Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

So, Obama and I finally agree on something – he says that he won’t send US troops to Iraq. Yep. they did their job and it’s up to the Iraqis to figure this stuff out for themselves, but, they do need some assistance. The Afgans’ Northern Alliance couldn’t defeat the Taliban by themselves in Afghanistan, but they got US air support and they rolled right over the Taliban, so that’s probably what the Iraqis need. A little moral support. But, really, it shouldn’t have got to this point.

I’ll concede that it’s largely the Iraqis own fault. Maliki is a dumbass – no argument here. He needs to be reminded that he’s the leader of all Iraqis, not just Shi’ite Iraqis. But, as far as US involvement goes, the President told reporters yesterday that his national security staff is working on a range of options that he can take to help the Iraqis.

Well, Fallujah fell to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria whichever the group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq is now calling themselves, back in January. What has the President’s national security staff been doing since then? Why are they always surprised by world events? The fall of Fallujah might have been a hint that things were going wrong in Iraq – well, to me anyway. There should have been a plan in place, along with some military assets that could be applied at a moment’s notice.

But the President and his staff only get their information from the news apparently. They’re consistently surprised by world events. It’s as if they don’t understand that their job is deal with these things before they happen based on the information that the rest of us don’t have. But, how many times has the President told us that he didn’t find out about problems until it was on MSNBC?

According to the Washington Times, John McCain is calling for the entire national security staff to be fired;

Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, said Friday that every member of President Obama’s national security team should lose their jobs.

“Everyone in the national security team, they have been a total failure,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

While the president said he is considering airstrikes to try to restabilize the conflict in Iraq, Mr. McCain said no one on the president’s current team should be making those decisions.

Now, that’s always John McCain’s answer to problems in the Obama Administration – I think he just inserts the problem area into a boiler plate press release calling for people to be fired. However, in this case, the President should have arrived at that conclusion when he asked his staff what he should do and they told him that they’ll get to work on a range of options.

I just finished reading Tom Clancy’s last novel “Command Authority” last night which was about a Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Clancy died on October 1st last year. The troubles in the Ukraine didn’t start until late November – Clancy had written a whole novel about a Russian annexation of the Crimea before he died, but the Obama Administration was taken by surprise. A novelist knew the warning signs better than the President and his advisers. So obviously the wrong people are in those jobs.

Pat and Chief Tango send us links to the Washington Post in which they do their best to deflect blame from the current administration for the failures of the Iraqi Army in Iraq this past week. Greg Jaffe, the WaPo journalist who told us at the last Milblog Conference that we have outlived our usefulness in the information business because he knows as much about the military now as we know, begins the blame game by blaming US troops for losing Iraq;

The Iraqi army’s collapse this week marked a stark failure for the U.S. military that trained it and for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, which has struggled to address leadership and morale problems that now threaten the force’s ability to defend the country.

Although they far outnumbered the insurgents and had greater firepower, Maliki’s troops have fled by the thousands in the country’s north, allowing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to take the city of Mosul and start an ominous march toward Baghdad.

Yeah, nice try, Jaffe. The troops did their jobs. They went above and beyond what they could do given what they had to work with. Fareed Zakaria, in another Post article, takes the more popular position of blaming Bush;

But how did Maliki come to be prime minister of Iraq? He was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert Tom Ricks called “the worst war plan in American history” — the administration needed to find local allies. It quickly decided to destroy Iraq’s Sunni ruling establishment and empower the hard-line Shiite religious parties that had opposed Saddam Hussein. This meant that a structure of Sunni power that had been in the area for centuries collapsed. These moves — to disband the army, dismantle the bureaucracy and purge Sunnis in general — might have been more consequential than the invasion itself.

Um, Maliki has won popular elections in Iraq at least three times, the most recent was last month. That’s how he came to be Prime Minister. Leaning on Tom Ricks isn’t helping you. Ricks is taking the Obama position on Iraq, he’s decided that he’s ignoring it.

The problem in Iraq isn’t a failure of the troops to do their job or Bush’s planning for the war. The failures came before the war began when liberals decided that a war against Iraq by a Republican Administration was unacceptable. It was fine during the Clinton Administration, but in 2003, not so much.

That told the insurgents that all they needed to do was wait us out and we’d leave. Saddam Hussein gave his generals each copies of the “Black Hawk Down” DVD as an instructional manual to defeat American will.

The insurgents in Iraq thought that the 2006 midterm election was a great victory, misunderstanding the US’ political process and the Iraq Surge surprised them. The 2008 election was their real victory – the Obama Administration wanted the US out of Iraq before the 2012 elections, regardless of the cost. Well, those chickens came home to roost this week.

The Weekly Standard reminds us that Joe Biden once called Iraq one of President Obama’s “great achievements”. Withdrawal was their only strategy, much like it is in Afghanistan now.

The Washington Post is setting up the scenario that Bowe Bergdahl was some sort of Bohemian deep thinker who was operating on an entirely different plane of existence that the rest of us wouldn’t understand. Well, that and he got booted from the Coast Guard after 28 days of basic training, or whatever it is that they call the initial training phase;

Before he became a Taliban prisoner, before he wrote in his journal “I am the lone wolf of deadly nothingness,” before he ever joined the Army, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was discharged from the U.S. Coast Guard for psychological reasons, said close friends who were worried about his emotional health at the time.

Of course, he was allowed to join the Army because “Bush!”

With two wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, the Army was meeting recruitment goals by issuing waivers that allowed people with criminal records, health conditions and other problems to enlist. According to a 2008 Army War College study on the subject, the Army was issuing waivers at a rate of one for every five recruits at the time.

[…]

“Bullet sponges,” [Bergdahl] wrote at one point. “This is what some of the SEALs call regular Army and other mass ground troops. Its right, the job of a soldier is to basically die.”

At another: “Lightning, there is nothing as truly beautiful as lightning .?.?.”

And then: “Puddle of mud, skitsafrentic phyco.”

He was a hippie, spawn of hippies, who accidentally joined the Army. The job of a soldier is to live, actually. A dead soldier is more of a burden to the Army than a live soldier. Of course, it’d be nice of us to die the day after we leave the service, but not while we’re in. But hippies like to read that shit. They also like to read that the Army was taking the Coast Guard’s mental rejects.

I guess the nature of his new chosen profession hadn’t dawned on him during marksmanship training (you know, shooting at people-shaped targets) or bayonet training (you know, stabbing people-shaped dummies and reciting the “Spirit of the Bayonet”).

Bergdahl wrote all of this hippie shit to a young lady by the name of Kim Harrison. I don’t know anything about her, but I assume that she’s nice, but in my opinion, Bowe was setting her up for a booty call for when he came home. I was a teenager in uniform and I recognize the theme of his writing style.

But the big news today is how Chuck Hagel testified to Congress that “time was not on our side” in regards to the negotiations for Bergdahl’s release. Funny, but the same deal was rejected in 2011 and 2012, according to the Washington Times so basically the Obama Administration is admitting that they suck at negotiating – they had four years to negotiate a better deal, but instead they just took the first thing that had come along. Like that kid in your neighborhood who always got suckered into bad trading card and comic book swaps.

From Associated Press;

“We could have done a better job of keeping you informed,” Hagel acknowledged to the panel.

Translation: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.

They couldn’t negotiate to keep troops in Iraq, they can’t negotiate to keep troops in Afghanistan and they can’t negotiate so that dangerous, treacherous criminals aren’t wandering around loose in the world. I’ll betcha that I could get Hagel to trade that Mickey Mantle rookie year card for my A-Rod Yankee card.