Category Archives: Iraq
Gates’ Book
Update:
The Democrats hoped to change the subject for the new year from ObamaCare to income inequality. Former defense secretary Robert Gates, a Republican, didn’t get the memo.
A WSJ review of his new book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War says Gates treated Bush and Obama in a nonpartisan way. But Bob Woodward’s review in the Washington Post called the book an emotional and seething critique of Obama’s top aids.
Gates didn’t hold back. He called Congress “ugly”, said Biden was wrong on every foreign policy issue for the last forty years, and criticized Obama for making national security choices based on getting re-elected.
Pottery Barn Rules for Health Care
Back when George W Bush was putting together his coalition of the willing, to kill people and break stuff in Iraq, Colin Powell warned they were under Pottery Barn rules: you break it you own it.
It appears that Democrats have broken the health care system. They transformed it by cramming through the Affordable Care Act, under special rules, on a Christmas Eve, with a completely partisan vote, featuring Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases. Now the thing doesn’t work.
Pottery Barn Rules
Rich Lowry says that rather than try to help fix it, Republicans should let them own it.
What Red Line?
During a press conference on August 20 President Obama said, “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
Yesterday in Stockholm, he said, “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.”
He didn’t build that red line. Somebody else made that happen.
Obama continued, “Keep in mind, I’m somebody who opposed the war in Iraq, and I’m not interested in repeating mistakes about basing decisions on faulty intelligence”.
Secretary of State John Kerry says he has proof that Assad gassed his own people, but then Colin Powell had proof of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. For good measure Kerry also insists that Syrian rebels are moderate .
Shirtless Putin says, “Kerry lies“.
Assad is accused of murdering a few hundred of his own. Ann Coulter notes that Saddam Hussein killed 50,000 plus with chemical weapons, leading up to the war Obama opposed. Bush’s invasion of Iraq so frightened Gadhafi that he gave up his weapons of mass destruction and turned in A Q Kahn, the ringleader of a world wide nuclear weapons black market.
Maureen Dowd, on the other hand, blames Bush.
Our Future Red Line Allies
Meanwhile it seems the Syrian rebels are busying themselves by executing men on their knees, and attacking a Christian village while they await our intervention in the war on Assad.
Al Qaeda on the Run
After retreating from Iraq, Afghanistan, and US embassies around the Muslim world, the president called in the marines – as background props for a Camp Pendleton speech – to announce that the “United States is never going to retreat from the world”. “We don’t get terrorized,” he said.
He also repeated his claim that “the core of Al Qaeda is on the way to defeat”.
Or as the late Osama bin Laden put it, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse they like the strong horse”.
Afghan Plan
President Obama considered Afghanistan the smart war and Iraq a dumb war with smart bombs. In 2009 he joined together a surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and a plan for withdrawal.
The surge got the boot with a drawdown in 2011. Obama claimed the killing of Osama bin Laden had put al Qaeda on a path to defeat and that the tide of war was receding. Terrorists in Boston, London, Nigeria, Libya, and Syria missed that speech.
Now he’s threatening Hamid Karzai with a “zero option” which would mean the total withdrawal of U.S. troops – same as Iraq.
