The financial cost alone to the United States will top $3 trillion, according to the estimates of the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, or about $24,000 per American household. Some 4,400 American soldiers died in Iraq, along with approximately 500,000 Iraqis, according to a survey and academic study.
The war helped trigger the Syria war, the genocide against the Yazidi and Middle East Christians, the rise of the Islamic State, the strengthening of Iran and a broader Sunni-Shiite conflict in the Middle East that will claim lives for years to come.
.. I have a grim feeling in my belly, a bit like I had in the run-up to the Iraq war, that we have a president who is leading us toward reckless, catastrophic conflict.
Actually, toward three reckless conflicts.
The first is not a bloody one: It’s a trade war.
.. The second conflict that Trump is hurtling toward is with Iran.
.. Unless he chooses some face-saving compromise, it looks as if Trump will pull out of the Iran nuclear deal by May 12.
.. The risk is that Iran responds by restarting its nuclear program. This would lead to soaring tensions, the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, a risk of Saudi-Iranian conflict and a danger of war between the United States and Iran.
Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, whom Trump has nominated to be secretary of state, is very smart — and very hawkish on Iran. Moreover, Trump is considering replacing his national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, with John Bolton, who is not a mere hawk so much as a pterosaur.
.. The final risk, of course, is a war with North Korea. We may have a reprieve for a couple of months if Trump’s face-to-face with Kim Jong-un goes ahead, but I think Americans are too reassured by the prospect of a summit meeting.
.. The basic problem: There’s almost no chance that North Korea will agree to the kind of verifiable denuclearization that Trump talks about.
.. Trump’s snap decision to accept Kim’s invitation to meet underscores the risk of a mercurial president leaping into actions — which is one of the reasons we got into the mess in Iraq.
.. The temptation to fire missiles at North Korea or Iran may also be particularly great for a president seeking to distract from a Russia investigation or an outspoken porn actress.
.. Kori Schake, who worked in the Bush White House during the Iraq war, notes that Trump sometimes has spoken about North Korea the way Bush administration officials did about Iraq, and she adds: “I worry that President Trump could lead to war on the Korean Peninsula or against Iran, or by miscalculation in a number of other places where adversaries misread his intent. The president considers his unpredictability advantageous, when it is more likely to have explosive consequences.”
Mike Pompeo’s evangelical zeal could complicate his new diplomatic life
And it will do so in unexpected ways
.. People who cherish America’s church-state separation like to cite the Tripoli treaty of 1797 between America and the Muslim overlords of North Africa, which assured them that “the government of the USA is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” and pledged respect for Islam.
Conservative American Christians retort that despite that pact, their country went on to fight two tough wars against those Muslim rulers, who were a threat to American merchant ships—though of course religion may not have been a factor.
.. it was a Democratic and not-very-religious secretary of state, John Kerry, who acknowledged the spiritual by creating an Office of Religion and Global Affairs to help American diplomats engage with faith leaders.
.. For all his reputed hostility to Islam, even President Donald Trump last year praised the rulers of Saudi Arabia for hosting “the holiest places of one of the world’s great faiths”. He must have been hoping his evangelical supporters were not listening.
.. Mr Pompeo comes across as an educated person whose negative ideas about Islam are more thought-through, and hence perhaps more worrisome, than the “visceral, almost incoherent” suspicion of that faith which Mr Trump exuded as a candidate.
.. Watched closely, the video does not show him to believe that all Muslims think that way. What is more striking is the remedy of Christian solidarity he proposes: Islam-inspired terrorists “will continue to press against us until we make sure…we know that Jesus Christ is the only solution for our world.”
.. As a Congressman, he said Muslim leaders who failed to condemn the outrage, and to call it incompatible with Muhammad’s teaching, were “potentially complicit”
.. Mr Pompeo’s record in Congress is the campaign he waged to have the global Islamist movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood formally designated as a terrorist organisation.
.. there is a widespread fear among Muslim-Americans that such a designation would lead to the banning of civil-society groups in America which lobby peacefully against discrimination, on the grounds that they are tainted by alleged links with the Brotherhood.
.. It has been reported that CIA professionals are among those who oppose the move
.. During the Middle Eastern travels of Vice-President Mike Pence, a passionate evangelical, some of the greatest hostility he encountered was from fellow Christians in the region, who felt America’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was unhelpful to peace.
.. He received a rave reception from Jewish members of the Knesset for a speech that was laced with scriptural references; but leaders of traditional Christian churches in the region were unwilling to meet him. Mr Pompeo should anticipate similar shocks.
The Political Forces Behind Rex Tillerson’s Firing
a third, run out of a suite of well-appointed offices on M Street in Washington. Founded by neoconservative journalist Clifford May just after 9/11, the non-profit Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has emerged as perhaps the most powerful outside influencer of the Trump White House today.
FDD is notorious: a self-styled “non-partisan policy institute,” the non-profit organization is funded primarily by right-wing supporters of Israel, including billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
.. Over the nearly two decades since its founding, FDD has
- promoted the Iraq War,
- banged the drum for an attack on Syria,
- opposed the Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran,
- extolled the virtues of Benjamin Netanyahu, and, at the beginning of this decade,
- launched a crusade that targeted the tiny Persian Gulf country of Qatar where the U.S. maintains an airbase.
.. Tillerson, it turns out, was not only blindsided by the embargo, but, as was reported in these pages last June, suspected that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had known of the UAE’s plans, failed to notify him, and instead urged the president to endorse the UAE initiative, which Trump did. Tillerson was not only shocked, he was angry. “Rex put two-and-two together,” a close associate of Tillerson told TAC at the time, “and concluded that this absolutely vacuous kid [Kushner] was running a second foreign policy out of the White House family quarters. [UAE ambassador to the U.S.] Otaiba weighed in with Jared and Jared weighed in with Trump. What a mess.”
.. Tillerson’s efforts, while prodigious, failed to heal the rift between Qatar and its neighbors, but it clearly backfooted the anti-Qatar coalition, who’d hoped to pressure their neighbor into ending its relations with Iran, isolate Turkey (a strong Qatar supporter), and shutter the Doha-based Al Jazeera television network.
.. only deepened the uneasy alliance of forces arrayed against him. Those forces, according to emails leaked in early March by the BBC, now included Erik Prince sidekick Elliott Broidy, a U.S. businessman and Trump campaign donor with deep business ties to the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed. According to the emails, Broidy met with Trump in October and told him that Tillerson was “performing poorly and should be fired at a political convenient time.” The emails described Tillerson as “weak” and “a tower of jello” who needs to be “slammed.”
.. While Tillerson’s demise can be dated to the moment it was reported that he called the president a “moron” back in October, the clock actually started ticking the previous June, when Tillerson decided he would work to reverse the UAE-led embargo against Qatar. Which is why, within hours of Trump’s announcement that Tillerson was being shown the door, his enemies in the Gulf States held a mini-celebration. Among the celebrants was Abdulkhalez Abdullaa, a prominent UAE political science professor, who insinuated that his country could take credit for Tillerson’s demise. “History will remember that a Gulf state had a role in expelling the foreign minister of a superpower and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote on Twitter.
.. FDD President Mark Dubowitz tweeted his approval of the move. “BREAKING,” he tweeted. “Trump ousts Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, will replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.” Dubowitz linked the news to a Washington Post report on Tillerson’s ouster, but then CC’d the entry to three Iranian officials: “@khamenei_ir,” “@HassanRouhani,” and “@Jzarif “: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Birther Taps Benghazi Conspiracy Theorist As Secretary Of State
Mike Pompeo went further than many members of his own party in blaming Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state, and President Barack Obama’s administration for the deaths of four Americans.
His outspokenness was a key reason he gained favor with Trump.
.. some members of Trump’s team chose him because another potential contender, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), was seen as too “soft” on the Benghazi issue.
.. The 2012 incident, they wrote, was “the story of a State Department seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi.”
“And it is the story of an administration so focused on the next election that it lost sight of its duty to tell the American people the truth about what had happened that night,” they added in their report, which came out just a few months before the presidential election in which Clinton was running.
- ignored warnings about the danger of the situation,
- refused to call in military help during the attack and then
- tried to cover up what happened.
But the independent investigations into the matter concluded that while there were systemic failures, Clinton herself was not personally responsible or deliberately reckless.Pompeo, however, said the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi was “worse in some ways” than Richard Nixon’s response to Watergate. He also pushed a conspiracy theory about how Clinton supposedly received her intelligence about the attack.
.. Pompeo will have a tough road to climb at the State Department after his role in the Benghazi investigation... “For all of the Republican fulminating about Benghazi, Rex Tillerson refused to meet one on one with his head of diplomatic security and did not nominate ambassadors, who are the officials ultimately responsible for the safety and security of our personnel overseas,” she said. “The bar for any secretary of State is understandably extremely high and, when it comes to Pompeo, will be even higher due to the role he played in politicizing a real national tragedy.”