BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
SPREADING HIS LEGS WIDE AND HOLDING HIS BUTT CHEEKS APART, 'PROFESSOR' NOAH SMITH CUMS TO PRAISE THE DRONE WAR AND, MOST OF ALL, FADED CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O.
BARRY O -- COWARDLY
NOAH INSISTS -- IS NOT A WIMP.
PROVING ONLY THAT THERE AREN'T A LOT OF TOUGH GUYS AT STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY.
IF THERE WERE, THEY'D ALL BE KICKING NOAH'S ASS.
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Each day, things get worse in Iraq. In an essay for
The London Review of Books entitled "
Isis consolidates," Patrick Cockburn offers:
In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul
and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an
hour’s drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of
Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on
either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia
population of seven million, people know what to expect if the
murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture the city, but they take heart
from the fact that the calamity has not happened yet. ‘We were
frightened by the military disaster at first but we Baghdadis have got
used to crises over the last 35 years,’ one woman said. Even with Isis
at the gates, Iraqi politicians have gone on playing political games as
they move ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister,
Nouri al-Maliki.
‘It is truly surreal,’ a former Iraqi minister
said. ‘When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if
they had not just lost half the country.’ Volunteers had gone to the
front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s
most influential Shia cleric. But these militiamen are now streaming
back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced
to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only
large-scale counter-attack launched by the regular army and the newly
raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on 15 July that
was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the
dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. ‘They were using
just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,’ the former
minister said, ‘so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140
helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?’
Probably
the money for the missing 139 helicopters was simply stolen. There are
other wholly corrupt states in the world but few of them have oil
revenues of $100 billion a year to steal from.
That's a look at Iraq today.
The prime minister is the chief thug Nouri al-Maliki. In 2006, Bully
Boy Bush refused to allow Ibrahim al-Jafaari to have a second
(non-consecutive) term as prime minister, arguing the 'new' Iraq (post
2003-invasion) was too young to survive a two-term prime minister, that
it would be too easy to slip in a new Saddam that way. So the Bully Boy
Bush administration began demanding the prime minister be Nouri -- who
had passed several tests with administration officials (including Zalmay
Khalilzad) and with the CIA (who felt his paranoia would make him very
easy to control). And that's how nobody Nouri ended up becoming prime
minister the first time.
Barack Obama was elected president in November of 2008. We're doing a
very simplistic time line here. In 2010, Iraq holds elections. Nouri
al-Maliki's State of Law loses to Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya.
Last week, Frontline (PBS) served up "Losing Iraq." One of the people they spoke with was Zalmay Khalizad.
He's generally considered to be a neocon and he was a supporter of the
Iraq War as well as the US Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
Zalmay Khalizad: Then at the same time, the Iraqi election was front and center. And
once the Iraqi election had occurred, Mr. [Ayad] Allawi’s party, called
Iraqiya, won more seats than Maliki’s party.
I felt the success of those two parties also showed political
progress in Iraq, the waning of sectarianism and the rise of
cross-sectarianism, because Iraqiya was a secular party that had a lot
of Sunni support but had some Shia support as well. For it to go from 25
seats in the previous election to 92 seats in the 2009 election showed
increased support for secular or cross-sectarian and less support for
sectarian parties.
And Maliki, who had been the leader of a religious party, a Shia
religious party by one of its leaders, adapted by establishing a new
party called the State of Law, which had nothing to do with a sect as
such, and he was the second largest party. He too moved away from being
sectarian.
These two were the two biggest political forces, the State of Law and
the Iraqiya, afterward. So government formation became a preoccupation
of the administration as well.
[. . .]
Frontline: So the 2010 election takes place. The United States
basically backs Maliki, is the one to sort of name the new government,
despite the fact that he had less seats. Is that important? Some people
say that’s a turning point, that if Allawi had been allowed to set up
the government, if Maliki had been pushed out of the prime minister
role, it might have allowed more of a chance for power sharing, more of a
secure Iraq moving forward, alleviating some of what happens afterward
that we’re seeing today.
Zalmay Kahlilzad: It would have been very important, in my view, to follow the
constitution of Iraq in order to maintain support for the process and to
show that being cross-sectarian pays off. It has political consequence.
And to ask Allawi to form the government, he may have or he may not
have succeeded in forming a government. Although he was the largest
bloc, he wasn’t the majority, and therefore he would have had to
convince some Shia, Kurds and some of the Sunnis who had separate
parties of their own to vote for him.
But that did not happen. Instead Maliki maneuvered, used the
judiciary in a politicized way by getting a judgment from the court that
said the bloc that even forms after the election, if it’s larger than
the bloc that won the election, as they were before the election, can
lead in forming the government. And we kind of bandwagoned with that,
rather than pushing back and saying the constitution had to be followed.
And an even bigger mistake, in my view, was in retrospect, that once
the government had been formed with Maliki leading, … the package that
was part of the agreement on the staffing of the government —
establishment of this new position of a senior group of a strategic
council that Ayad Allawi was to chair — was never formed.
Some of the other agreements that were in place on policy issues did
not occur, and we became much more disengaged after intense engagement
in the formation of the government with a vice president and the
president being hands-on, calling. Then we didn’t push, pursue, cajole
to have these other elements also be implemented.
Then add to that the absence of a SOFA and total withdrawal and the deterioration of the region, all of this then impacted Iraq.
There are things I disagree with in the above (State of Law
nonsectarian?) but in terms of a sweeping summary, it's better than
most. The agreement he's speaking of is The Erbil Agreement -- the one
giving Allawi a position over national security. For over eight months,
Nouri refused to step down. In doing so, he brought the government to a
standstill. The political stalemate set a world record at the time for
the longest period of time between elections and the formation of a
government.
Nouri would not have been able to pull that off without backing from the
White House. Some point to Iran as well. And they did support Nouri.
They did not, however, ensure his second term as prime minister. The
White House did. The Parliament finally met (and named a president, a
speaker and a prime minister-designate all in one day) the day after the
US-brokered Erbil Agreement was signed.
The agreement was a contract -- a binding contract, US officials told
the leaders of each political bloc. In writing, the leaders agreed to
give Nouri a second term as prime minister in exchange for concessions
from him -- such as Allawi's national security appointment, the Kurds
wanted Article 140 of the Constitution implemented, etc.
Nouri didn't win.
There was no reason for him to be prime minister.
The legal contract was how the US government got people on board with a second term.
And then Nouri refused to implement it and the White House played dumb.
In 2011, he's not implemented it. By that summer, the Kurds, cleric and
movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqiya are among those publicly
calling for Nouri to implement the agreement.
We need to wrap this section up -- it's all prelude to another portion of the snapshot -- so let's big picture it.
Nouri does not keep his word. Not on The Erbil Agreement. Not on the White House benchmarks. Not on this, not on that.
I have called out Barack repeatedly here for refusing to stand up to
Nouri. A friend who left the administration in 2013 tells me I'm wrong.
Barack gave many firm words to Nouri over the years especially
November 1, 2013.
Okay, I'm fine with being wrong on that.
The man who's all talk scolded the man who can't keep his word. And
nothing ever followed because Nouri can't keep his promise and Barack
thinks empty words solve everything.
Barack should have long ago made clear that if X isn't met then the US pulls support.
By not doing so?
Peter Sullivan (The Hill) notes
the results of the latest NBC News - Wall St. Journal poll including,
"Respondents rated Obama's handling of foreign policy even lower, with
36
percent approving, also an all-time low for the president." This a day
after
Connie Cass and Jennifer Agiesta (AP) reported on the latest AP-GfK poll which finds "38 percent find the situation in
Iraq of pressing importance; 57 percent disapprove of Obama's handling
of it."
Barack ran for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination on
the lie that he was 'right' about Iraq. (Barack protested it before the
war started. Once it started, he was supporting it. That's public
record. I also knew this for a fact long before Boston in the summer of
2004 -- when Barack spoke to the New York Times. He had already told
Elaine and I at a fundraiser that 'we're there now' so opposition to the war no longer mattered.)
He deserved your vote, he insisted, because he was right about Iraq.
Does he look right now?
He took over in 2009 as violence was dropping and all he's done is throw
gas on a fire to keep it going and to make it grow larger.
Does he look right now?
Andy Piascik (Connecticut Post) observes, "True to his preference for violence over diplomacy, Obama has sent a strike force to Iraq which grows larger by the day."
Barack's 'superior judgment' never was all that and events on the ground in Iraq threaten Barack's very image and power base.
The ongoing failure that is the failed state of Iraq is a reflection on
Barack and, as usual, the dim bulbs of the administration have somehow
managed to repeatedly overlook that fact.
The public doesn't appear to be. The low marks Barack's getting have to
do with his false advertising being revealed to be false.
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