DONALD TRUMP’S REACTION to news that some U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf was to fire back: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
He might have had a point — were it not for the fact that he was being so obviously and ludicrously insincere. Case in point: Trump is said to be on the brink of appointing John Bolton as deputy secretary of state. He is arguably the man most responsible for hiding the truth about Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs.
.. The Bush administration, with Bolton as undersecretary of state for arms control, arrived in Washington, D.C., in 2001 with the goal of invading Iraq. They weren’t motivated by whatever WMDs Iraq might or might not have, but, as a senior administration official later explained, by the simple and highly galling fact of Saddam Hussein’s “defiance” of the U.S.
.. When the September 11 terrorist attacks gave them the opportunity, the administration’s conservative wing, including Bolton, had no interest in sending inspectors to Iraq to see if Hussein had WMD. They wanted to simply use WMD as “justification you can jump on” to invade — without bothering to check whether Iraq actually had anything.
.. Iraq had informed the OPCW in late 2001 that it wanted to sign the treaty. This would require Iraq to provide the organization with a list of any chemical weapons stockpiles it possessed — and submit to intrusive OPCW inspections.
.. This set off loud alarm bells in the Bush administration, since inspections could not just delay their desired war, but undermine the case for it in the first place. As Bustani put it years later, his willingness to consider inspecting Iraq “caused an uproar in Washington,” and it quickly “became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me.”
According to Bustani, “Everybody knew there weren’t any [banned chemical weapons]. An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.”
.. Bolton took the lead in ousting Bustani and replacing him with someone more pliable. After the Bush administration failed to win a March 2002 no-confidence vote from OPCW’s executive committee, it threatened to cut off its funding of the OPCW, which accounted for 22 percent of its budget.
.. they were unable to prevent later inspections of Iraq under the auspices of the U.N. Those inspectors then failed to find anything — since Iraq did not actually possess any banned weapons — and the U.S. and its allies went ahead and invaded anyway in March 2003.
.. If Bolton becomes part of the Trump administration, he’ll be an extremely loud voice for war with Iran. In November, he said that overthrowing Iran’s government is the “only long-term solution” to the country’s supposed threat to the U.S.
The avid reading habits of Trump’s potential Secretary of Defense, James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis
Mattis wrote that “the problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.”
Marines: Nothing can stop us. We just don’t take refuge in self-pity.
You must improve.. You’ll push yourself on your 3 mile run.. and you’ll accept no excuses.
After Losses in Syria and Iraq, ISIS Moves the Goal Posts
Islamic State leaders had long promised their followers an apocalyptic battle — foretold, some believe, by the Prophet Muhammad — in an otherwise nondescript village they controlled in northern Syria.
But the warriors of the self-declared caliphate lost the village, Dabiq, in just a few hours over the weekend as Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey, closed in. To soften the symbolic blow, the Islamic State switched rhetorical gears,declaring that the real Dabiq battle would come some other time.
.. as Dabiq was surrounded on three sides by the Turkish-backed rebel force, Islamic State followers “began to frantically explain why the approaching showdown in Dabiq would not be THE showdown,”
.. Islamic State media outlets pointed out that other conditions for the prophesied battle had not materialized, like the appearance of a “crusader army,” or the Mahdi, a messiah-like figure, or an 80-nation coalition of fighters.
.. Dabiq has been central to the group’s identity. The Islamic State’s online magazine is called Dabiq, and its news agency, Amaq, is named after the surrounding area. And many Islamic State opponents seized on the village’s fall and the recalibration of the group’s messaging as proof that its grand visions were falling apart.
..Seizing the border area that includes Dabiq helped the rebels in several ways: It showed their potential backers that the rebels could fight the Islamic State. It also carves out a relatively safe area for their Syrian supporters; some refugees have already returned to the area.
And it helps delegitimize the Islamic State’s ability to compete with the rebels for supporters and fighters, like Sunni Muslims who also believe in the prophecy about Dabiq.
The End of Interventionism
The era of the West’s enthusiasm for military intervention is over. Two reports on Iraq and Libya—written from the heart of the British establishment and published recently—have delivered its obituary. Each is damning; together, they dismember the case for intervention in both its neocon and liberal-hawk variants. Although their focus is almost exclusively on decision-making within Whitehall—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Ministry of Defence, and, above all, No. 10 Downing Street—Americans will recognize many of the same ills afflicting their own government.
.. Many liberals opposed the Iraq intervention because they disliked its architect and suspected its motives. But they still believed that Western, and especially U.S., military power, used assertively, could make the world a better place.
.. The 2011 Libya bombing was a swift response by liberal hawks to what most agreed was an imminent massacre. It was both opportunistic—a material interest in Libya’s oil industry, and bolstering French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s faltering political stature were strong motivations—and also a test of the noble doctrine of the “responsibility to protect,” adopted at the United Nations in 2005.
.. The Chilcot report on the Iraq War (so called after the investigation’s chair, Sir John Chilcot) reveals, most notably, that key war decisions were taken solely—during unminuted meetings—by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who would ignore legal advice he didn’t like and circumvented official procedures for cabinet collective decision-making. The report, which catalogs numerous obfuscations and outright lies of the Blair administration, offers a verdict that is all the more damning because of its laconic understatement: “The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory.”
.. The central failing of military intervention is not coordination, secretiveness, or dishonesty, though these certainly exist. At its core, the problem is the iron law of organized violence: intervention is war, and war commands those who choose to fight, however much they may believe they are its masters.
.. In order to deter Iran, and to appear strong across the region, Saddam needed to project an illusion of power. His army had been shattered in the 1991 Gulf War. Admitting that he had lost his weapons of mass destruction would be tantamount to conceding that he was defenseless. Not only would this have made Iraq seem vulnerable to Iran, but it would have stripped Saddam himself of his dignity and aura of strength, leaving him exposed to challenges from within his own ranks.
.. Having vilified Saddam, they could not make the necessary leap to see the world from his point of view.