of Russian Jews during Operation Barbarossa. The sad fact, and it's a brutal one for many of these troops to process - is that Iraq was a totally useless and wasteful exercise. Not only that, it was illegal under Article IV of the Nuremberg laws. It was another sordid example of what transpires when a people are driven by ideology and militarism into a conflict in which they have no business. Much like LBJ used the pretext of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to drive the country into Vietnam and the loss of 58,000 lives.

True, Saddam was no angel, not one bit. But the Bushies' exploitation of the false "al Qaeda" narrative to justify an American invasion actually back fired, because now the real al Qaeda likely has taken up residence in the chaotic vacuum left behind. What the invasion did, which had been controlled up until then, was unleash the sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites which Saddam had neutralized by his anti-religious, secular power. Once Saddam was removed from power, the Sunnis and Shi'ites were free to go at each others' throats - and all the American occupation did was delay it.

Of course, there's no going back now. We already wasted $4 trillion there, which we could have better used to repair our crumbling infrastructure here at home. What one does hope is that in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan - we finally re-learn the lessons we ought to have learned after Vietnam. That is to stay the fuck out of places where our immediate domestic security isn't threatened.  Were all those troops" fighting for my freedom"? Hell no! They were fighting for Wall Street, the Bushie opportunist Oil imperialists and their privateer companies (like Halliburton) and the advance of Amerikkan Neoliberalism.

It's about damned time future troops understand what they're getting into before they enter some hyped- up "crusade" - and they also understand that when they sign onto a "volunteer army" (even for later supposed "benefits")  they become de facto mercenaries in the service of war capitalists.

To that end, all citizens also need to understand how Bush is now trying to whitewash his crimes using the venue of his Bush Library. To see Rachel Maddow's  take down of this nonsense, go to one of my previous blog posts here:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-exposes-bush-library-for.html

 

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[1] We now know an Iraqi (codename ‘Curveball’) made the whole WMD baloney up in order to trigger regime change to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs.

 

[2] Jacoby, Susan, The Age of American Unreason., 310.

[3] Ibid.