Eli Lake is a guy who has cashed checks from both Marty Peretz and the Reverend Moon. He now holds forth at the Daily Beast and if you read his column “Why the White House Ignored All Those Warnings About ISIS,” you’ll find out why President Obama is so afraid of going up against the military-intelligence complex. Because they’ll piss all over their commander in chief if he does!
The column is largely given over to a litany of “if only the president had listened to me!” drivel, all of it ignoring the fact that ISIS has won its victories because the large and heavily armed Iraqi army threw down its weapons and ran away. The advisors who claim that if only we had kept troops in Iraq (when 80 percent of the Iraqis wanted us gone) U.S. forces could have defeated ISIS ignore the fact that this would simply have converted Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki (not so popular in his own right) into an American puppet and U.S. troops into an occupation army. Do we really want to send our young men and women over to Iraq so they can stand and swelter in 120-degree heat while screaming kids throw rocks at them?
Lake is not entirely unscrupulous—only about 80 percent. Sandwiched in between the backstabbing, 20/20 hindsight are a couple of intelligent paragraphs:
One senior U.S. official who works closely on Iraq policy said there were no good options right now for who the United States should support. “This stuff is far more complicated than ‘white hat / black hat’ and Maliki good, that guy bad, or Maliki bad, that guy good. They’re all shades of gray, at best.” This official said that while it’s true that Maliki has alienated the Sunni minority, he also has genuine roots in Iraq’s society and real popularity. “That does not mean he is likely to form a government in the present environment, and there is growing opposition to a third term, even within his own bloc,” this official said. “But Maliki’s strength and staying power was more a function of the realities of Iraq than policies in Washington.”
Got that? What happens in Iraq is “more a function of the realities of Iraq than policies in Washington.” What a concept! If only Eli could keep it in his head for more than two paragraphs!
