While President Bush Was Ducking Shoes… you missed the SOFA.
June 23, 2014

 
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“It was a natural reaction to the killing of a million of my people, the orphaning of 5 million children, the widowing of one million women, resulting in tens of thousands of handicapped persons, tens of thousands of prisoners in American jails in Iraq, and the everyday scandals caused by the American occupation: rape, Abu Ghraib prison, bringing down roofs on peoples heads with Apache helicopters and F16 planes. Despite all this, Bush was saying the Iraqi people are happy, and the Americans liberated the Iraqi people, and the Iraqi people welcomed the Americans with flowers. […] You lied. We did not welcome you with flowers, and instead, we are saying goodbye with our shoes.” So said Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al Zaidi explaining why he threw both of his shoes at President Bush during his final visit to Iraq. The reason for the visit? To announce an historic “Status of Forces Agreement”… SoFA for short… between the U.S. and Iraq promising, quote, “the next president” would withdraw “ALL” U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Problem was, embedded in SoFA was a requirement for Iraq not to seek prosecution against any American soldiers for any crimes they may have committed while serving in Iraq. Because of this, Iraqi president al Maliki refused to sign SoFA. It was also because of this refusal to exempt American soldiers from prosecution, that President Obama did not leave residual American forces in Iraq. He negotiated with Maliki and tried to get him to agree to SoFA, but (as “Mother Jones reported), Iran demanded Maliki not allow ANY residual American forces in Iraq, “and Maliki owed them [Iran].” The Right has been going nuts for the past week trying to blame Obama for the crisis in Iraq that seems to be destabilizing the Middle East. That’s a bit like blaming the firemen for your house burning down after you set fire to it and then waited five hours before calling them.

I’m trying to imagine what the Right’s reaction would have been if President Obama had agreed to keep American forces in Iraq on the condition they could be prosecuted by a foreign government.

My TV survived another Sunday despite having to sit through this little exchange on Fox “news” Sunday yesterday. Michel Needham, the CEO of the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Action for America” super-PAC, lobbed this asinine accusation against President Obama (try not to toss your computer out the window):
 

“Six years ago (2008, before he was president), he [Obama] makes the decision to pull out of Iraq, leave no residual forces… the forces that could have been there identifying the intelligence and targeting the assets that would have prevented this [ISIS] from happening.”

(I especially like the end-part, where Needham agrees that he probably wouldn’t do anything different than President Obama, except to criticize the president’s lack of clairvoyance for not sending agents into Iraq “six months ago” to gather “intel”. Why on Earth would anyone have thought it necessary to gather intel on Iraq in late 2013? I did a Google search and I was unable to find ANY calls… not from Mr. Needham, the Heritage Foundation, nor anyone else on the right, demanding President Obama send agents into Iraq to gather “intel”. We WERE gathering intel in Syria six months ago, and ISIS was there. Lot of good that did.)

Oh Mr. Needham, where to begin. Well, first, I’m not going to nitpick that “six years ago”, Obama wasn’t president. “5+ years”, “six years”. Whatever. But something DID take place “six years ago” before Obama took office. it was President Bush, on December 15, 2008, with barely a month left in office, that sought an agreement with Iraq to withdraw ALL U.S. forces from Iraq. Iraq said, “Not unless we can prosecute them.” Bush said “No” and the agreement was never signed. But the plan to pull ALL American troops out… including any potential “residual force”… remained. President Bush wasn’t about to leave American troops at the mercy of the Iraqi courts. But apparently Mr. Needham wishes President Obama had agreed to let Iraq prosecute American soldiers just so long as we could have kept troops there? Yeah, right. And Mr. Needham must have some unspoken power of “time travel” where American troops could have magically skipped over the last two years and lived in Iraq incident-free to arrive at 2014 to stop ISIS from materializing? American forces couldn’t even stop Muqtada al-Sadr, the powerful and fiercely anti-American cleric, from rising to power. Leaving American forces in Iraq would not have prevented ISIS from rising to power. They started in SYRIA not Iraq. And they were drawn to Iraq in protest of the corrupt & inept Maliki government that was excluding Sunni’s from the political process. That would have taken place whether we left troops there or not. And as I pointed out last week, whether it was one more or one hundred more years, the moment American forces left, a thousand years of jihad in Iraq would have picked up right where it left off (and will in Afghanistan too).

As recently as last September, John McCain was still bemoaning the fact that President Obama was still refusing to arm the Syrian rebels fighting President Assad, saying his “friends in the Free Syrian Army” would feel “abandoned” if we didn’t send them “arms”. McCain has been calling for the arming of Syrian rebels for YEARS. The largest of the Sunni anti-Assad militia groups McCain wanted to arm, you know today as “ISIS”, the alQaeda-trained terrorist organization now in control of nearly half the region. Yes, had “President” McCain of had his way, we could have been arming ISIS all along. Darned the luck! (How this idiot keeps getting booked on the Sunday shows without a single one of them pointing out this one simple fact, is a mystery to me… well, not really.)

Last week also saw former Vice President Cheney rise from the crypt in his “undisclosed location” to attack President Obama… saying without a hint of irony… that “never has a president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” I can’t imagine the bubble this man has been living in over the past 13 years, but whatever he’s smoking in that bubble can’t be legal.
 

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, that August 5th PDB warning that bin Laden was preparing an attack against the United States, well, it looks like it wasn’t ‘historical’ information after all and now 4,000 Americans are dead.”

    •  

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, the Iraqi people did not greet us as ‘liberators’. Instead, they see us as ‘occupiers’ and have taken up arms against us.”

    •  

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, those Weapons of Mass Destruction you assured everyone were there in Iraq? Well, they’re not, and before this war is over, another 4,500 American troops will be dead and 22,000 will be permanently disabled.”

    •  

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, that massive Hurricane Katrina bearing down on New Orleans, well FEMA wasn’t sent down in time to evacuate everyone and now 1,500 people are dead.”

    •  

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, it appears Wall Street was not capable of regulating itself and has resulted in a global economic catastrophe that will cost tax-payers three-quarters of a Trillion dollars to bail out the banks.”

    •  

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, the Iraq War is taking longer than you promised and is it not only not going to pay for itself, but will cost tax-payers another TWO TRILLION DOLLARS before it’s through.

    •  

  • “Uh, Mr. Vice President? I hate to wake you but, uh, the invasion of Iraq didn’t result in $20/barrel oil. Instead, it hit $147/barrel and the price of gas… once $1.60/gallon, is now over $4, driving incredible inflation and economic hardship for millions.

 
Let’s read what Mr Cheney said again: “never has a president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

As I like to point out, the objective of this site is to “Record history for those who seek to rewrite it”, and I could have spent literally WEEKS taring down all the asinine comments made by former Bush Administration officials and Right-Wing pundits last week that dare criticize President Obama’s handling of the shit-storm left to him by these “detached-from-reality” war criminals whose only audience should be in The Hague. But SO many others did such a great job of taking Cheney and the rest over their knee and slapping the malarky out of them that I didn’t have to.

And now, it’s this accusation that it is President Obama’s fault that the terrorist organization ISIS is taking over the region because HE refused to leave any American troops behind in Iraq after he pulled them all out in 2011. Sorry guys, we know better.
 
Oh, and before we go, a bonus clip from the same Fox “news” Sunday yesterday. Cleta Mitchell, attorney for “Tea Party groups” (gee, I wonder who hired her?) openly accused the Obama Administration of being behind the Cincinnati IRS “scandal”. When asked for the “hard evidence” she insisted she had, all she has was innuendo (this is what passes for “news” on Fox):
 

[flv:http://www.mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/video/FnS-Cleta_Mitchel-Teanut_lawyer-140622.flv http://www.mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/video/FnS-Cleta_Mitchel-Teanut_lawyer-140622.jpg 512 288]Mitchell: My “hard evidence” Obama is behind IRS scandal? He was secretly suggesting people do stuff.

 

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June 23, 2014 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: fake scandals, Middle East, myth busting, Partisanship, Politics, rewriting history, Terrorism, War

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