Via the Washington Post:
Supporters of an Iranian-backed militia besieged the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes, breaking through the first layer of security at the embassy compound and damaging a reception area before being expelled by Iraqi security forces.
…
As the chaos erupted, U.S. military officials were left to determine how to respond without further inflaming the situation.
They settled on dispatching two of the Army’s Apache gunship helicopters to provide overwatch and security, and deploying scores of Marines from a crisis-response unit in Kuwait to reinforce those already guarding the embassy.
(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘Hell Canto 2: Giants,’ found here).
Obama had quickly pissed me off a decade ago when he wouldn’t go after GW Bush and his boys on Iraq, opting instead “…to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2008 concluded the whole Iraqi-war bullshit was indeed bullshit:
“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced.
Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.
In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
I’d already been pissed off when he’d named Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to work in his administration (Geithner as Treasury secretary, Summers as director of the National Economic Council — both up to their lying-ass eyeballs in causing the ‘Great Recession’).
Of course, Obama is still 100-million-percent better than the T-Rump, or any Republican within a trillion miles (or any Democrat for than matter), and most-likely the best president in my lifetime.
Yet Iraq was a bitch.
When I started this blog in April 2007, the continuous pure-absolute top-of-the-news was Iraq, which then was in the throes of GW’s so-called ‘surge,’ and a way-bitter ethnic civil war was convulsing the country. Despite the time distance, not much has changed.
My all-time favorite Iraqi notes came from the late-great Gen. William Odom, who proclaimed a couple of months before the invasion:
“The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that.
I find it naive and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon.
The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long, and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke.”
And the joke continues, but it ain’t fucking funny-at-all — Odom also called the Iraq war “the greatest strategic disaster in American history.” And sadly heartbreaking.
This Twitter thread says it all (h/t Mark Sumner at Daily Kos):
We never should have gone. When I deployed for the first time in 2004, I thought I was doing something heroic. I was incredibly naive. I was being used. We all were. The entire country was lied to, including us. We were sent to fight and die for absolutely nothing. We did both. https://t.co/o7ppcvCvfS
— The World Ends With Me (@mistermegative) December 31, 2019
Click over and read the whole thing — horror of war.
And now an even bigger idiot-asshole is fucking shit up…