The Republican Party is in trouble, as is indicated by their current representative vying for the highest office in the land. When trying to find out why they went wrong, however, the most useful tool would be a mirror.
Donald Trump has gone from entertaining sideshow to dangerous demagogue. I'll admit at first that I fell into the attitude that he was a flash in the pan; something that, like summer, would be wrapped up by Labor Day.
Not so. Today, Trump's numbers are as high as ever. The media is tripping over themselves to let him on their shows, just so he can lie over and over again while saying that the media is scum. It's a form of self-flagellation that not only hurts the media, but hurts the entire political atmosphere in America.
The problem is that the American echo chamber, when replayed abroad, is portraying Donald Trump as speaking for the U.S. If every time someone overseas turns the television on and sees Trump bloviating on banning Muslim travel to the U.S., or saying the Paris attacks would have gone differently if the victims had been armed, or that Muslims need to carry special ID, what else are they supposed to think?
In the same way that so many people think that ISIS and Al Qaeda represent Islam, many people abroad are beginning to think that Donald Trump represents America. Neither are true, but the truth gets lost in perception time and time again.
The GOP should not be surprised that the three current leading candidates to represent them in the 2016 election are Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. Three people that, if they boarded a New York subway and went into their stump speech, would have rational people rolling their eyes and wishing for Showtime.
The Republican Party took a hard right when it came to religion and perceived morality in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan and his use of the Religious Right. Barry Goldwater - the epitome of a pre-Reagan conservative - predicted the fall of the GOP 20 years ago, when he warned Republicans about letting the extreme religious portion of their party take over.
They didn't heed that warning, and the result is that decades of sowing that side of the party has reaped them with three national embarrassments as their best candidates. The party's reliance on partisan media, their willingness to court white voters almost exclusively, and their inability to criticize Trump because they think he's a victim has led them to their current position. And they have no one the blame but themselves.
What is missing is the political response that was so quick and furious following the Paris attacks. While the same kind of gun was used in Paris as was used in Colorado Springs, there were no calls on tightening gun applications like there were for refugee applications. In fact, many of the presidential candidates have been silent on the shooting.
But, you may be saying, Colorado Springs was not nearly on the scale as Paris. And you'd be absolutely right when looked at in a vacuum. But if you look at America in 2015, 431 people have perished in mass shootings. This is a problem in the United States, and anyone who says otherwise is lying or delusional.
Syrian refugees fleeing their homeland (Daily Mail)
In the days following the atrocious attacks in Paris, American politicians have wasted no time in laying the blame squarely where it does not belong: on the shoulders of the refugees fleeing the same kind of horror we collectively gasped at on Friday.
Many state Republican governors (and one Democrat) pledged not to accept Syrian refugees in their states, citing safety concerns. They feel that because one of the Paris attackers may have posed as a Syrian refugee, that their states will be the next to fall victim to a terrorist attack at the hands of a pseudo-refugee. The cognitive dissonance is especially rich with Governor Charlie Baker from Massachusetts, a state that began as a colony of people fleeing a volatile political environment.
To begin with, the idea that Syrian refugees are just coming over to America without any kind of vetting process is absurd. It typically takes 12-18 months from the time of application to be able to enter the United States. On top of this, less than 1% of refugees worldwide are ever actually resettled to a third country. This small, highly vetted group is not coming to America to commit terrorist acts. They are coming to America and other Western nations to escape the very terrorism these governors and other reactionaries are accusing them of trying to further.
But this all flies in the face of another issue: the main proponents of the Paris attacks were citizens of EU nations. Preventing only Syrians from coming to the United States does not solve for those radicalized in the very nations they seek to destroy. Slandering Syrian refugees in order to score political points by scaring one's electorate does absolutely nothing for national security, and instead further inflames anti-Muslim sentiment which helps drive radicalization.
It does, however, call to mind a disgraceful time in the United States. During WWII, the US State Department tightened immigration policy, fearing that Jews fleeing Hitler and Nazism could be made to act as German agents in the US. In an infamous case, Washington turned away the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner trying to find a place for over 900 Jewish refugees, forcing it to return to Europe, where over a quarter of the ship's passengers went on to perish in the Holocaust.
But America has proven itself a world leader in this field in the past, with no major issues. From 1975 to 1997, nearly 1.3 million refugees have been resettled in the United States from Indochina following the fall of Saigon. In the first few months alone, 130,000 Vietnamese were resettled from a landscape scarred by a war fought in part by the United States.
We have a choice here, as a nation. We can look back at our WWII policy, which hid behind xenophobia and disallowed Eastern Europe's victims into our borders, sending many to the gas chambers as a result. Or, we can lead the world, much like we did following the Vietnam War, and accept refugees coming from a region we have played a large part in destabilizing. The alternative is not just failing as a nation on a moral level, but serves up those seeking a better life (into which many of us just happened to be born) to groups like ISIS as either victims or recently spurned recruits.
A man plays John Lennon's "Imagine" in Paris after the attacks on Friday
The pernicious cancer that is ISIS has done what many thought was only the group's pipe dream: they attacked a Western nation, bringing the carnage and horror they have employed across Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Beirut.
If you turn to Facebook or other social media, you'll see people's profile pictures adorned in the French tricolor, symbolizing solidarity with the wounded nation. An honorable gesture, to be sure, but one that I did not see utilized after the Beirut bombings, or the Sharm el-Sheikh plane crash, or the myriad other atrocities being committed across the Middle East. That's a problem.
Yes, ISIS needs to be destroyed. We need to wipe them out completely. But if we want to avoid these tragedies in the future, we need to stop accepting Middle East instability as the norm. We need to stop catalyzing regime change with no post-change strategy. We need to stop throwing money at and selling arms to repressive regimes in the region. We need to start realizing that an unstable portion of the world is not only a threat to area nations, but to all nations. It is 2015, we are a globalized planet. Globalization doesn't just mean business can reach new international markets more easily, it also means that we are all that much more connected. ISIS and al-Qaeda aren't regional problems - they're now global.
In response to 9/11, Washington declared a war on terrorism, which, on its face, is inane. You cannot declare war on an ideology - you will never, ever win. ISIS is a short-term manifestation of a long-term problem. When Joe Biden declared that the United States is not in the business of nation-building, he was way off the mark. ISAF member nations cannot destroy a nation and then not step up when it is time to rebuild. Post-war infrastructure - economic, political, physical - needs to be part of any military strategy, otherwise you open the door to what we're seeing now.
One thing that will not solve the ISIS problem - and will actually further long-term terrorism - is trying to close Western borders to those fleeing the unimaginable hell that exists in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. If Western nations are not willing to engage in post-war nation-building, then the very least they can do is take displaced civilians in. We as the West have an opportunity here to be known for humanitarianism and compassion instead of as the owners of unmanned aircraft that fire off missiles at any given moment in the Middle East. If we tell these civilians to stay where they are, all we are doing is serving them up to terrorist groups as either victims or recruits. That serves no one's end except the terrorists'.
We can cut down limbs from the tree of terrorism, but if we're not addressing the root causes of the problem - war-torn hellscapes that these kids grow up in, with zero opportunities, be they economic or educational - we're not going to solve it. We cannot deny that we've helped create these environments that allow terrorism to flourish. We did it in Afghanistan in the 80s, we did it with Iraq in the 2000s, we did it with Libya and Syria more recently. If we want to stop ISIS in the short term, we need to destroy them. If we want to minimize terrorism in the long term, we actually need to help to build stable Middle Eastern states.
A vigil at the Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston, SC (Time)
In echoes of 1963 Birmingham, a white terrorist entered a church and killed nine people last night in Charleston, South Carolina. As we try to understand acts that are impossible to comprehend, we neglect to see that the attitudes motivating Dylann Roof are not isolated to one sick individual. There is a systemic problem we have refused to address that creates an environment in which someone like Dylann Storm Roof can operate.
After no indictment was handed down in Missouri in the case of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, many people turned to Washington. A hope existed that Attorney General Eric Holder's comments about his own experience with America's police would help guide the Department of Justice toward bringing civil rights charges against Wilson. This was misguided for many reasons.
A collection of "I Am Charlie" sayings in various languages (CNN)
A few days out from the terror attack at Charlie Hebdo in response to that magazine's satirical cartoons, we've seen the emergence of the Hot Take express based on the social media movement around #JeSuisCharlie. Translated from French, the hashtag means "I Am Charlie" and was posted as a sign of solidarity with both the victims of the attack and freedom of expression.
That didn't seem to sit right with some people. Rather than seeing the movement for what it is - a gesture of support for the right to publish whatever one wants - some saw it as support of the content of Charlie Hebdo. Simply put, that's a shortsighted view of those who came out in support of Charlie Hebdo after their staff was brutally murdered for publishing uncouth cartoons.
There are no words that can sum up the evil visited upon the 12 victims in Paris today, sparked by satirical cartoons lampooning Islam. Those who use violence against innocents to try to prove a point simply lack the intelligence and rational thought to achieve their ends any other way.
And so it is with the these terrorists. They were so offended (on behalf of a supposedly omnipotent and all-powerful being) that they decided to kill the people responsible for publishing a cartoon and anyone who got in their way. The response throughout the day once the news became widespread is yet more evidence that the pen can and will outlast the sword.
A memorial for PO Liu and PO Ramos in Brooklyn. (Source)
Last night's assassination of Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos was a tragedy. There is no other way to describe it. Two men simply doing their job gunned down in cold blood as they sat in their cruiser. The killer furthered his cowardly act by turning the gun on himself, escaping the responsibility of answering for his actions. Any sane individual mourns with the city of New York and the NYPD over this senseless tragedy.
A moment like this should unite a city that has already seen such unrest the past few weeks. Unfortunately, pundits, politicians and others who gain from division have jumped on the opportunity to politicize this. Long Island Congressman Peter King (who has previously supported cop-killers) has used this tragedy to point the finger at people like Bill de Blasio and President Barack Obama for their "cop bashing," suggesting some kind of link between yesterday's killer and the president of the United States.
This evening a friend of the blog called out CNN The Lead reporter Jake Tapper, on a point about terrorists killing other Muslims in the name of Islam. The following was the last paragraph in a blog post on The Lead's blog about online terrorist chatter regarding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370:
"But there's been a very strong push back from some of these jihadist forums that there were Muslims on board, an so taking down an airplane that killed Muslims was at its core an act not supported by Islam," said Jones.
This is a classic bullshit argument by terrorist organizations like Al Qaida, who claim that killing co-religionists goes against Islam and, thus, against their murderous dogma. It is well known that Al Qaida actually murders more Muslims than any other group of people in their terrorist acts, which Nihar called out to Tapper.
In what has proven an incredibly disappointing tenure by Attorney General Eric Holder, in which he, among other things, claimed that "due process" was not "judicial process," the last straw may have (hopefully) just seen the light of day. NBC News is reporting that Holder personally approved the secret seizure of Fox News reporter James Rosen's private emails.
Unlike the AP case, where Holder has stated that he recused himself because he had been interviewed by the FBI for the investigation, this Fox News case shows how far the Obama administration will go in its quest to control information. That the administration went beyond finding the source of the leak, which was intelligence analyst Stephen Kim, and tracked Rosen's movements to of the State Department to prove he was meeting with Kim.
On top of this, the separatist movements found in the North Caucasus region of Russia have one enemy in their eyes: Russia. It makes no sense, as some were quick to rush to postulate in the aftermath of the Marathon Bombings, that the Chechen separatist movement would attack American targets. There's a litany of reasons why this is true, but the main is that it makes no sense to attack a country who is usually at diplomatic odds with the country you view as your sworn enemy. It'd be like Puerto Rico attacking Saudi Arabia because they want to be independent from the United States.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a United States citizen who committed crimes on American soil. This is the beginning and the end of the conversation.
Honestly, I was more shocked than I should have been that people would call to try the surviving terrorist from the marathon bombings as an enemy combatant. I knew some people would say it; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed a heinous crime against innocent civilians and this obviously engenders very strong emotions. But there is a very important reason why Tsarnaev should be tried in criminal court in the U.S.
Last week someone left a comment on one of The Second Age's Facebook page posts about publishing graphic photographs like those taken at the Boston Marathon bombing. My argument in the post about showing the world the horror of that day and other tragedies was that it would allow the true devastation that occurred to be realized by the public. I said that editing photos or not releasing photos because they may be too graphic runs the risk of toning down the public response to the horror.
The comment left made a valid point: "Only if they also publish photos of 'collateral damage' from Predator Drones. Fair and balanced." [Quick editorial note: Because the comment was left on my personal Facebook page, I'm not going to link directly to it in case the commenter did not want his statement put up on the blog.] I agree that publishing photos of the human toll that the ever-expanding drone war that the Obama administration has undertaken would be a service to the public to help people understand on a visceral level exactly what we are doing in non-war zones in sovereign countries.
Note: This post is about graphic images and prominently displays a graphic image from last Monday's marathon bombing that some media outlets deemed too graphic to fully publish.
The scene after the Boston Marathon bombing (Source: Wikipedia)
A debate has popped up recently over the ethics of publishing gruesome photos like those of Marathon Bombing victim Jeff Bauman. Some have said that publishing these photos is in poor taste because of the gore that it subjects its viewers to. The Daily News even went so far as to alter one image of the bloody scene to make it less graphic.
Before getting into the merits of publishing gut-wrenching photos, it is pretty obvious that the altering of press photographs is inherently wrong. The consensus is you either run the photo or not, but sneakily editing it the way that the Daily News did is never the right thing to do.
As I simmered at the irresponsibility of Wednesday's ratings-driven media, a much stronger metaphorical punch to the gut was in store: thanks to a minority of Senators in Congress, expanded background checks for the purchase of guns was defeated. Not a limit on clip size or ammunition or assault weapons. A simple background check that would keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill (while strictly outlawing a national gun registry) was deemed too intrusive on this population's ability to own firearms.
To those 46 senators who voted against the clear will of the American people, who looked gun violence victims and their loved ones in the face and decided to vote against a commonsense measure to help prevent future tragedies, who listened to a vocal minority and lobby in a cowardly dereliction of duty: I am embarrassed for you. There is no rational argument against this.
If you are a member of the NRA you are part of the problem. Your financial support helps fund the campaigns that help intimidate weak-willed members of Congress into voting against the American people's wishes. This was not a difficult issue; when was the last time this country backed something at a rate of 90%? If you are part of the majority of NRA members who support universal background checks and do not leave the organization, you are no better than the senators who voted against this bill.
But here's what is the most insulting thing for the American people. Everyone opposed to these measures is saying the same thing: those gun deaths that occur, year in year out, whether by mass shooting or homicide or accident are simply collateral damage. They are collateral damage in the name of easy access to guns. They are collateral damage in the name of a perverted reading of the 2nd Amendment. They are collateral damage in the name of irrational paranoia. The victims of Columbine are collateral damage. The victims of Aurora are collateral damage. The 20 dead first graders at Sandy Hook? A necessary sacrifice in the name of "gun rights." Shameful indeed.
A lot of the reaction was "Oh, well, everyone knows the Post is trash" or "Oh, well most of cable news is garbage anyway." I don't necessarily disagree with either of those sentiments, but at the same time they are news outlets and are looked to in times of information demand (the latter certainly more than the former.)
Today's "reporting" has shown why outlets like the New York Times and the major networks are still the king of clean and polished reports for breaking news. While outlets like CNN and AP and Boston.com were reporting that a suspect was in custody and heading to the courthouse, the Times and the major networks held off on reporting this.
Just for contrast, I'll write what was confirmed, and then in bold what was extracted from that by some irresponsible media outlets:
Of course, this led to everyone scrambling to get to the courthouse, amassing outside. Then a bomb threat was relayed to the courthouse, causing a massive evacuation made much more logistically complicated thanks to all of the reporters who were there on false reports of a suspect in custody. It was a microcosm of shoddy journalism complicating legitimate law enforcement activities. A shameful one, at that.
I lump in all of the cable news networks together. If you're a right winger, you watch Fox News. A leftie? MSNBC is where you head. Stuck in an airport? CNN. The one thing all channels have in common is that they are driven by ratings over journalism and are not legitimate sources of good, hard information.
I will take this time to call out the Twitter account @BuzzFeedNews. Tweets like "Police SUV with dark tinted windows just pulled around to the back." or "WCVB: Van back into U.S. Fed. courthouse." are just asinine. Yes, law enforcement vehicles (including tinted SUVs and vans) can be found outside of a federal courthouse, sometimes moving, on any day of the year. To report this as some kind of significant news event is borderline predatory for pageviews and retweets. One thing it cannot be categorized as is news.
A friend of mine made a good point today. Assume that CNN or some other outlet was first in getting the scoop of an arrest. Next week, most people would forget who had it first. But everyone will certainly remember when CNN blasted "SUSPECT ARRESTED" on their website. They'll remember CNN anchors excitedly saying that an arrest has been made in the case. People don't forget that kind of misstep.
So what do we know? Well, for one, CNN learned absolutely nothing from their healthcare misreporting less than a year ago. We learned that for some reason, executives still view CNN as an industry-leader in the breaking news category. We learned that Wolf Blitzer and Jon King should not be on air during breaking news events. Unless you're interested in the relatively mundane traffic patterns outside of the Moakley Courthouse, @BuzzFeedNews probably isn't a good feed to follow. And when someone cites "a source," wait until clearer reports come out, preferable with a named official, before taking something and running with it.
Newspapers for sale on Newbury Street (Source: Boston.com)
Last night I spent a good portion on GChat, speaking with a friend in Boston talking about how surreal the entire scene was yesterday. We signed off, saying that we will know more tomorrow. When I woke up this morning and watched the various press conferences I realized that would not be the case. A few items would be clarified, but the bombing would still be shrouded in mystery. Who had done this? Why?
I think these questions have led to a small debate about what constitutes terrorism. When CNN made the editorial decision to call what happened in Boston yesterday a terror attack and then the president did not reciprocate in his evening presser, some wondered why.
Is perpetrated to further a religious, ideological and/or political cause;
Deliberately targets or disregards the safety of non-combatants (civilians)
Yesterday's events definitely meet criteria 1 and 3. This was no accident and was meant to shatter the joy of the Massachusetts holiday and to shake this community to its core. Boston will bounce back; as Mayor Menino said we are a resilient city, but it would be hard to deny that this event has affected the city.
Yesterday's attack also shares a common terroristic trait: the cowardly targeting of civilians. Those gathered yesterday on Boylston to watch the end of the marathon were not state actors in wartime. They were innocent civilians gathered to celebrate the achievements of family and friends and enjoy the beginning of spring in Boston.
The question that many people are anxious to answer relates to motive. Who did this and why? Why bomb innocent civilians? What message was the bomber(s) trying to get across, if any? Until this is answered, we cannot say definitively that this is an act of terror.
While my hunch is that it is, we don't know that yet. The use of bombs at an event like this almost always indicates terrorism (with a fewexceptions), but this could be the work of a deranged individual (think Aurora or Newtown) as opposed to someone trying to influence policy or misguidedly drive home some kind of ideology.
At the end of the day, though, this is simply semantics. Whether or not this falls under the pseudo-legal definition of terrorism will not bring back the victims. It will not repair the lives forever altered from senseless violence. It will not restore the atmosphere in Boston just prior to the attack. And that, in and of itself, is terrifying.
Note: I wanted to break up this post into two parts. I had thought about making two separate posts, but I figured it would be a bit confusing. Part I is a personal reflection on the marathon and the inspiration of the event as a whole and the response of people today after the blast. Part II is about the media response and the irresponsible speculation by journalists to fill air time and drive ratings and social media metrics. I've written this so the first part is standalone, because not everyone is going to be in the mood to read about issues with today's media after such a tragedy.
Having grown up in the Boston area, and spent a decent amount of time on and around Boylston Street in high school, today's events at the marathon have hit close to home, to use a bad cliche. Patriots' Day is a special day in Massachusetts - a day off that most of the rest of the country does not get. Everyone who grew up in and around Boston can remember heading down to the marathon route to cheer on the runners as they go by in droves along the grueling 26.2 mile course.
Today's bombings will change the marathon for the foreseeable future. The openness and carefree vibe of the event will revert to a more closed and tense atmosphere next year and possibly for years to come. For an event with such a rich and vibrant history, from the revolutionary to the bizzarre to the inspirational, the fact that the marathon will forever be tainted with this tragedy is a shame.
Through all of this sadness and anger, watching the video of the scene right after the blast is inspiring in a way. It is inspiring because you see people rushing to the site of the blast, not knowing if there are any secondary devices waiting to take out first responders. It is inspiring to see cops, EMTs, firefighters, BAA volunteers, and runners working together to tear down barricades and get to the injured. Other stories of heroism and kindness coming out of the city do not replace the anger and fear and confusion that follow something like this, but it certainly helps to begin to displace them, which only time and reflection can do.
On top of this, there is just wild speculation that has no business in a journalistic environment. I wasn't watching CNN, but from what I heard about Jane Harman she was just spewing speculation with zero basis in fact. Also Luke Russert thought that because he went to a Red Sox game twenty years ago when Waco happened that there could be a link to the marathon bombing.
Let me be clear about this: this could be an AQAP bombing. This could be a home-grown domestic terror bombing. If either scenario is true, Harman or Russert deserve zero credit for saying it on air/Twitter. Their speculation adds nothing to the fact finding that occurs after something like this, it adds nothing to the national discourse, and really only muddles what is going on and further confuses people. I understand there's a drive for ratings and retweets, to be the first to break a story, but that should never supersede journalism. Ever.
In times of tragedy like this there is a human drive to get the facts, to try to make sense of something like this in our minds. We need to see a cause and effect so we can prevent something like this in the future. Unfortunately, rationality and logic are far removed from an event like this and it simply does not make sense. Speculation with no factual backup to try to make sense of it is unfair to both the speculator and the speculatee. We look to the news for information and updates, not ratings-driven false scoops and made-up connections.
Combat brigade leaving Iraq in August 2010 (LATimes)
This week has been full of media navel gazing and dissecting of how so many people were tricked into going to war with Iraq, who had nothing to do with 9/11 and also most certainly did not have weapons of mass destruction. It is very easy to find reporters and pundits and politicians who were for the Iraq War before they were against it.
What I wanted to focus on was those so delusional as to think that Bush's legacy in regards to Iraq will be favorable. Those who pointed at W as he left office and said, "History will be kind to him." If you've been reading the news coverage, it's pretty clear that history - both now and in the future - will be anything but kind to the man who is responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred thousand people based on lies. And justifiably so.
But this post is not a look back at Bush's legacy. This is dedicated to those who continue to defend his decision to invade Iraq despite hindsight being 20/20. Honestly, so many people reversed course after the war that mea culpas would almost go unnoticed at this point. It takes a truly oblivious individual to say that history will improve Bush's foreign policy blunder.
There's Andrew Roberts over at The Telegraph, who had this to say as Bush left office:
The next factor that will be seen in its proper historical context in years to come will be the true reasons for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in April 2003. The conspiracy theories believed by many (generally, but not always) stupid people – that it was "all about oil", or the securing of contracts for the US-based Halliburton corporation, etc – will slip into the obscurity from which they should never have emerged had it not been for comedian-filmmakers such as Michael Moore.
Instead, the obvious fact that there was a good case for invading Iraq based on 14 spurned UN resolutions, massive human rights abuses and unfinished business following the interrupted invasion of 1991 will be recalled.
What Andrews misses when talking about "unfinished business" after the Gulf War is that there was none. Take Dick Cheney's own words in 1992:
And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.
The Gulf War was ended on the United States's terms. And if spurned UN resolutions and human rights abuses are enough to invade and occupy a country, we would be occupying nearly half the globe, including South Africa, India and Pakistan, to name a few.
Then there's Jeb Bush, who went to bat for his big brother on Meet the Press recently:
I understand the family connection here and Jeb's desire to look out for George. There are others from Bush's administration who have come to 43's defense, like John Ashcroft and Karl Rove. While still delusional and wrong, this makes more sense than someone not related to or having worked for the president defending what - both at the time and in retrospect - is and was a horrible decision.
Many Republicans in the US have marched down the same road of Bush apologism. One of the biggest names is Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who said that people are looking back with "more fondness" on President Bush's presidency.
And 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney also endorsed the idea in 2008 that going into Iraq was the right thing to do, even if the management of the war was not the greatest:
It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now. It was not well managed in after the takedown of Saddam Hussein and his military. That was done brilliantly, an extraordinary success. But in the years that followed, we were undermanaged, underprepared, underplanned, understaffed, and then we come into the phase that we have now. The plan that Bush and General Petraeus put together is working. It’s changing lives there. Perhaps most importantly, it’s making sure that al Qaeda and no other group like them is becoming a superpower, if you will, in the communities, and having a safe haven from which they launch attacks against us. It’s critical for us. The most important issue is what do we do now, and their just run and retreat regardless of the consequences is going to be a real problem for them when they face a debate with a Republican on the stage.
The overwhelming evidence has shown that the American public was lied to, but for some people the cognitive dissonance is so strong as to believe that history will look back on Bush's decision to send our youth into an unnecessary war as beneficial to this country. It was not and is not. There really is no argument that can counter that.
The war has also had farther reaching consequences geopolitically. As the drum beat for war with Iran increases every year, many forget that Hussein's presence in the region had a stabilizing effect, as the two countries kept each other in relative check. With no Iraq to worry about, Iran is allowed to do what it wants unchecked by what was once a regional power.
To say that Iraq is a success or that history will look back on George W. Bush kindly for his decision to start a war under false pretenses - when diplomacy was actually making progress - is ludicrous. If anything, history will become harsher when it comes to Bush's presidency, especially this costly failure.
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