When did “regime change” become the mark of a “real” president? Well, not to keep you in suspense, but it was in the brief reign of George Herbert Walker “Bad Ass” Bush. While still a mere VP, Georgie wanted President Reagan to green light the removal of Panama strongman Manuel Noriega—basically a CIA “asset” gone rogue—but Ronnie, while he loved things that go bang, tended to be a little squeamish when it came to the sight of actual blood when shed by actual Americans, so George had to wait until he got his own bony Connecticut ass in the Oval Office before the shooting could start.
Noriega, of course, was a mere hors d'œuvre, a hors d'œuvre verging on farce when the U.S. military spent hours blasting a holed-up Noriega with super-loud doses of rock n’ roll in an effort to bludgeon him into surrendering, instead of, you know, just kicking in the door, rolling across the floor and wasting everyone in the room with a fusillade of rounds from a .357 Magnum, the way Dirty Harry would have done it. Sure, we “won”, but we looked a little ridiculous doing so.
Iraq was much, much better. Saddam Hussein was a certified bad guy, the “worst since Hitler”, a guy who oppressed the Kurds and other racial minorities within his own country and had now brutally invaded the innocent neighboring country of Kuwait, leading to an orgy of rape and murder. No wonder Aitch-Dubya, as he’s sometimes called, launched a mighty blow against this moral monster.
A mighty blow, yes, but not a mortal one. Before Hussein’s brutal invasion, Bush had already given him the green light, but only to take part of Kuwait, not the whole thing. A few rapes, sure, the price of progress. But don’t go overboard!
And Bush, despite urging the oppressed minorities within Iraq—of whom there were many—to revolt, planned all along to leave Hussein in charge once he’d been driven back across the border. Better the devil you know, after all, even if it means letting that devil murder tens of thousands of people roused to revolt by the United States) and then abandoned.
Most Americans never noticed the profound disparity between American words and American actions. It was too much fun blowing shit up! Americans love it! Most of all, the media love it! As Donald Trump discovered, when a president blows shit up, he gets great press! And you know how Donald Trump loves great press!
But Republicans did notice when they lost the 1992 election. How to get back that special glow? Invade Iraq for real this time! Total victory! Total!
The only problem was that that damned hippie Bill Clinton, the nation’s draft dodger in chief, was in the White House. And then when even Bill Clinton effected regime change, smart bombing his way to victory in Kosovo, it was all too goddamn much. If that goddamn Bill Clinton can be a “war hero”, maybe those goddamn smart bombs are too smart!
Like the first Gulf War, the war in Kosovo was considerably more “confused” than most Americans believed—bloodier and with considerably more moral ambiguity than most American talking heads can soundbite. But regardless of what happened on the ground in eastern Europe, in the U.S., the lesson was clear: Clinton acted, bombs fell, no Americans died, and “we won”.
Naturally, George W. Bush was chafing at the bit to kick some ass when he entered the White House. The evidence is clear that finding an excuse for taking out Saddam Hussein with force and violence was the number one foreign policy goal for the new Bush Administration. While the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was not the pretext Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld wanted, it was the pretext they embraced, and the disaster began.
Barack Obama largely owed his victory in the Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton to the fact that he opposed the second Gulf War, though he shamefully muted the extent of his disagreement with the invasion, pointing out virtually none of the Bush Administration’s countless hypocrisies in launching an entirely unnecessary and brutal war, very largely for political gain. Obama recognized that Americans wanted to get out of Iraq without having to admit that they had done anything wrong.
Once in power, Obama himself signally failed to resist the siren call of regime change, especially when emitted by that most unlikely of sirens, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary had her rod on for regime change almost from the get-go, though her favored, and ultimate, target all along—Great Russian self-crowned pseudo-czar Vladimir Putin, remained frustratingly out of reach. But Hillary pulled the wool over Vladimir’s eyes, getting Russia’s support in the UN for a resolution authorizing a U.S.-organized “humanitarian intervention” in Libya, which quickly turned into out and out regime change. “We came, we saw, he died”, chuckled Hillary, channeling her inner Gaius Julius, Caesar to Vladimir’s mini-czar, and fitting herself for the purple, which she would have won had she not persuaded Obama to “lead from behind”. Karma much, Hillary?
Yes, Libya was a massive disaster, costing four American lives (up front at least) compared to the thousands lost by George Bush & Co. but Republicans use different scales when it comes to Clintons and black guys with big ears. Hillary was hammered mercilessly, though for all the wrong reasons, and she paid the price.
Back when Donald Trump was running for president, he on occasion uttered pretty much an ultimate heresy—that the Iraqi invasion was not merely a mistake— “Oh, if we had only known that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction!1 But it’s so not our fault!”—but a lie and a disaster from the start. Well, but that was then. That fat kid in Korea is giving Big Donnie shit and Donnie don’t take shit. And then there’s that goddamn Iran. We need to kick some ass there. We need to kick some ass somewhere! It’s Patton time!
Ever since Noriega, the U.S. has staggered from one disaster to the next, but like the drunk who insists that this time he won’t piss his pants and wreck the car, not only our presidents but the whole military/diplomatic/“intelligence” bureaucracy can’t seem to put the bottle down. It’s so boring being, you know, polite to people! Why can’t we just kill them? It’s so much more fun!
Afterwords
Over at the American Conservative, the indispensable Daniel Larson tracks the Trumpians’ bizarre obsessions with both North Korea and Iran. The constant threats and bullying directed at the two nations would seem to guarantee either a humiliating climbdown on both North Korea (“Okay, keep your nuclear weapons and your death-dealing ICBMs. You don’t seem like such bad guys after all!”) and Iran (“You know, all that stuff about 72 virgins with pear-shaped breasts sounds kinda fun. See you in Jannah,2 amigo!”) or, you know, war! Why do supposedly sane military men in particular, who know that war with either nation would provoke bloodshed on a scale at least comparable to that of Vietnam (and in a much shorter time span) for no purpose except to show “toughness”, keep pushing for a showdown? Do they think that Trump’s base will simply swallow any lie/line he gives them? Do they think of anything at all, except their next budget? One can wonder.
Also at the American Conservative, Matt Purple outlines the horrors Hillary’s vanity hath wrought in Libya. I would love to read this aloud to both Hillary and Obama.
- I have bitched, so many times!, about the fraudulent use of the notion of “weapons of mass destruction” to invade Iraq, notably in the post WMD: The Right Lies Well. To recapitulate, briefly (or not): Biological and chemical weapons, which “everyone” assumed Saddam possessed, are not weapons of mass destruction. Saddam himself claimed that they were, saying/threatening that he could destroy half of Israel with chemical weapons, so, in effect, he dug his own grave, but in actual use these weapons are no more, and no less, horrible than the standard bullets and high explosives. March 16, 1988, saw the worst chemical weapons attack in modern history, when Saddam’s forces slaughtered up to 5,000 helpless Kurdish citizens of his own country in the town of Halabja in a five-hour assault involving a dozen bombers. The Twin Towers collapse took some 2,500 lives in less than half an hour, while Hiroshima took at least 70,000 in less than a minute. Despite the endless “worst case” scenarios, there is simply no comparing, much less equating, chemical and biological weapons with nuclear ones. And the United States is the only nation to have ever used them. ↩︎
- Paradise. ↩︎
