snip//

Today President Barack Obama issued a statement on the situation in Iraq.

He reiterated that the ISIS/ISIL advance was a threat to US interests. He was receiving regular briefings from his national security team, and was in contact with the Iraqi leadership.

But if the people who got Iraq into the state it is today expected words of comfort, they were in for a rude surprise.

Pres. Obama tore into the Iraqi leadership, castigating it for not working anywhere near hard enough to knit the country’s various ethnicities and religious confessions together into a viable state. He bemoaned that all the money which the US taxpayer has poured into building the Iraqi Army seems to have gone to waste, as a numerically inferior force of terrorists has overrun Iraqi Army posts, brigades just melting away without firing a shot.

This is the state in which Iraq finds itself. A Shi’a elite has replaced a Sunni Arab elite, and has operated along the same lines as the former elite under Saddam Hussein. Sunni Arabs are shut out of any real power. Frustration builds. A civil war which had been somewhat tamped down by the time US troops left has flared up to full force again. There are other Sunni groups fighting the central government besides ISIS. And Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki keeps trying to centralize power and entrench his new elite.

Of course, the mistake was invading Iraq in the first place. Jihadi groups did not exist in the Levant before George W. Bush’s geopolitical disaster. This was a disaster aided and abetted by a feckless media, too shellshocked by 9/11 and Bush’s popularity to ask any real questions. The country and the “coalition of the willing” rushed to war against a country whose major sin was that it stuck in the craw of the PNAC crowd.

Invading was the first mistake. The second, more onerous error was to have no plan for the postwar settlement. It was envisaged that troops would be pulled out after six months, with an Iraqi government airlifted in, already prepared and equipped to take over from its exile in London and Paris. The problem was that these exiles had no power base in the country. They didn’t suffer the decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein. And the Shi’a who were under Saddam’s boot weren’t going to merely roll over and accept an imposed leadership. So, without a government to take over smoothly, the US suddenly found itself as an occupying power, with no plan in place. The postwar settlement went from a comedy of errors to an increasing tragedy, as sectarian war erupted, with US soldiers stuck in the middle, sometimes fighting Shi’a, sometimes Sunnis, at a cost of 4,000 US dead, thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead."

The rest of Liberal Liberian's piece..
http://theobamadiary.com/2014/06/13/some-truths-about-iraq/

Romnesia

Had allowed prosecutions for IranContra to go forward we never would've had a Gov Bush x2 or President Bush in 2000 or 911 or the Iraq War. When we let them get away with mass cocaine dealing, assassinations and other felonies we essentially told the conservatives they weren't guilty and empowered them.

There were other investigations going on including of those pardons. And Clinton definitely had quid pro quo with Bush Sr who later once the 2000 election handed power to his son referred publicly to Bill as his 5th son. There were also investigations going on including cocaine dealing and Iraq loans...Clinton squelched them all. He was Bush Sr's lackey...unless one believes in fairy tales.

Maybe you should read Gary Webbs book, Robert Parrys columns or even watch CNN broadcasts. They were facilitating importing hundreds of tons of cocaine while promoting the first private prisons in the early 90s to enrich their buddies. Bush Sr spearheaded it and even Bill and Sam Nunn on "our" side pushed it. Black helicopters? Really? Sarcastic...downplaying Bush Sr and his whole vile families crimes going back a hundred years? If you didn't notice Clinton's complicity perhaps you should take a closer look. Just watch CNN's 41 on 41 coming up if you want to watch history be rewritten like they did in 1984. There will be plenty of submission and butt-kissing I'm sure. It's amazing how they want us to buy into the shallow pomp and circumstance as if that's what lends us faith in this broken system.

Rec!

I have my differences with a lot of what he does, but he does things very right sometimes. But THEY... are both wrong and hostile every time. Every time. 100% of the time, every time. It still stuns me that so much of the population still cannot see that.

We need to see more of statements like these.