SENATOR McCAIN PROVIDES ANOTHER REASON TO DISLIKE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

…The 79 year old Arizona Senator is stuck in the past.

 

Blaming President Obama for ISIL, while not acknowledging that it was the Bush team that took us to war, is classic GOP thinking.

 

It was pretty disgusting when Senator John McCain decided to provide the perfect example of why so many Americans have been turned off by the Republican Party.

 

McCain first told reporters, “Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS or ISIL is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures….He pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIL would go unchecked, and there would be attacks on the United States of America,” he said. “It’s a matter of record, so he is directly responsible.”

 

This 79 years old Senator is still stuck in the past.  The Arizona Senator still believes that if we were “fighting them over there, we wouldn’t have to fight them over here.”

 

Sen. McCain’s remarks inspired so much immediate backlash that he had to put out another statement clarifying his remarks, but he was still making the same false point, “I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obama’s national security decisions, not the President himself. As I have said, President Obama’s decision to completely withdraw US troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL. I and others have long warned that the failure of the President’s policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.”

 

The Republicans are endlessly blaming the President for every single bad thing that happens. All the while, the GOP clings to their War in Iraq, and they blame Obama for their own failed policies.

 

The reality is that the war that President Obama voted against is the reason that if George W. Bush, and the warmongering Republicans like McCain would not have invaded Iraq on false pretenses, there would be no ISIL.  If you use McCain’s logic, it is the Republicans, not Obama, who are responsible for all of the attacks by ISIL inspired terrorists.

 

But let’s not just stop with that logic, let’s explain the reality.

 

What about the poor dealing with the Iraq situation by the Bush team after the initial allied invasion?

 

At the end of World War II, it was decided to not tear apart the infrastructure of either Germany or Japan.  Those organizations that had kept those countries functioning were disarmed, but they were kept in place so that the basic functions of electric power, water, sewer and police were still kept intact.  Even though they were also unarmed, many of the military groups were kept together to keep all those still in the country working for the good of the defeated nations.  These groups were not only kept together, they were also paid a salary so that the local economies didn’t go into the sewer.

 

The world had learned from the first World War that if you totally penalize the losing nation, you could cause another even worse conflict as eventually happened with the beginning of the second World War.

 

But did the Bush Administration learn from that world history?  Apparently, they learned nothing.

 

After the initial loss by the Iraq army, one of the first moves was for the Bush group to install an American to run the defeated country.  Mr. Paul Bremer was appointed by President Bush as the Presidential Envoy to Iraq. His appointment declared him subject only to the "authority, direction and control" of the US Secretary of Defense, which was the man that turned out to be the “not so bright”, Donald Rumsfeld.

 

This group, running a defeated nation, first got rid of all the local police authorities and they fired all of the heads of the military.  Of course, after that occurred, the allies did not have enough of the military on-hand to manage a whole Iraqi civilian population.

 

Therefore, they could only watch as Iraq’s major museums were robbed of priceless artifacts.   With everyone losing their jobs, the control of the power, water, and general needs of the civilian population were unable to function.  And none of these issues takes into consideration that the nation consisted of two different sects of Muslims.  There were both Sunni and Shia Iraqi Muslims that made up the Iraqi population, and these two groups have been at war with each other since the 6^th Century.

 

As it turns out, many of those Sunni military officers that the Presidential Envoy had ordered to be fired, they eventually ended up being key military personnel in what became the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, or as we call it today, ISIL.

 

During the Iraqi occupation by the US Military, there were also many mistakes made by the Bush Administration.  You know, issues like the horrible treatment of prisoners in the military Abu Ghraib prison.

 

And on another occasion, it was decided by the Presidential Envoy that they needed to send pallets of US currency to Iraq to use as local currency, as the Iraqi currency was now without value. 

 

Isn’t it interesting that somehow some of those pallets never made to their destination…?  It was later learned that of the currency that did make it, approximately $12 billion appears to have been lost due to local corruption and waste.

 

The point is that, to blame the development of the ISIL terrorists on the single actions of President Obama withdrawing the troops too early from Iraq, is a very convenient excuse for the Republicans.  But there’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to Iraq, and it all started with one of the worst and most expensive decisions to go to war that the United States will be paying for over many decades.

 

So, thank you George W. Bush and your partner-in-crime, Dick Cheney.

 

Think about it.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016