I'd like to see Senator Tom "I'm a Warrior, Hear Me Roar" Cotton, respond but my guess is he's a follower and not a leader.
Pretty big joke of an article. His only argument is that the surge was a disaster because the results could not be sustained post-withdrawal. Duh. Nobody suggested the results would be sustained post-withdrawal and in fact the collapse was predicted. This guy probably supported the Obama drawdown of troops but wants people to believe the collapse of Iraq was inevitable. The Obama foreign policy has taken a beating over the last week and his supporters are trying to avoid responsibility.
No amount of western intervention is going to hold Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or any other middle eastern, Arab or Muslim country together. Obama knew this hence his anti Iraq war vote in the senate. I wish you neocons would figure this out. And I'll take the author's word over yours anyway based on his credentials and your bias.
I'd like to see Senator Tom "I'm a Warrior, Hear Me Roar" Cotton, respond but my guess is he's a follower and not a leader.
Pretty big joke of an article. His only argument is that the surge was a disaster because the results could not be sustained post-withdrawal. Duh. Nobody suggested the results would be sustained post-withdrawal and in fact the collapse was predicted. This guy probably supported the Obama drawdown of troops but wants people to believe the collapse of Iraq was inevitable. The Obama foreign policy has taken a beating over the last week and his supporters are trying to avoid responsibility.
No amount of western intervention is going to hold Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or any other middle eastern, Arab or Muslim country together. Obama knew this hence his anti Iraq war vote in the senate. I wish you neocons would figure this out. And I'll take the author's word over yours anyway based on his credentials and your bias.
Of course you accept his credentials and not Tom Cotton's. Clearly no bias from you. The surge was successful yet you and others are trying to wash your hands of the post-withdrawal disaster. And again you conflate the decision to invade vs the decision to withdraw. Obama's early anti-war vote won't save him from his dwindling place in history as even democrats are opening up on his failures to act.
I'd like to see Senator Tom "I'm a Warrior, Hear Me Roar" Cotton, respond but my guess is he's a follower and not a leader.
Pretty big joke of an article. His only argument is that the surge was a disaster because the results could not be sustained post-withdrawal. Duh. Nobody suggested the results would be sustained post-withdrawal and in fact the collapse was predicted. This guy probably supported the Obama drawdown of troops but wants people to believe the collapse of Iraq was inevitable. The Obama foreign policy has taken a beating over the last week and his supporters are trying to avoid responsibility.
No amount of western intervention is going to hold Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or any other middle eastern, Arab or Muslim country together. Obama knew this hence his anti Iraq war vote in the senate. I wish you neocons would figure this out. And I'll take the author's word over yours anyway based on his credentials and your bias.
Of course you accept his credentials and not Tom Cotton's. Clearly no bias from you. The surge was successful yet you and others are trying to wash your hands of the post-withdrawal disaster. And again you conflate the decision to invade vs the decision to withdraw. Obama's early anti-war vote won't save him from his dwindling place in history as even democrats are opening up on his failures to act.
Tom "I'm a Warrior, Hear me Roar" Cotton is a follower and not a leader. Regardless, America doesn't have the appetite for a 70,000 troop, 70+ year occupation of Iraq and even then you wouldn't see Iraq safe enough for you to vacation there. Why is that so difficult for you neocons to understand? Your mentality seems to be that if the US drops the biggest bombs and goes in heavy, things will be great. And I don't see Trump rushing to send more troops to Iraq. Keep believing the dream.
I'd like to see Senator Tom "I'm a Warrior, Hear Me Roar" Cotton, respond but my guess is he's a follower and not a leader.
Pretty big joke of an article. His only argument is that the surge was a disaster because the results could not be sustained post-withdrawal. Duh. Nobody suggested the results would be sustained post-withdrawal and in fact the collapse was predicted. This guy probably supported the Obama drawdown of troops but wants people to believe the collapse of Iraq was inevitable. The Obama foreign policy has taken a beating over the last week and his supporters are trying to avoid responsibility.
No amount of western intervention is going to hold Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or any other middle eastern, Arab or Muslim country together. Obama knew this hence his anti Iraq war vote in the senate. I wish you neocons would figure this out. And I'll take the author's word over yours anyway based on his credentials and your bias.
Of course you accept his credentials and not Tom Cotton's. Clearly no bias from you. The surge was successful yet you and others are trying to wash your hands of the post-withdrawal disaster. And again you conflate the decision to invade vs the decision to withdraw. Obama's early anti-war vote won't save him from his dwindling place in history as even democrats are opening up on his failures to act.
ftfa "Obama lied. American combat boots and Iraqi ground collide. Say it again. Obama lied. People died. Include murders committed by the Islamic State in Iraq among Obama’s dead. Obama left a power vacuum in Iraq. Yazidi women were raped. No, it doesn’t rhyme, but it’s more accurate than Bush lied. Say it again. Obama lied. The battle for Mosul continues so people continue to die. As for eiminating Syrian WMD, Obama lied and Syrians definitely continue to die." Is this the new "Thanks Obama"? ...those Russians can come up with some good marketing slogans....
WI 6/27/98 WI 10/8/00 MO 10/11/00 IL 4/23/03 MN 6/26/06 MN 6/27/06 WI 6/30/06 IL 8/5/07 IL 8/21/08 (EV) IL 8/22/08 (EV) IL 8/23/09 IL 8/24/09 IN 5/7/10 IL 6/28/11 (EV) IL 6/29/11 (EV) WI 9/3/11 WI 9/4/11 IL 7/19/13 NE 10/09/14 IL 10/17/14 MN 10/19/14 FL 4/11/16 IL 8/20/16 IL 8/22/16 IL 08/18/18 IL 08/20/18 IT 07/05/2020AT 07/07/2020
Seems the Iraqi parliament and people support the withdrawal of all foreign troops. I wonder what excuses the Team Trump Treason Administration will use to disregard the flourishing democracy in the Middle East? Maybe it’s time for a coup d‘Etat? Or some electoral interference?
Seems the Iraqi parliament and people support the withdrawal of all foreign troops. I wonder what excuses the Team Trump Treason Administration will use to disregard the flourishing democracy in the Middle East? Maybe it’s time for a coup d‘Etat? Or some electoral interference?
PS: Putin on the ritz is snickering in his dacha.
trump is going to tweet that this was all part of his long game all along. he will also say he kicked iran out of the iran deal.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
The troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan planned by the Trump administration amount to a painful admission: We lost.
By Timothy Kudo
Mr. Kudo is a former Marine captain who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The Defense Department recently announced troop withdrawals by Jan. 15 that will reduce American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to 2,500 each from their one-time highs of some 170,000 and 100,000 troops, respectively. This drawdown makes explicit what those of us who served in the military have long realized: We lost.
War is evil even when it is necessary but our inability to win has stolen even the possibility that the ends might justify the means. For the roughly three million service members whose boots touched soil in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 19 years, our defeat is a uniquely personal loss.
When I was sent to Iraq in 2009 it was to safeguard our withdrawal. During our entire deployment in the once treacherous Sunni triangle we discovered and disposed of a single roadside bomb on the main highway outside Falluja, where they had once been as common as potholes. I returned home wishing I could have done more but was glad to see how much progress had been made by the regiments who’d fought so hard before me.
When I read a few years later that the Islamic State had overrun that same area I began to sense that our efforts had been in vain. But it was my Afghanistan deployment in 2010-2011 that cemented their futility for me.
My company defended a labyrinthine cluster of mud-walled villages set amid fields of poppy and corn in the Musa Qala District of Helmand Province. As the northern tip of the Marine campaign in Helmand we held a line alongside battalion after battalion of Marines that extended south through the river valley to the district center, where the bazaar and the governor were, and then down past Sangin to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and further to Marja and Garmsir.
People often ask me what Afghanistan was like but I can never really answer: Each district might as well have been its own war for the Marines who fought, with victories and defeats known only to them.
I often think back on the moments in my deployments when the crack of a gunshot or the deep thud of a large roadside bomb suddenly infused my life at war with a clear and tangible purpose. I remember the kids lining up the first day after the school reopened, the first time the partners we trained in the Afghan Army took the initiative to patrol without our assistance, and the rare smile on a villager’s face after we’d provided the first aid that had saved the life of his father, who had been shot in crossfire.
I try to remember those small decencies instead of the casualties and the killing but they do little to assuage the overwhelming senselessness of the greater war.
Shortly after I returned from Afghanistan in 2011, President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed during a raid on his compound in Pakistan, where he was living after fleeing Afghanistan years before. As I watched people celebrating outside the White House and outside ground zero I hoped that the war was finally over, but even then it didn’t feel like victory.
The conflict had grown so much bigger since the attacks of Sept. 11 that his death felt like a footnote. The execution of a single dethroned sheikh suddenly paled in significance to my own recent experience at war. Later that night I tried to recall the circumstances surrounding the death of each man we’d killed and count how many there had been but there were too many to remember.
The Afghanistan war was finally lost for me in August 2015, several years after my own deployment ended, when the Taliban recaptured Musa Qala, which five men in my company had died defending. After the Taliban’s seizure, allied airstrikes bombed the same government center we’d sacrificed so much to hold.
A member of Parliament from Helmand Province later described that building as “completely vanished from the earth.” Along with it was buried any hope there might have been that the sacrifices I, and so many others, have made in service to our country would not be in vain.
The cost of these wars has been astronomical: Roughly $6 trillion in government spending, with the Defense Department spending alone costing each American taxpayer an estimated more than $7,000. Additionally, today’s young veterans face a legacy of psychological and physical injury, as well as illness from our war’s Agent Orange: the toxic burn pits whose smoke we inhaled.
Even more costly are the approximately 515,000 people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, including more than 260,000 civilians. And for what? Iraq remains a tenuous democracy teeming with militias while Afghanistan is locked in a conflict with a resurgent Taliban, and peace talks are in deadlock.
Both countries fail to meet the objectives of freedom and democracy set when President George W. Bush started those wars. They fall short of President Obama’s goals when he sent me and 30,000 other troops to Afghanistan and of the claims he made when declaring an end to combat operation in Iraq only to see the Islamic State undo those gains. President Trump does not seem to even have a purpose for those 5,000 troops who will remain in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Like many service members I wrote a letter in case I was killed during my deployment. It began with an assurance to the friends and family I would have left behind: “It was worth it.” I believed then that we had a moral obligation to not only protect my fellow Americans but to leave the Afghan and Iraqi people with a chance to live in peace.
That obligation remains even though it cannot be fulfilled. Instead I am resigned that these wars will finally enter the history books not only as defeats but as stains on our national honor.
The political theorist and philosopher Michael Walzer writes in “Just and Unjust Wars” that “it still seems important to say of those who die in war that they did not die in vain. And when we can’t say that, or think we can’t, we mix our mourning with anger.” I would add that we also mix it with shame.
I recognize that shame is not a very American trait but with it comes humility. Sadly, my generation had to relearn the lessons of Vietnam in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in coming to grips with our defeat, we have a chance to ensure that we do not sacrifice future generations to such folly.
And by so doing we may yet salvage some purpose from this tragedy: to do everything in our power to avoid more wars, and to ensure that if and when the next war does come, it is worth it.
Timothy Kudo (@KudoTim), a former Marine captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
There should have been a contingency plan put in place for a withdrawal that lead to safety and security for the people of Afgahistan. But then again,it's their country and if their military doesn't think enough about it to fight,then why should we. The US shouldn't be the world's babysitter.
There should have been a contingency plan put in place for a withdrawal that lead to safety and security for the people of Afgahistan. But then again,it's their country and if their military doesn't think enough about it to fight,then why should we. The US shouldn't be the world's babysitter.
You are not the worlds babysitter…you are the worlds bully and like all bully’s you just got punched in the mouth in Afghanistan..
My biggest complaint of the Obama Administration was it’s failure to hold the Shrub Administration accountable for the lies and the debacle that was the Iraq War. We’re experiencing the blow back now in the form of POOTWH, Steve O., Mikey Flynn Baby and all the others who are getting away with everything from tearing down the administrative state to jettisoning democratic ideals because if you can lie a world to war, killing 4K+ Americans and 100s of thousands of “others,” lose 44 million emails related and not even be investigated, never mind held accountable, what else can you do or get away with at the highest pinnacles of power? Good luck, ‘Murica.
David Kay, weapons inspector who helped disprove Iraqi WMDs, dies at 82
He concluded that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq and that intelligence agencies had badly misjudged the available evidence
David A. Kay, the weapons proliferation expert who led a CIA-run operation in 2003 that concluded former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein had built no weapons of mass destruction, sharply undermining the chief justification for the U.S.-led invasion earlier that year, died Aug. 13 at his home in Ocean View, Del. He was 82.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Anita Kay.
Dr. Kay, a reserved Texan with an international affairs doctorate, had an early career teaching political science before joining organizations such as UNESCO in Paris and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. In 1991, he became a household name while serving in Iraq as chief nuclear weapons inspector for the United Nations and the IAEA after the United States and its allies had liberated Kuwait from Hussein’s forces.
The mission of all the U.N. teams was to search out and destroy any banned nuclear, biological or chemical weapons or materials. In September 1991, using powers granted under a U.N. resolution, Dr. Kay’s nuclear team launched an unannounced inspection of a military facility in Baghdad to look for incriminating documents about Hussein’s clandestine efforts to develop nuclear arms.
Because it was close to his team’s hotel, Dr. Kay had already surveilled the building by running past it on his morning jog to see where security was tightest. During the inspection, his 44-member group was detained after attempting to remove documents and videotapes they considered significant, and endured a four-day standoff followed by media around the world.
Using a relatively newfangled satellite phone, Dr. Kay answered calls from news agencies, notably CNN, while surrounded by Iraqi guards. He and his team slept in their vehicles — a bus and several cars. As pressure from the U.N. Security Council and the world grew, the Iraqis let them leave with the documents and tapes.
The chemical program was huge,” he later told journalists with the PBS series “Frontline,” summing up all the U.N. teams’ findings after the 1991 war. “The actual storage area of their main chemical weapons dump was larger than the District of Columbia. ... In the nuke area, whereas before the war there were two facilities identified ... instead we discovered 25 main sites that we had had no knowledge of, and that they, at that point, were probably six to 18 months away from having their first working nuclear device. It wouldn’t have been a pretty device, and it wouldn’t have launched on a missile, but it would have been a working device, and then rolling progressively forward on that area.
“Finally, when the biological program was fully exposed in the mid-90s,” he added, “we discovered that not a single site that had been hit in the air campaign of the first Gulf War had actually had an active biological program. They had moved them all to sites that we did not know about, successfully hid them. In fact, they had a very large anthrax program, botulinum toxin program, ricin, and a quite accomplished biological program.”
The U.N. teams destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons and programs in the 1990s, but after the inspectors were forced out in 1998, the CIA worried Hussein was secretly rebuilding his WMD. After the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House portrayed those suspicions as irrefutable evidence of a direct Iraqi threat to the United States and its allies.
When the March 2003 invasion quickly toppled Hussein’s regime, a Pentagon team fanned out across Iraq but failed to find any sign of the weapons of mass destruction. That summer, President George W. Bush put the CIA in charge of the hunt, and CIA Director George J. Tenet picked Dr. Kay to lead the newly named Iraq Survey Group.
Although he went to Iraq convinced that sites suspected of housing weapons of mass destruction would be found, he soon concluded that none existed and that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had badly misjudged the available evidence. Frustrated by the CIA’s refusal to agree, Dr. Kay resigned from the weapons-hunting group in January 2004. Days later, he gave explosive testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” he told the panel. “It turns out we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.”
Soon after, Bush called him into the White House. Even though Iraq had no WMD, Dr. Kay told the president he believed that the invasion was the right thing to do because of the suffering of the Iraqi people under Hussein.
Bush thanked him for his work, but Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld continued to play down Dr. Kay’s conclusions, suggesting Hussein may have smuggled some illicit weapons out of the country and may have at least been planning a WMD program.
Dr. Kay found himself a veritable outcast for publicly saying the CIA was wrong. Hewas treated “coldly,” he said, when he returned to CIA headquarters.
“One part of it, it’s almost comical to me,” he told “Frontline.” “In fact, I laughed at the time because it was so much like a poor spy novel. I was given an office that didn’t have a working telephone, that was surrounded by packing cases, at the depths of Langley, with a secretary that usually wasn’t there. You’d have to have been pretty dumb not to have caught the signals of it. But not even to have a secure phone in the office where you can’t talk to anyone, nor a computer where you can e-mail — I understood it.”
Bush, however, felt obliged to respond to Dr. Kay’s bombshell and immediately set up a bipartisan presidential commission led by Reagan-appointed federal judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) that in March 2005 confirmed the prewar intelligence fiasco.
“The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure,” the commission concluded. “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also facing fury from those opposed to the Iraq invasion that he had supported, was forced in February 2004 to announce an inquiry, known as the Butler Review after its chairman, Lord Robin Butler. The panel took until that July to issue a report that concluded that the intelligence used to justify the invasion was “unreliable” and over-reliant on dissident Iraqi sources.
One of the key sources for the false intelligence was an Iraqi defector to Germany who was code-named Curveball. The CIAdid not interview him until a year after the invasion, but his bogus account of Iraq’s biological weapons became a linchpin of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s address to the Security Council in February 2003, which set the stage for war.
Comments
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Obama lied and people died...in Iraq and Syria
http://observer.com/2017/04/obama-bashar-al-assad-syria-chemical-weapons/
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
"Obama lied. American combat boots and Iraqi ground collide.
Say it again. Obama lied. People died. Include murders committed by the Islamic State in Iraq among Obama’s dead. Obama left a power vacuum in Iraq. Yazidi women were raped. No, it doesn’t rhyme, but it’s more accurate than Bush lied.
Say it again. Obama lied. The battle for Mosul continues so people continue to die.
As for eiminating Syrian WMD, Obama lied and Syrians definitely continue to die."
Is this the new "Thanks Obama"?
...those Russians can come up with some good marketing slogans....
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/memorial-day-falluja.html
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2019/05/26/raptors-fans-flood-toronto-streets-to-celebrate-game-6-victory/
PS: Putin on the ritz is snickering in his dacha.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Two Costly Wars, and a Legacy of Shame
The troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan planned by the Trump administration amount to a painful admission: We lost.
By Timothy Kudo
Mr. Kudo is a former Marine captain who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The Defense Department recently announced troop withdrawals by Jan. 15 that will reduce American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to 2,500 each from their one-time highs of some 170,000 and 100,000 troops, respectively. This drawdown makes explicit what those of us who served in the military have long realized: We lost.
War is evil even when it is necessary but our inability to win has stolen even the possibility that the ends might justify the means. For the roughly three million service members whose boots touched soil in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 19 years, our defeat is a uniquely personal loss.
When I was sent to Iraq in 2009 it was to safeguard our withdrawal. During our entire deployment in the once treacherous Sunni triangle we discovered and disposed of a single roadside bomb on the main highway outside Falluja, where they had once been as common as potholes. I returned home wishing I could have done more but was glad to see how much progress had been made by the regiments who’d fought so hard before me.
When I read a few years later that the Islamic State had overrun that same area I began to sense that our efforts had been in vain. But it was my Afghanistan deployment in 2010-2011 that cemented their futility for me.
My company defended a labyrinthine cluster of mud-walled villages set amid fields of poppy and corn in the Musa Qala District of Helmand Province. As the northern tip of the Marine campaign in Helmand we held a line alongside battalion after battalion of Marines that extended south through the river valley to the district center, where the bazaar and the governor were, and then down past Sangin to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and further to Marja and Garmsir.
People often ask me what Afghanistan was like but I can never really answer: Each district might as well have been its own war for the Marines who fought, with victories and defeats known only to them.
I often think back on the moments in my deployments when the crack of a gunshot or the deep thud of a large roadside bomb suddenly infused my life at war with a clear and tangible purpose. I remember the kids lining up the first day after the school reopened, the first time the partners we trained in the Afghan Army took the initiative to patrol without our assistance, and the rare smile on a villager’s face after we’d provided the first aid that had saved the life of his father, who had been shot in crossfire.
I try to remember those small decencies instead of the casualties and the killing but they do little to assuage the overwhelming senselessness of the greater war.
Shortly after I returned from Afghanistan in 2011, President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed during a raid on his compound in Pakistan, where he was living after fleeing Afghanistan years before. As I watched people celebrating outside the White House and outside ground zero I hoped that the war was finally over, but even then it didn’t feel like victory.
The conflict had grown so much bigger since the attacks of Sept. 11 that his death felt like a footnote. The execution of a single dethroned sheikh suddenly paled in significance to my own recent experience at war. Later that night I tried to recall the circumstances surrounding the death of each man we’d killed and count how many there had been but there were too many to remember.
The Afghanistan war was finally lost for me in August 2015, several years after my own deployment ended, when the Taliban recaptured Musa Qala, which five men in my company had died defending. After the Taliban’s seizure, allied airstrikes bombed the same government center we’d sacrificed so much to hold.
A member of Parliament from Helmand Province later described that building as “completely vanished from the earth.” Along with it was buried any hope there might have been that the sacrifices I, and so many others, have made in service to our country would not be in vain.
The cost of these wars has been astronomical: Roughly $6 trillion in government spending, with the Defense Department spending alone costing each American taxpayer an estimated more than $7,000. Additionally, today’s young veterans face a legacy of psychological and physical injury, as well as illness from our war’s Agent Orange: the toxic burn pits whose smoke we inhaled.
Even more costly are the approximately 515,000 people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, including more than 260,000 civilians. And for what? Iraq remains a tenuous democracy teeming with militias while Afghanistan is locked in a conflict with a resurgent Taliban, and peace talks are in deadlock.
Both countries fail to meet the objectives of freedom and democracy set when President George W. Bush started those wars. They fall short of President Obama’s goals when he sent me and 30,000 other troops to Afghanistan and of the claims he made when declaring an end to combat operation in Iraq only to see the Islamic State undo those gains. President Trump does not seem to even have a purpose for those 5,000 troops who will remain in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Like many service members I wrote a letter in case I was killed during my deployment. It began with an assurance to the friends and family I would have left behind: “It was worth it.” I believed then that we had a moral obligation to not only protect my fellow Americans but to leave the Afghan and Iraqi people with a chance to live in peace.
That obligation remains even though it cannot be fulfilled. Instead I am resigned that these wars will finally enter the history books not only as defeats but as stains on our national honor.
The political theorist and philosopher Michael Walzer writes in “Just and Unjust Wars” that “it still seems important to say of those who die in war that they did not die in vain. And when we can’t say that, or think we can’t, we mix our mourning with anger.” I would add that we also mix it with shame.
I recognize that shame is not a very American trait but with it comes humility. Sadly, my generation had to relearn the lessons of Vietnam in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in coming to grips with our defeat, we have a chance to ensure that we do not sacrifice future generations to such folly.
And by so doing we may yet salvage some purpose from this tragedy: to do everything in our power to avoid more wars, and to ensure that if and when the next war does come, it is worth it.
Timothy Kudo (@KudoTim), a former Marine captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Afghanistan, yes but not so damn long
David Kay, weapons inspector who helped disprove Iraqi WMDs, dies at 82
He concluded that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq and that intelligence agencies had badly misjudged the available evidence
David A. Kay, the weapons proliferation expert who led a CIA-run operation in 2003 that concluded former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein had built no weapons of mass destruction, sharply undermining the chief justification for the U.S.-led invasion earlier that year, died Aug. 13 at his home in Ocean View, Del. He was 82.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Anita Kay.
Dr. Kay, a reserved Texan with an international affairs doctorate, had an early career teaching political science before joining organizations such as UNESCO in Paris and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. In 1991, he became a household name while serving in Iraq as chief nuclear weapons inspector for the United Nations and the IAEA after the United States and its allies had liberated Kuwait from Hussein’s forces.
The mission of all the U.N. teams was to search out and destroy any banned nuclear, biological or chemical weapons or materials. In September 1991, using powers granted under a U.N. resolution, Dr. Kay’s nuclear team launched an unannounced inspection of a military facility in Baghdad to look for incriminating documents about Hussein’s clandestine efforts to develop nuclear arms.
Because it was close to his team’s hotel, Dr. Kay had already surveilled the building by running past it on his morning jog to see where security was tightest. During the inspection, his 44-member group was detained after attempting to remove documents and videotapes they considered significant, and endured a four-day standoff followed by media around the world.
Using a relatively newfangled satellite phone, Dr. Kay answered calls from news agencies, notably CNN, while surrounded by Iraqi guards. He and his team slept in their vehicles — a bus and several cars. As pressure from the U.N. Security Council and the world grew, the Iraqis let them leave with the documents and tapes.
The chemical program was huge,” he later told journalists with the PBS series “Frontline,” summing up all the U.N. teams’ findings after the 1991 war. “The actual storage area of their main chemical weapons dump was larger than the District of Columbia. ... In the nuke area, whereas before the war there were two facilities identified ... instead we discovered 25 main sites that we had had no knowledge of, and that they, at that point, were probably six to 18 months away from having their first working nuclear device. It wouldn’t have been a pretty device, and it wouldn’t have launched on a missile, but it would have been a working device, and then rolling progressively forward on that area.
“Finally, when the biological program was fully exposed in the mid-90s,” he added, “we discovered that not a single site that had been hit in the air campaign of the first Gulf War had actually had an active biological program. They had moved them all to sites that we did not know about, successfully hid them. In fact, they had a very large anthrax program, botulinum toxin program, ricin, and a quite accomplished biological program.”
The U.N. teams destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons and programs in the 1990s, but after the inspectors were forced out in 1998, the CIA worried Hussein was secretly rebuilding his WMD. After the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House portrayed those suspicions as irrefutable evidence of a direct Iraqi threat to the United States and its allies.
When the March 2003 invasion quickly toppled Hussein’s regime, a Pentagon team fanned out across Iraq but failed to find any sign of the weapons of mass destruction. That summer, President George W. Bush put the CIA in charge of the hunt, and CIA Director George J. Tenet picked Dr. Kay to lead the newly named Iraq Survey Group.
Although he went to Iraq convinced that sites suspected of housing weapons of mass destruction would be found, he soon concluded that none existed and that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had badly misjudged the available evidence. Frustrated by the CIA’s refusal to agree, Dr. Kay resigned from the weapons-hunting group in January 2004. Days later, he gave explosive testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” he told the panel. “It turns out we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.”
Soon after, Bush called him into the White House. Even though Iraq had no WMD, Dr. Kay told the president he believed that the invasion was the right thing to do because of the suffering of the Iraqi people under Hussein.
Bush thanked him for his work, but Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld continued to play down Dr. Kay’s conclusions, suggesting Hussein may have smuggled some illicit weapons out of the country and may have at least been planning a WMD program.
Dr. Kay found himself a veritable outcast for publicly saying the CIA was wrong. Hewas treated “coldly,” he said, when he returned to CIA headquarters.
“One part of it, it’s almost comical to me,” he told “Frontline.” “In fact, I laughed at the time because it was so much like a poor spy novel. I was given an office that didn’t have a working telephone, that was surrounded by packing cases, at the depths of Langley, with a secretary that usually wasn’t there. You’d have to have been pretty dumb not to have caught the signals of it. But not even to have a secure phone in the office where you can’t talk to anyone, nor a computer where you can e-mail — I understood it.”
Bush, however, felt obliged to respond to Dr. Kay’s bombshell and immediately set up a bipartisan presidential commission led by Reagan-appointed federal judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) that in March 2005 confirmed the prewar intelligence fiasco.
“The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure,” the commission concluded. “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also facing fury from those opposed to the Iraq invasion that he had supported, was forced in February 2004 to announce an inquiry, known as the Butler Review after its chairman, Lord Robin Butler. The panel took until that July to issue a report that concluded that the intelligence used to justify the invasion was “unreliable” and over-reliant on dissident Iraqi sources.
One of the key sources for the false intelligence was an Iraqi defector to Germany who was code-named Curveball. The CIA did not interview him until a year after the invasion, but his bogus account of Iraq’s biological weapons became a linchpin of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s address to the Security Council in February 2003, which set the stage for war.
Continues
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/22/david-kay-weapons-inspector-iraq-dead/
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Gift article
https://wapo.st/3LANo0T
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©