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Published On: Wed, Jan 8th, 2014

McAdams, Eland warn of return to Iraq

Since the United Nations report that disclosed that Iraq endured the most violent year in five years since “the surge”, the Uber-hawks have come out in force pointing fingers at the man in the White House, President Barack Obama.

photo US Army Joint Salute

photo US Army Joint Salute

The most uber of uber-hawks in the US Senate, John McCain (R-AZ) and sidekick Lindsey Graham (R-SC) already lambasted Mr Obama in a press release over the weekend:

“..the Administration cannot escape its share of the blame. When President Obama withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, over the objections of our military leaders and commanders on the ground, many of us predicted that the vacuum would be filled by America’s enemies and would emerge as a threat to U.S. national security interests.”

And that’s just a small sample.

In response to the massive pressure Mr Obama is getting and other issues, two non-interventionist writers are warning of a possible US military return to Iraq.

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director, Daniel McAdams points out the problem with the likes of Graham and McCain Tuesday:

Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before 2003, as we all know. So if anyone is responsible for al-Qaeda in Iraq it is McCain, Graham, and the coterie of cakewalk neo-conservatives who pushed for the war.

McCain and Graham and the neocons want to have it both ways. They want us to believe that the “liberation” of Iraq produced a successful, positive result — a brave new society eager to spread its democratic, tolerant, and multicultural wings. That would justify their decade long (and more) advocacy of such an attack.

But at the same time they tell us that the US military can never leave Iraq lest a “power vacuum” be created that would allow “America’s enemies” to establish themselves. But was the attack itself not supposed to rid Iraq of “America’s enemies”? Worse, these enemies seem far worse than the enemies the initial intervention was supposed to eliminate.

How awkward for them to face the fact that their preferred action (invasion) produced a result worse than the problem. Their Straussian answer, of course, is to ignore that glaring fact and just scream for more intervention!

McAdams closes with a dire prediction, particularly after listening to the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, “Yes, sounds like Vietnam over again, perhaps even worse than 2003. The US “hellfire” missile shipment to Iraq has been “fast-tracked.” This time the US is claiming to attack the same ISIS in Iraq that it is supporting (along with the Saudis) next door in Syria.

“Back to Iraq? You bet!”

McAdams is not alone in his concern of a return to Iraq.

The Independent Institute’s Dr Ivan Eland wrote in a piece in the Huffington Post today, “Even representatives of the American media buy into the “abandonment” argument. Jane Arraf, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera America and former CNN bureau chief in Baghdad, said on the PBS NewsHour on January 6, 2014, “I think while the West was ignoring Iraq, essentially, the country has become partitioned… one of the things we have to really talk about, I think, is the Sahwa, the Awakening, the tribes who turned against al-Qaida and fought with the American forces and then were essentially abandoned by the United States.”

Eland continues:

The Obama administration, however, is caught between the interventionist foreign policy intelligentsia and a more sober American public, which has grown sick and tired of huge American losses in blood and treasure during more than 12 years of pointless overseas quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Iraq, there may be a slippery slope to reintroducing U.S. troops to shore up the shaky Iraqi military, despite years and billions of dollars of U.S. training. General Colin Powell’s prescient warning to the Bush administration when he argued against the U.S. invasion of the country — “If you break it, you’ve bought it” — came true and may do so yet again. The United States bought Iraq for almost nine years and extricated itself only because the Iraqi government kicked it out by refusing to agree to the rather imperial demand that residual U.S. forces would continue to be exempt from Iraqi law. Unfortunately, the United States, by increasing the flow of U.S. weapons to the unsteady Iraqi government to put down a raging al Qaida movement, may be in line for a repurchase.

Recommended reading for today must be these two insightful articles.

 

 

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About the Author

- Writer, Co-Founder and Executive Editor of The Global Dispatch. Robert has been covering news in the areas of health, world news and politics for a variety of online news sources. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the website, Outbreak News Today and hosts the podcast, Outbreak News Interviews on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify Robert is politically Independent and a born again Christian Follow @bactiman63

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