The Past Unravels

++You get to see Dick Cheney tomorrow again on the Sunday Talks shows.

++You get to read Joey Lieberman in the Imperial Post today arguing that Obama was wrong on Iraq and making a mistake by withdrawing from Afghanistan.

++Mookie al Sadar and his Sadar Brigade held a choreographed parade in Beghadad today of suicide bombers. Quite snappy.

++ISIS now has control of border controls between Syria and Iraq.

++Today the first security forces sent by President Obama are to arrive in Baghdad.

++The Guardian today has a piece on how Tony Blair knew Syria was manufacturing chemical weapons way before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

++Joe Conason has a superb piece in Real Clear Politics about "What New details Reveal About the "Scandal" and its Promoters" on Benghazi. His point is that we now know from both the New York Times and the New Yorker that the attack on the consulate was in part stimulated by the video, which has provoked a rampage at our Cairo Embassy where the walls were breached. His point is that Republicans never made a big deal about W failing to get Bin Laden or that the bomber of the Cole took 14 years to track down. Conason remarked that the #Benghazi! crowd were actually disappointed by the capture of Abu Khattala. 

++Earlier this week, Cenk over at TYT raised an interesting point about Benghazi that has never been mentioned by the conservatives. One of the 12 men charged with the attack on the consulate was released from Gitmo in 2007 by the Bush Administration. Suhan bin Qumu was somewhat unique of those released. He was one of the individuals designated as a specially designated global terrorist. He was released to Qaddafhi, who was then our "ally in the war against terror" to be kept by Libya  and then he was released in Libya to go free in 2008--way before Obama came on the scene. He had been personally been trained by bin Laden, then worked for him in the Sudan at his factory, the one Clinton bombed, and fought alongside the Taliban. He received a monthly stipend of $500 from Al Qaeda. During the whole discussion of Benghazi, this inconvenient reality has not been discussed.

++Michael Gerson,the man who crafted the words for George W. Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq, wrote in the Washington Post that it is time to stop the blame game. But the reappearance of the invading team demands an accounting of how Iraq got to this position. Even Tony Blair knows this as he is covering for himself in the U.K. Just two items cast a shadow over today--the dissolution of the Iraq army by Paul Bremer and the de-Baathization by the occupying forces. Those two measures effectively eliminated the governing institutions in the country and propelled the Sunnis into a resistance.

++Joe Scarborough on the Morning Joe said that Iraq was fine in 2011. Having been there then, it was not fine. You could not go outside the "Green Zone". Even then you needed armed escort to even go to the local restaurant. You could not visit with Iraqis unless there came to you through multiple roadblocks and you had to run a gauntlet to get through all the roadblocks to the airport. Embassy personnel had to make security arrangements a week in advance for appointments outside the embassy and the Vatican-sized embassy had a car lot of high-priced cars, which could not get license plates from the Iraqi government. The week I was there a whole congregation of Christians were slaughtered during a service that was nationally broadcast. A young American who was a USAID educational expert was killed by militia men. The city of Bagdad had been segregated by sect. No, Joey, it was not fine.

++Andrew Sullivan caught the truly bizarre piece by David Ignatius in the Imperial Post about how the US can replace Prime Minister al-Maliki but they need cover. Ignatius went though whole scenarios of how we can provide a stabilizing force and that we would have a coalition headed by the United Nations. Andrew also caught the rewrites as Ignatius made his suggestions in the conditional case. But Andrew is right, this is the thinking deep inside the national security apparatus.

++The New York Times had a scary piece about the meetings to replace al-Maliki, Scary, because it showed that the American ambassador had been meeting with Ahmed Chalabi, the self-proclaimed Hero in Error,and the favored Iraqi by the neo-conservatives. His aide,Francis Brookes, said that Chalabi wasn't necessary interested in heading the new government but he would support revisiting the de-Baathization Law. Chalabi had become the head of reforming the national banks and still seats in Congress. He is known for a variety of acts of disinformation during the lead up of the war.

++While President Obama said the appropriate things about an inclusive government,he is inviting disaster if the U.S. believes it can manufacture a new government that would actually achieve the objectives he set out. That failed for the past decade. We should learn that we are a very bad imperial power, despite constantly trying. And no, Karl Rove,"Because we are an empire, we can not make the reality we want."

++The President had me giving him the benefit of the doubt for the first 60% of his new Iraq policy but he lost me on the last part about the politics of it. It was the last part that has the "humanitarian interventionists" and the "Occupying interventionists" cheering about.

++Robin Wright raised her head with an op-ed about why al-Maliki must go. But he frequently said over the week he would not go and that he would not resign as a pre-condition for drone strikes.

++Peter Bergen, who has written the most authoritative books on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, pointed out in a CNN opinion piece that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq until after we invaded. And then they controlled an area greater than a European country and the American administration didn't talk about it. By the end they had suffered military defeat and kept a low profile in the Anbar Province and then came alive with Syria. 

++President Obama clearly has extended the actions in Iraq to include Syria. So then, if you are a real warrior like the Washington Post, you print front page stories of how many drones have crashed in the United States as a hint that maybe troops might have to go in because drones and airstrikes won't be effective.

++Leslie Gelb, who with Joe Biden, got Iraq right before the war when he advocated a federated state. now urges Russia,the United States,Saudi Arabia and Iran to engage in a "grand bargain" to redraw the boundaries of the Middle East. Even Jonah Goldberg re-emerged with his own new map, which he proposed years ago.

++Help! Don't go there, President Obama. Keep the mission limited both in personnel and time.