The End of the Beginning, Not That Some Will Ever Admit It

thepilot.com

If you listen to the doomsayers of our so-called liberal media and to the dire pronouncements of the Frightened Right, you might be tempted to just give in to despair and fear. But let’s look at how some of their previous predictions have turned out:

Remember how Ebola was this terrifying epidemic that was, in the words of CNN commentator (and thriller author) Robin Cook “the scariest thing we can deal with”?

Remember when the panic was so severe that New Jersey Governor and B-list presidential candidate Chris Christie was, on the most dubious legal authority, locking a nurse up in a “quarantine tent,” even though she was showing no symptoms of the disease, purely because she’d treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone?

Remember how it was going to jump the oceans via international travel and ravage the U.S. any day now?

Well, I’m pleased to pass on this piece of good news: The World Health Organization has declared Guinea, the country where the outbreak began, to be Ebola-free. Sierra Leone was declared clear of the virus in November, and Liberia got a clean bill of health in September.

A couple of cases have since been reported in Liberia, but it does seem as if the major outbreak is over and the disease is in retreat. And, in case you didn’t notice, the mass outbreak that had Americans running in circles with their hair on fire never materialized.

Remember how, when the Iranian nuclear deal was announced, the American right wing, the congressional Israel lobby, and Our Friend Bibi were all shrieking that the dastardly Iranians would never follow through, claiming that they’d be cheating right from Day One, and acting as if President Obama had ensured that we’d be seeing mushroom clouds over Tel Aviv and D.C. within this decade?

Well, I’m pleased to pass on this good news: According to a story in the New York Times, “A Russian ship left Iran on Monday carrying almost all of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, fulfilling a major step in the nuclear deal struck last summer and, for the first time in nearly a decade, apparently leaving Iran with too little fuel to manufacture a nuclear weapon.”

There’s still a long way to go, but the world is measurably safer from the threat of an Iranian nuke than it was a year ago.

Remember how Daesh (aka ISIS, ISIL, etc) was supposed to be this unstoppable force of invincible desert warriors, unable to be beaten except by a massive influx of American ground troops? (Not that anyone on the Right would actually admit to advocating that, but they’d deride everything else, including airstrikes, as weakness and appeasement.)

Well, I’m pleased to pass on the good news that those invincible desert warriors just got vinced. Daesh just lost the key city of Ramadi to Iraqi troops. Fact is, they’ve lost 40 percent of the ground they took since last year.

It’s gotten to the point where their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had to send out a message to his troops trying to rally their spirits: “If we are killed and the wounds are numerous and the problems amassed against us and the hardships are great, then it is no surprise either.” No, it isn’t, Bubba, and don’t let it be a surprise that it’s going to get a lot worse. This is not the speech of someone who’s winning.

This is very likely why they’re desperately lashing out with attacks like the one in Paris. But even on that front, the news is encouraging. The Belgian police reportedly just broke up an attack planned by ISIS in that country on New Year’s Eve.

Ten major Daesh leaders, including “several external attack planners," have been killed in anti-Daesh coalition airstrikes in the past month, according to coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren. And the mastermind of the Paris attacks, as we know, was killed by the French police.

So does all this mean that everything’s coming up roses, that all the bad times are over and that, in the words of that annoyingly catchy tune from the Lego Movie, “everything is awesome”?

No. But it means that, despite a sensation-driven media and a grasping political party, all of whom follow a business model based on convincing us all that everything is awful and that the only response to terror is to surrender to it and be terrified, things are getting better.

As Winston Churchill famously put it in 1942, after the Allied victory in the deserts of North Africa: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

There are those who’d deny all hope, for their own selfish gain. But when they do, try looking at their record for prediction.

Random Observations for the Post Thanksgiving Lull

Opinion | thepilot.com

A few random observations for this post-Thanksgiving, post-Black Friday day of recovery:

* Donald Trump said recently that if he were president, he would be “bombing the [bad word]” out of ISIS. Five minutes on Google or Bing or Yahoo! or whatever would have turned up U.S. military figures showing we’re already doing that.

In fact, we’re actually bombing ISIS more than we have the Taliban. The Washington Post reviewed data supplied by the U.S. military and found that “from August 2014 to August 2015, there have been 22,478 weapons released over Syria and Iraq, mostly by U.S. aircraft,” whereas only 20,237 weapons were released in the last five years over Afghanistan. Add in the contributions of our allies and of Russia, and I’m not sure how much more [bad word] we can be bombing out of ISIS.

Here’s a radical idea for our pundits and politicians: Before you make strident demands that some group of people do something, do a little research to see if they’re already doing it.

* Speaking of surprising numbers, did you know that 26 people have been killed in jihadist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11/2001, but that 48 people have been killed by right-wing anti-government, anti-immigrant and white supremacist killers during the same period? Did you know that among those 48 are nine police officers targeted, ambushed and killed by professed “anti-government” terrorists specifically because they were cops?

Seems to me that maybe we’re talking about profiling the wrong people. After all, if radical right-wing white people are responsible for so many terrorist acts, then maybe we should be compiling databases and restricting the movement of all white conservative. … No. Wait. That would be stupid. Never mind.

* Speaking of profiling, I’m not sure why some people think it’s a compelling argument to make to me (as some have in the past two weeks) that “47 Democrats voted for restricting entry of refugees from Syria” or that “Bill Maher said Muslims can’t be trusted.”

I’m enormously disappointed in the Democrats who caved in to fear and let ISIS terrorists dictate our refugee policy. As for Bill Maher, I’m certainly baffled as why wingnuts think he’s some kind of liberal spokesman. Also, before you go jumping on Maher’s bandwagon, you might want to check out his views on Christians.

It reminds me of the delicious moment when Sean Hannity invited the late British author and gadfly Christopher Hitchens on his show because Hitchens hated the Clintons, only to end up throwing him off the show because Hitchens started ripping into Hannity’s idiotic claims of a “War on Christmas” before going on to express his contempt for religion in general and Christianity in particular. Again, people, five minutes with Google can save you a lot of grief.

* Speaking of the War on Christmas, I see Fox “News” is going after a national chain because its holiday cups aren’t Jesus-y enough. “Is Starbucks acting more like Ebenezer Scrooge to bah-humbug Christmas?” asked self-described evangelist and Fox News host Kelly Wright. “Some people think so.” Their complaint? Starbucks removed “traditional holiday decorations of Christmas trees and snowflakes on its cups” in favor of a bright, cheery but blank red cup. This, according to Wright, is taking “Christ and Christmas” off the cup.

So let me get this straight. The removal of a pagan symbol of renewal and rebirth (the tree) and a naturally occurring phenomenon (the snowflake), neither of which have squat-all to do with the birth of Jesus 2,000-odd years ago, is taking “Christ and Christmas” off your morning cup of mediocre overpriced coffee. You realize, of course, this makes no sense. But, hey, who cares about logic when you’re a member of the country’s dominant religion attempting to portray yourself as part of some kind of beleaguered insurgent movement?

* Speaking of overreacting to the smallest thing: The White House recently went into lockdown and parts of Pennsylvania Avenue were closed when an unidentified person or persons threw an apple core over the fence. Donald Trump immediately called for a “big, beautiful” wall to be built around Washington State to prevent the spread of the Red Delicious Menace.

OK, I made that last part up about Trump. But the part about the apple core was true.

It certainly does seem as if, in the war against terror, terror is winning.

Different Bush, Same Mistakes

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Recently, the man they call JEB! faced off against a 19-year-old college student. It didn’t go well for him.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush was at a town hall meeting in Nevada the other day when he was confronted by political science major Ivy Ziedrich, of the University of Nevada at Reno. Ms. Ziedrich reacted to a statement from JEB! claiming that ISIS was created by Barack Obama “retreating” from Iraq.

“We had an agreement that the president could have signed,” Bush had stated, “that would have kept 10,000 troops, less than we have in Korea, that could have created the stability that would have allowed for Iraq to progress.”

Actually, Ms. Ziedrich argued, the problem goes back farther, to the time when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority decided to disband the Iraqi military, a time “when 30,000 individuals who were part of the Iraqi military were forced out — they had no employment, they had no income, and they were left with access to all of the same arms and weapons.”

She wound up by concluding, “Your brother created ISIS.”

It was a scene reminiscent of the time Joe the Plumber, the belligerent bullet-headed dude-bro from Ohio, became a hero to the rubes and ignoramii by getting in candidate Barack Obama’s face and claiming Obama’s policies would make his taxes go up. The difference between Ivy Zierdich and Joe the Plumber is that Ziedrich actually knows what she’s talking about.

Disbanding the Iraqi forces and leaving thousands of armed and angry young men with nothing to do but form insurgent groups is now regarded by most historians as the second biggest blunder of Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure (the first being starting the bloody thing in the first place).

The most compelling evidence that that decision led to disaster is that no one, including Dubbya himself, will now admit to being the one who made it. Colin Powell, who said it was a mistake, denied ever being consulted, as did Gen. Peter Pace, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Condoleezza Rice claims it was a complete surprise. Dubbya told biographer Robert Draper, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” adding, “I can’t remember; I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy. What happened?’”

Stirring leadership, that.

So how did this become an issue now? Probably as a result of JEB!’s first, but almost certainly not last, gaffe of his campaign-that-is-not-yet-a-campaign-except-everyone-totally-knows-it’s-a-campaign. Asked by Fox News if “knowing what we know now,” would he have decided to go to war with Iraq, JEB! said he would — “and so would Hillary Clinton.”

On this last part, he may be right, even though Clinton at least admits her vote was a mistake.

Sadly, the Fox reporter did not follow up with the obvious questions like, “Would you also have put an entirely unqualified campaign donor in charge of FEMA, and then watched as he massively bungled the relief effort after a major hurricane before telling him he was doing a ‘heckuva job’? Would you have ignored a daily briefing titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’ 36 days before the late Mr. bin Laden did just that?”

JEB! later began furiously backpedaling, claiming he thought the question was “knowing what we knew THEN, would you have gone into Iraq?” Only problem with that defense is that those of us who knew what we knew THEN thought it was a terrible idea. And guess what? We were right.

Finally, JEB! threw in the towel, sulkily declaring that “knowing what we know now, I would not have engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.” In other words, JEB! was retroactively for war in Iraq before he was retroactively against it. There’s that Bush leadership again.

Oh, and as for that claim that we had an “agreement that would have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq”? Politifact rates that as “mostly false,” adding:

“Obama inherited a timeline to exit Iraq from George W. Bush and followed it, but there was no agreement to leave a large force behind. The Obama White House considered 10,000 troops for a short time but ruled it out, suggesting a much smaller force. Negotiations with Iraq broke down, however, and there was no agreement that met conditions Washington wanted.”

Those conditions included immunity for American troops from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

So let’s review: JEB! said he’d make the same mistake his brother did, then said he wouldn’t, then lied to try to shift the blame for the current disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War away from the president who started it in the first place.

Doggone these liberals! When are they going to stop blaming George Dubbya Bush for the things he actually did?

OMG OMG OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE AAAAAAAAAH!

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Anyone who says that President Barack Obama is not doing enough about ISIS, ISIL, whatever they call themselves, should be required to answer one simple question or forever hold their peace:

Do you or do you not advocate sending American ground combat troops into Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS? Yes or no?

Let’s make no mistake: These ISIS people are bad news. They’re so vicious and crazy even al-Qaida disowned them. They've committed horrific atrocities against American and British citizens, not to mention against thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of their fellow Muslims.

They do not, however, pose a significant threat at this time to the U.S. homeland. Don’t just take my word for it. This is the assessment of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon, even though Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel did allow as how they may threaten our interests abroad.

That doesn’t stop the usual hysterical ranting from the usual gang of warmongers. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, looked as if he was about to bust a blood vessel on Fox News Sunday as he demanded ground troops, ground troops and more ground troops, while railing that President Obama “needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”

Really? They’re going to kill all 314 million of us? No, Graham insists, it’s actually worse. According to him, ISIL, left unchecked, will “open the gates of hell to spill out on the world. … This is ISIL versus mankind.”

Meanwhile, you can always count on our old pal John McCain, a guy who never saw a crisis he didn’t want to carpet-bomb.

“We are now facing an existential threat to the security of the United States of America,” McCain said, possibly because he doesn’t understand what the words “existential threat” actually mean. Either that or he doesn’t care about anything other than the fact that the words sound scary.

It’s all poppycock. Also, codswallop and balderdash.

ISIS/ISIL doesn’t threaten the existence of the United States, which is what the words “existential threat” mean. They don’t hold the keys to “the gates of hell” like the Big Bad in a second-rate horror flick.

Yes, they need to be dealt with, before they get big enough to actually do some real damage to us. That’s going to take exactly the sort of broad-based plan we’re engaged in now: diplomacy with our allies who actually are on the front lines, combined with training and support for the people who rightly should be fighting the war for Iraq and Syria, namely Iraqis and Syrians.

It’s fear-mongering, pure and simple, from the party that realizes every issue it has counted on up to now to bring down the president and defeat his party has fizzled.

Obamacare is working as more and more people get access to health care. A Republican-led committee finally had to admit that its investigation of the Benghazi murders revealed no wrongdoing on the part of the administration. The economy continues to improve as the Dow rises and the jobless rate falls. And so on.

So they fall back on their tried and true tactic: scaring people into believing that Daddy McCain and Momma Lindsey and all their Republican pals will take care of us against the Scary Brown Supervillains Who Will Kill Us All. Pay no attention to how many of our own sons and daughters will be killed, maimed or broken to pay the cost of another war. After all, it won’t be their kids or grandkids bleeding and dying.

The kind of sustained freak-out the right is engaging in right now over an exaggerated threat is exactly the same sort of madness that led to this mess in the first place. Letting terrorists — well, terrorize us into committing troops to another quagmire in the Middle East is playing right into their hands.

They’d like nothing better than to have American troops in Iraq and Syria so they could go back to slowly bleeding us with IEDs and suicide bombers, while our inevitable reaction creates more and more resentment among the locals and more and more of them join the ranks of the terrorists.

Have we learned nothing?

But, hey, if the current group of Republican pols want to send division after division of Americans back into Iraq, make them say it. Don’t allow them to get away with their usual “we don’t want war, but we’ll call anything else failure” nonsense. Make them own up to it. See how the American people like them then.

Through the Mideast Looking Glass

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends: the eternal and ceaselessly bloody drama that is the Middle East.

A Sunni militia calling itself “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (or ISIS) has routed the Iraqi military forces we spent years and billions training and arming. They have seized the cities of Mosul, Tikrit and Tal Afar, and immediately began doing what they do best: slaughtering their countrymen for being the wrong kind of Muslim.

Faced with a looming humanitarian crisis in Iraq, patriots like John McCain know exactly what to do: play politics by blaming the current president, and not the one who stupidly invaded the country without a clue about what to do after we beat the Iraqi Army, deposed the dictator, and took the lid off of the boiling pot of religious and ethnic hatreds that is Iraq.

“All the success we had,” McCain claimed on the Senate floor, “is torn asunder because of a policy of withdrawal without victory.”

Keep in mind, however, that McCain is also on record as saying other things, like: “the people of Iraq will absolutely treat us as liberators”; “it will be brief and we will find massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction”; “post-Saddam-Hussein Iraq is going to be paid for by the Iraqis”; and the ever-popular “there’s not a history of violent clashes between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can get along.”

McCain also seems to have forgotten that the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, that set the timetable for our withdrawal was negotiated by Obama’s predecessor, the President Who Must Not Be Named. He’s also forgotten that he took to Twitter to celebrate the last American combat troops leaving Iraq, claiming, “President Bush deserves credit for victory.” You can look it up.

Last American combat troops leave Iraq. I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 19, 2010

And yet John McCain, along with a plethora of others who were ceaselessly and consistently wrong about Iraq, remain the go-to guys for your so-called liberal media for commentary on the current crisis. People like Doug Feith (whom Gen. Tommy Franks of Central Command called “the dumbest [bad word] on the planet),” Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney are all too willing to take to the airwaves and assure us that all of this could have been averted if we’d just stayed in Iraq. And stayed. And stayed, while the body bags and maimed soldiers kept coming back.

The chutzpah of the people whose arrogance and hubris led us into the Iraq debacle in the first place is truly breathtaking. Frankly, the only question a competent media, let alone a liberal one, should be asking any of these clowns is, “Why aren’t you in prison in the Hague?”

We could have kept troops in Iraq for a hundred years (a time frame McCain said wouldn’t bother him), and the Sunnis and Shiites would still hate and be trying to kill each other while the Kurds would just want to be rid of the whole insane lot of them.

Actually, it may be the Kurds who came out as the only winners in this thing. They finally got the Turks over their paranoia at the prospect of an independent Kurdistan, largely by building a pipeline and selling them lots and lots of oil. As the rest of Iraq falls apart, their Pesh Merga militias have taken control of their strategic city of Kirkuk. At least the Kurds still like us, right?

Now we’ve learned that the Syrian government is attacking ISIS bases in the north and northeast of Iraq. They’re responding to the fact that ISIS is using tanks captured from the Iraqi military to attack Syrian forces.

So the Syrian military (which we oppose) is attacking ISIS in Iraq (who we also oppose) because ISIS has been attacking Syrian government troops (an action we also support.)

It seems that the enemy of our enemy is our friend, except sometimes they’re also our enemy. Oh, and we’ll probably be entering talks with Shiite Iran (also an enemy) to help deal with the Sunni ISIS.

Are we far enough through the looking glass yet? This is what we get for sticking our noses in what are, at their root, sectarian religious conflicts in the Middle East.

Dear Rand Paul: Fuck you.

So now that the Iraq War is over, Rand Paul takes the courageous step of actually doing something to repeal the legal authorization for it. *slow sarcastic clap*.

Look here, you preppy asshole, I was against that war when some people regarded it as treason and weren't shy about telling me so. (My favorite was the e-mail warning me that "They hanged Benedict Arnold, you know," which managed to be both vaguely threatening and historically inaccurate). I wrote about what a bad idea it was to invade Iraq when it actually had fucking consequences, like my own father publicly stating in a letter to the local newspaper that people like me and my wife were responsible for 9/11. 

Fuck you, Rand Paul. Fuck you with a rusty fence post wrapped in barbed wire.