"The People Who Broke Iraq Have A Lot of Ideas About Fixing It Now" (Hayes Brown)

Ari Ferchrissakes Fleischer? Shouldn't he be out somewhere on a roadside trash-pickup crew?

by Ken

Howie wrote at length about the mess in Iraq on Saturday "Who Will Save Iraq Now -- Obama? Rouhani? The Anunnaki? A Negotiated Rational Partition?," and on the whole I would prefer not to touch the subject. But it's so much another case of the chickens coming home to roost and, American-discourse-style, not being recognized as either the old chickens or the old roost, that I have to jump in.

And always hanging over any possible discussion of the subject is not just this habit of amnesia but the living and standing byproducts of it: attention being paid to people who, on the basis of their earlier performace regarding Iraq, should have earned lifetime "Shut Your Friggin' Piehole" clamps. So how could I not gravitate to a piece with a title like ThinkProgress's Hayes Brown's "The People Who Broke Iraq Have A Lot of Ideas About Fixing It Now"?

The crisis in Iraq has reached a critical point, as the Obama administration debates how to stop the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) — also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — in its conquest of Iraqi cities and villages. All U.S. forces left Iraq in late 2011, the result of the Iraqis not wanting to extend the terms of the status of forces agreement that dictated how American troops could operate. That marked the end of a war that lasted nearly a decade in which a well-documented campaign to push for war against Saddam Hussein drowned out any criticism ahead of the launch of combat operations.

Now, those same architects are invited to write op-eds, speak on television panels, and generally give their opinion on today’s Iraq with little to no pushback on just how wrong they got it a decade ago. The situation as it stands in Iraq is not the same as in 2003 and the administration is now considering air strikes to slow the progress of ISIS. But so as to not allow the ones who broke Iraq in the first place to go entirely unchallenged, here are some of the top advocates for launching the war in 2003 — along with their misleading statements and incorrect predictions — and what they have to say about Iraq now.

Some of what some of these folks have to say isn't entirely what you would expect, in that some of them have learned to hem and haw a little better than they were doing back in 2003. (For each of his subjects Hayes begins with a little "Role in 2003" quick shot.) For the record, his rogues' gallery today consists of Paul Bremer, Tony Blair, Paul Wolfshit, Douglas Feith, and Ari Fleischer. These gentlemen are not currently employed, as you might think, as circus clowns, and are still being listened to as if they were, you know, serious people.


SURE, THERE ARE MORE CONSEQUENTIAL PEOPLE
IN THE GAGGLE, BUT REALLY, ARI FLEISCHER?



As Hayes Brown recalls:

Role in 2003: As Press Secretary in the Bush administration, Fleischer had the job of selling the media on the war’s benefits and ease. Among the quotes he gave from the podium in the White House Press Briefing Room include: “[G]iven the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice,” and “there’s no question that if force is used, it will achieve the objective of preserving the peace far faster than the current path that we’re on.” In 2011, he praised the decision to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Iraq as President Bush had negotiated.

You'll note that our Ari now doesn't want to talk about what happened in 2002. In real-world terms, of course, he doesn't know anything about what happened in 2002. The one thing he knows about what happened back then is that, for stooge-apologists of the neocons, it's probably something that's better left un-talked-about in 2014. And of course he knows if anything less about the great Surge of 2007. Again, the one thing he knows is that this is much safer to talk about, even though in the long term it not only didn't solve any of Iraq's problems but probably made most of them worse. Today? Well, I still think that clown career might be open to him if he was prepared to really go after it.

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