Things Could Have Been Very Different

The Taliban were weak and ready to surrender in 2001 when the U.S. passed on a deal to end the war in Afghanistan. Nearly 20 years later, the U.S. did negotiate a deal — but the balance of power was very different. It favored the Taliban. https://t.co/gI1u5mzMZM

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 23, 2021

Here's part of the problem:

Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.  

But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.  

“We don’t negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead.

As incredibly stupid and awful as I think the Trump Administration had been, it really is hard to compete with the steely-eyed ignorance and thick-skulled hubris of the Bush Administration. And of course, the Iraq War was dumb as hell and went on forever as well. What the hell does "We don't negotiate surrenders" even mean--we refuse to accept a win? They could have said--Mullah Omar turns up, you turn him over. It wouldn't have been super-satisfying, but it would have not been--this.

So many pundits, military "experts" and so on, people whose credentials have been made in participating in prolonging this tragedy, get to take up cable news real estate when they shouldn't be given the ground.

I do believe I will stay mad about this for a very long time.

 

Things Related and Not

 

It happens that a man can live a long time and do any number of appalling stupid things, like help facilitate a long, brutal, murderous war of choice and authorizing torture, and if he is capable of mustering a grin and fashioning statements that in hindsight seem ghoulish or hysterical depending on how you look at things (among the greatest hits, "I don't do quagmires", "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want to have", "Freedom is messy" and the convoluted mush that is the full "unknown unknowns" quote) and he will somehow receive surprising praise even in death,

He's still dead though, and the history he leaves behind him is still brutal. Some people will say that the Iraq invasion, and the way the justification was tied to 9/11, and the excuse made for appalling judgements of error and misrepresentations of fact were judgment calls by people who felt, after the enormity of 9/11, that they were doing the right thing. Others will say those choices were deliberate and, had there been no 9/11 to tie them to, would have still been made, if more slowly.

Unknown unknowns, right? 

Even after investigations and time, accountability is hard to come by. 

That's the frustrating thing, after the lives lost and damage done and still ongoing. And there was a lot of blame to go around. 

The Bush Family Drama

It seems like a little bit of family business worked its way out in public as some of the senior Bush's opinions have been related by Jon Meacham in his biography of George H. W. Bush. It seems that "41" had a bit of criticism for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a little criticism for "43".  The elder Bush described his son as having been badly served by Rumsfeld, and described Dick Cheney as becoming a more hardline and "iron ass" guy (possibly with the encouragement of his wife Lynn, and daughter, Liz). Bush "43", for his part, sticks up for those who served in his Administration. Say what you like about W.--he's loyal to a fault or a hundred.

There's nothing in that necessarily that makes me go "OMG!" about either what was said, not the source and direction of the opinion. I got a good enough sense that "43" didn't seek his father's advice when he said as much himself; when asked if he sought his father's counsel on things, he said he had a "higher father" that he relied on. This kind of statement, when it was not signifying theocratic holy war scary-times, was in line with the idea W. projected of being "the Decider". Nevertheless, in the midst of making claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, programs to build same, and relationships between Saddam Hussein and terrorists that couldn't possibly have made sense, the one thing I thought rang true was when Bush justified his invasion with "This was the guy who tried to kill my dad that one time."  This was family drama as war. Unless Bush's real reason was some crazy End-times shit--we will never really know, right?

Now, presuming that Jon Meacham is a Beltway remora and Poppy Bush still has his wits about him, that particular message slamming Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney has a couple of familial interests behind it. Knowing that Number 2 son is in need of distancing himself from the foreign policy disasters of Number 1 son, he establishes a narrative of distance by setting out that the reason for the disaster was a Team Effort, giving Number 1 son opportunity for plausible deniability and Number 2 son running room. He was trying to do a mitzvah for his boys like they understood how this worked. I guess he never told them though, or didn't think he had to.

43 hugged Dick Cheney like they were still testifying behind closed doors for like an hour that one time in front of the 9/11 commission. And Jeb, like the stunning political performer he is, also totally sided with Team Cheney. This is the guy we last saw being lashed by Donald Trump with his brother's foreign policy, and then like a mook stood in front of a mirror and straightened out the knots.

When 83-year old reptilian Donald Rumsfeld was warmed up enough by the sun, he mentioned that GHWB was "getting up in years" but that W. made his own decisions. He sure did. I'm not saying I'd make any kind of president, but after the Abu Ghraib revelations, I'd have been asking for Rumsfeld's resignation the first damn thing to show I treated this stuff as a top-down disaster.

But the insinuation that Bush "41" isn't still mentally sharp is a lie. He is. He was jumping out of planes when folks his age couldn't jump out of bed. Sharp as he ever was. The people around him, though, are only sharp as they ever were, too.

Dick Cheney Gets A Little Char from Chris Wallace's Grilling

I think the exchange in this FOX News Sunday piece is a good reminder that even if the rationale for the Iraq war was supposedly anti-proliferation of WMD's and WMD-capability--the Bush Administration really wasn't much good at it.

Wallace made this key point:

Wallace pointed out that Cheney had eight years to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and failed to do it.

“You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years, and I think it was fair to say that there was never any real, serious military threat,” Wallace noted. “Iran went from zero known centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000.”

“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?” the Fox News host asked.

Cheney completely did not understand that this was a failure. He pointed to the invasion of Iraq as something that was supposed to have done some good there--but the actual facts are that no, the Iran nuclear program was never arrested by the invasion, and in fact Iran had an ever-greater influence in Iraq because of that invasion and the destabilization of the previous political infrastructure.

Which gives me a notion that Cheney was in part, operating under the Kissingerian "madman" strategy, where the monstrous destruction wrought in Iraq was supposed to serve as a caution to other nations to not even try with the US.

That would be goddamn stupid. Because if you became aware that your neighborhood was unsafe--wouldn't it make sense for you to arm yourself? That nonsense didn't even work in Vietnam. If looking like a country run by crazies was supposed to result in a draw-down, what in the hell was the arms race with Russia and the escalation in Afghanistan in the '80's about? Everybody got to buying weapons. It was the opposite of anti-proliferation logic.

Well, funny old thing--in his post-congressional life in the 1990's, Dick Cheney got a job at Halliburton and they kind of went around sanctions to sell multi-use gear to Iran that might have been useful in their nuclear program. (There was all kinds of wrongdoing in the 1990's by Halliburton though. But they were in good--that is to say bad, company--see Donald Rumsfeld and North Korea.)

But let's call all those little ways in which Bush Administration so-and-so's screwed-up to make things worse world-wide in terms of WMD mere mistakes.(And how could they do better, being the heirs of Iran/Contra and the Cambodian Campaign?) Would it not make sense then, for people who were journalistically inclined, to not actually ever rely on the words of such people as experts in anything ever again? Just because they are very likely either abominably stupid or quite obviously lying?

I do not understand why failures are promoted in the media and why I should feel so happy to see one journalist even bother to address some aspects of the failure. This should be the media's regular job. Cheney should have been called out like an SOB in 2003.

What is Donald Rumsfeld--an Untrained Ape?

I'd care what Donald Rumsfeld has to say about whether the Obama Administration should be able to obtain a SOFA with Afghanistan (really--a "trained ape"could?) but he is not actually a person whose opinion can be trusted.  Obama and anyone associated with him have to be belittled by the man because Rumsfeld and his lot were not competent to do things--and if they weren't, who even could be? But as it was, the Bush Administration in 2008 had obtained the SOFA with Iraq that resulted in the ultimate withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011.

This notably did not happen while Donald Rumsfeld was SecDef, and possibly would not have. It is notable, after all, that the plan under which both the Afghan and Iraq campaigns were waged were a departure from the Powell Doctrine that made a quick work of the original Gulf War. But I think it was apparent that the idea of a quick job never was in the offing for either front of the GWOT. The Rumsfeld Doctrine was about reducing the number of forces in a theatre and thus, reducing the amount of supplies needed. Except something went bad there. It was cost-effective on paper, but it's really weird what a money and time suck those logistics were when put into play.

By the time the miserable manager who so blew mission discipline that things like Abu Ghraib or the Fallujah Massacre (hm--how did we get so reliant on contractors?) were just more kicks in the teeth to a military that was doing the very best it could with what it was given--and still couldn't live up to the bullshit promises made was basically fired, he should have realized that his life really reached the pinnacle of its arc when he was covering up studies on artificial sweeteners that showed they might be toxic so that he could get them sold as health food. He is, at heart, a salesman--not the most honest sort.

But as the poet said, there is some shit one will not eat. Therefore, I am not at all interested in any shit from Don Rumsfeld. Maybe some people think it tastes good--but I think it's probably toxic.

It's Tricky, This Syria Business

Just for old times' sake, I think I'll start my survey of what Republicans of some repute (of what repute, I shall refrain from elaborating) are saying about the upcoming Syria decision by looking at my former senator, Rick Santorum, who is very worried about that tyrant winning. You know. The one in the White House.

"An al Qaeda-run Syria is no better than an Assad-Iran-Hezbollah-run Syria," he says in the statement. "What is happening there is tragic, but it is not in the United States’ best interest to intervene with a military strike." 

In March 2012, when Santorum was battling Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination, the former senator told TIME Magazine air strikes "would certainly be one of the things" he would consider as a strategy for taking out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. 

"Had President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acted then in support of pro-democracy forces when that rebellion was taking place, we could have removed Assad and helped usher in stability for that country," Santorum says in Thursday's statement. "But we have a very different situation today. After nearly two years, 100,000 people killed, a rebel force comprised of al Qaeda and a Syrian regime in a much stronger position, a military strike would no longer be in our national security interest."

I find that I actually have some overlap with respects to his negative view of what is currently capable of being accomplished by acting, while completely disagreeing with him regarding whether action ever would have brought about a positive result.  I don't actually forsee an "al Qaeda-run Syria" as the necessary result of missile strikes, but since the ultimate goal isn't supposed to be regime change, no better is still no better. I just seriously question whether US intervention ever seriously could have tipped the scales in the favor of "the rebellion"--as if it wouldn't have fragmented anyway, or ever really was that cohesive. I'm not saying I know better, just that I doubt he does. But I have to point out that if Santorum were to have won (hrmmffppf...mphff....giggle...bwahhahahahaha) both the GOP primary and the election, surely he'd had sprung into action no sooner than sometime in 2013, amirite? Which would have been--too late? And it is interesting, no, that the "red lines" that Santorum thinks are reckless now, are part of the Syria Accountability Act that Santorum supported? Right. Santorum is only half-right because he doesn't care for a Democrat in the White House, otherwise, I think he'd be capable of being all wrong.

But he's got nothin' on Smokin' Aces McCain.