Sunshine and warm this Sunday morning along California’s north coast.
Weather’s good, but the problem’s the mighty Pacific — according to the NWS, turbulent shoreline waters: ‘Surprising periods of larger sets of waves.’
Speaking of surprises — this morning, Fox News’ Chris Wallace knocked Dick Cheney off the fantasy cat-bird-seat: ‘“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?”‘
And of course, as par for an unnatural flow, The Dick retorted: ‘“I don’t think of it that way…”‘
History in the eye of the beholder — The Dick and his daughter, Liz, were on Fox to rally against the Iran nuclear deal, blame Obama for everything, including the current European refugee chaos, and mostly to hawk their new book, “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” which dropped last week.
However, the sight was a horrible example of liar-in-a-box, pants way-on fire.
And hardcore, self-righteously insane — from Salon yesterday:
During his book promotion this week, he adamantly defended the war in Iraq, claiming that it was not only warranted, but a complete victory until Obama messed it all up.
On Wednesday, Juan Williams of Fox News asked him, “Well, if people say, ‘Dick Cheney was wrong about Iraq, why should they listen to you on Iran?’”
Like a perfect sociopath, without an iota of self-doubt, Cheney replied, “Because I was right about Iraq. Our objective was to take down Saddam Hussein. We did it. The world’s a much better place without him.”
The shit about ISIS from Cheney is shit — from a review of “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” by national-security reporter Joby Warrick, published at the end of last month:
The author, without passing judgment, provides examples aplenty of the Bush-Cheney regime’s squandered opportunities in toppling ISIS.
We see, up close, that administration’s tensions with the CIA, fueled largely by the Cheney-Bush crowd’s overriding pressure and obsession to tie Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and Sept. 11.
As one CIA analyst told the author, whenever the CIA tried to convince the “Cheney team” that al-Zarqawi wasn’t working with Saddam Hussein, the administration’s answer would be, “So what? All those people have the same agenda, so who cares?”
And here we are. And even The Donald once figured that even The Dick’s boss, George W, has pants on fire — via CNN in October 2008:
“Well, he lied.
He got us into the war with lies.
And, I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant.
And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense.
And, yet, Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
In keeping with that theme, another new book on the Iraqi debacle, “The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq,” by Emma Sky, a British expert on the Middle East, who from 2007 to 2010 served in Iraq as the political advisor to U.S. General Ray Odierno, and as the Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk for the Coalition Provisional Authority from 2003-2004 — so she’s seen and felt the shit up-close.
Arrogant incompetence a major factor, a war conceived and administrated without a clue, with hundreds of thousands dying because of it, and Iraq now a nightmare without end.
Sky in an interview at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in late August:
“When I arrived to Iraq I had no training, no briefings,” she recalled.
“I had no idea what my job would be, and then I was suddenly in charge of Kirkuk. It was a indication of the problems there.
“There was no plan.”
…
“These plans drawn up in Washington were all wishful thinking,” she said.
At one point, Sky recounts in the book, Donald Rumsfeld showed up for a military briefing in northern Iraq, and didn’t know where neighbouring Iran was on the map.
“No one has ever been held accountable for the decisions, for the false intelligence that led them to invade Iraq,” she says.
“They should be. The people at the top should be held accountable for what went wrong.”
Sky was blunt in her assessment to General Odierno, telling him that America’s blundering in Iraq was the, “worst strategic failure since the foundation of the United States.”
His response, said Sky, was, “What are we going to do about it? We’re not going to leave it like this.”
…
Sky was disheartened as she watched the Iraqi people lose confidence in the country’s leaders, especially groups such as Sunni Muslims, who felt there was no place for them and no chance to be part of the government.
“If you were Sunni, you made the unfortunate decision that supporting ISIS was a better option than supporting the central government in Baghdad,” she says.
A joint historical note — if memory serves me right, the late, great Lt. Gen. William Odom proclaimed in October 2005 before a US Congressional hearing: ‘“The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”‘
Instead of appearing on TV pushing a noxious book, The Dick should be, at the bare minimum, in a jail cell somewhere…
(Illustration above found here).