Iraq was the Democrats' war, too

When Iraq Was Clinton’s War - Chip Gibbons, The Jacobin:

May 6, 2016 - "When [George W.] Bush entered the White House, the US (with help from the UK) was bombing Iraq an average of three times a week. In 1999, the US spent  $1 billion dropping bombs in Iraq; in 2000, that number was up to $1.4 billion....

"Omitting the decade leading up to the 2003 invasion distorts the roots of the war, which wasn’t just a product of post–9/11 hysteria or the creation of various Bush administration personalities. The February 2001 assault was part of a bipartisan policy that put continuous war with Iraq at the center of strategies to maintain US hegemony in the Middle East....

"[A]t a February 1998 town hall... Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to sell the public on bombing Iraq. Albright was repeatedly interrupted by antiwar activists, and ... replied, 'No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing. He is producing weapons of mass destruction'.... Just a few years later, similar scenes, with different players, would be reprised in the buildup to the Bush administration’s invasion.

"Much as George W. Bush inherited his initial Iraq policy from Bill Clinton, Clinton inherited his from Bush’s father. Following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq.... Even after Hussein pulled out, however, the US ... refused to allow the sanctions to be lifted. Their new rationale was that the restrictions were needed to  disarm Iraq. Yet as early as 1992 the US knew Iraq had given up its weapons of mass destruction, and the sanctions remained....

"Iraq experienced shortages of food, medicine, and clean drinking water. And a 1995 Lancet study sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization concluded that 576,000 children under the age of five perished because of the policy, while a “conservative” estimate put the death toll for the same age group at 350,000. Dennis Halliday, a thirty-four-year UN veteran, resigned ... after spending a little over a year as the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq. He said the sanctions constituted genocide.... Clinton simply denied the facts in question....

"Like his successor, one of Clinton’s early acts in office was to bomb Baghdad. In 1993, he sent twenty-three cruise missiles to hit the city.... Five years later, Clinton signed the 'Iraq Liberation Act' into law, formalizing the US’s demand for regime change. The legislation, which also appropriated $97 million to fund Iraqi opposition groups, was followed up with ... Operation Desert Fox ... sold to the public as retribution for Hussein’s decision to kick UN weapons inspectors out of the country. Yet ... Clinton ordered the inspectors out. Saddam didn’t kick them out....

"From the end of Operation Desert Fox [in December 1998] until the 2003 invasion, the US and UK bombed Iraq at least once a week."

Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/war-iraq-bill-clinton-sanctions-desert-fox/
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U.S. media: Don't give peace a chance in Korea

Historic Korean Summit Sets the Table for Peace — and US Pundits React With Horror | The Nation - Tim Shorrock:

May 2, 2018 - "April 27, 2018, was a historic day for Korea, and for the millions of people on both sides of that tragically divided peninsula. In a meticulously planned event, Kim Jong-un, the 34-year-old hereditary dictator of North Korea, stepped carefully over the border running through the truce village of Panmunjom and clasped hands with Moon Jae-in, the democratically elected president of South Korea....

 "Kim’s action marked the start of a remarkable day in which the two nations 'solemnly declared' an end to the Korean War, which ripped the country apart from 1950 to 1953.

"Over the next few hours, accompanied by top aides and diplomats, generals and intelligence chiefs, the Korean leaders discussed an agreement that would lead to what they both described as the “complete denuclearization” of the peninsula. The two also 'affirmed the principle of determining the destiny of the Korean nation on their own accord,' a signal to both the United States and China that the days of great-power intervention in their divided country may be waning....

"But almost from the moment of that first handshake, the pundits who shape the US media’s coverage of North Korea were spinning the summit, and Kim’s outreach in particular, as a dangerous, even ominous, event....

"'Yada, yada, yada,' the perennial hawk Max Boot wrote disparagingly in The Washington Post about the 'Korea summit hype,' adding that 'there is very little of substance here.' Similar hot takes were offered by Nicholas Kristof and Nicholas Eberstadt in The New York Times, Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, Robin Wright in The New Yorker, and Michael O’Hanlon in The Hill. Their doubts were repeated and amplified as gospel by the usual critics on cable TV.

"The kicker came on Sunday, April 29, when the Times’ Mark Landler painted the Korean summit as an affront to US national-security interests. Citing every establishment pundit he could find, Landler argued that a resumption of diplomatic ties between the Koreas 'will inevitably erode the crippling economic sanctions against the North,' while making it hard for Trump 'to threaten military action against a country that is extending an olive branch.' It was depressing to see such overt cheerleading for US imperial control over Korea in the media."

Read more: https://www.thenation.com/article/historic-korean-summit-sets-the-table-for-peace-and-us-pundits-react-with-horror/
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Deep state terminated Trump security adviser

The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn - Bloomberg View - Eli Lake:

February 14, 2017 - "If we are to believe the Trump White House, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn just resigned because he lied about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the vice president....  That sounds about as credible as when the president told CIA employees that the media had invented the story about his enmity toward the spy agency, not even two weeks after he had taken to Twitter to compare the CIA to Nazis.... It doesn't add up.

"It's not even clear that Flynn lied. He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Vice President Mike Pence. The New York Times and Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend by the White House could be read different ways. One White House official with knowledge of the conversations told me that the Russian ambassador raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn responded that the Trump team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia policy and sanctions. That's neither illegal nor improper....

"A better explanation here is that Flynn was just thrown under the bus. His tenure as national security adviser, the briefest in U.S. history, was rocky from the start. When Flynn was attacked in the media for his ties to Russia, he was not allowed by the White House to defend himself. Over the weekend, he was instructed not to speak to the press when he was in the fight for his political life. His staff was not even allowed to review the transcripts of his call to the Russian ambassador.

"There is another component to this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted. It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009.... Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do....

"The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.

"Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, ... saw the leaks about Flynn's conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. 'There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,' he said. 'From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.'"

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-14/the-political-assassination-of-michael-flynn
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