Apply that argument to Iraq in 2003 then, the military really got that one right. It’s a black stain so large it’s amazing you think anyone will ever trust the military-industrial complex again.
The problem is of those institutions own making. Many Americans lost their lives hunting for Saddam’s WMDs - something that was fabricated by said institutions.
“Trust us” is no longer something we can blindly accept.
When I was in combat training (U.S., mid 2000s), a corporal who was teaching a munitions class one day started pointing to things and listing off random objects. Clothes, chairs, computer, projector, weapon lubricant, etc. He asked what all of these had in common. The answer was that they all contain petroleum derivatives. And that's why we go, he said. The 18-year-old idiot me didn't understand, so that night I went into my Green Monster (didn't have internet) and started reading about recent U.S. military involvement. It culminated in a rather dramatic mental image of Iraqi forces retreating through Kuwait and burning hundreds and hundreds of oil wells as they went. I was still very confused, but I was overcome with a sharp feeling that I was a pawn in a game being played by gods I couldn't see or hear or meet or understand, a game that had been going on since before I was born. I became depressed and cursed my father for not teaching me anything at all useful about the world.
I don't know why I wrote all of that. Maybe just to say that I'm sorry for my part in all of this bullshit.
The US government lost all credibility for this type of claim in 2003 when they manufactured intelligence to justify the Iraq war. So it's not surprising that people now demand verifiable evidence.
> Yet a growing group of intelligence analysts persisted with their complaints. For some, who have served at CENTCOM for more than a decade, scars remained from the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, when poorly written intelligence reports suggesting Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, when it did not, formed the basis of the George W. Bush administration’s case for war.
I'm reminded of the quote from Karl Rove dismissing the "reality-based community" as subordinate and inferior to "history's actors" which shape reality according to their whims. Of course the mindset goes back a lot further than that, and more than the American government is guilty of it, but in the US intelligence community it seems to have gotten a real shot in the arm during the Bush administration. Unfortunately, like many other terrible precedents set during that Presidency, our current President has done little to reverse it.
If we've really gotten to the point where anyone in Washington can question whether "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as though there is even a debate to be had there, without being laughed out of the city, then the real mystery of American government is how it manages to function as well as it does. This is a meme that needs to be rooted out and thoroughly destroyed.
The case made for it was pathetic. It was plain BS. Fuck’s sake, they were lying about Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and everyone (more or less—not me, for all the nothing that was worth) was already behind that war. People should have noticed that and be way more skeptical about Iraq.
Pretending otherwise is just gonna make the next time (and there will be one) easier to sell. It was transparent crap and the American public has blood on its hands—and so do the media, and many still-active members of both major political parties. Ignorance becomes criminal at some point, and that met the mark.
> Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.
My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.
We got lied to about Vietnam. Iraq had WMDs. Afghanistan was a budding democracy, fully equipped to stand on its own. Russia was an unstoppable modern military and we need hundreds of billions to hold them off!
Now. All those people lied - buy we're blaming the civilian population for not having skin in a game which is clearly run by liars, and not "doing more" to stop these liars?
We've watched it mangle generation after generation of our young people, and none of the liars are held responsible.
Of course we don't want skin in the game.
In a healthy democracy, these military liars wouldn't last. It's not a healthy democracy.
The difference is that it wasn't hard to work out the claims were nonsense. WMDs are hugely expensive, and the Iraqi economy was running on fumes at that point. That combined with US belligerence against Iraq made the claims improbable.
But Russia actually does have a strong black hat culture, with links to the political establishment. Putin is a technologically savvy kind of despot who likes sneaky low-cost high-return actions. So this fits the profile - both as a workable hack and also as a proof of concept for future attacks.
Consider the cost/benefit. Instead of physically blowing up infrastructure and security systems you can cripple them, possibly permanently, for the cost of - what? - 20 or 30 specialists, some PCs, and maybe some supercomputer time. Although even that may be optional.
It's unlikely conclusive evidence will be released, because that might reveal too much information about defence strategies. So circumstantial evidence will be as good as it gets.
But whatever the cause, clearly - clearly - all countries and larger orgs need to work much harder on security. Some decorative pen-testing isn't going to be nearly enough in the 2020s.
Before the US invaded Iraq, when the President was talking about mushroom clouds [0] and the Secretary of State delivered a PowerPoint about bio-weapons to the United Nations [1], I gave our leaders the benefit of the doubt.
Surely the military, the CIA, the NSA, the NRO, and the President must have secret information they cannot share with the public to justify the horrors of war.
Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to justify a predetermined agenda.
After the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, when the President and the Secretary of the Treasury threatened the end of the world as we know it if the richest corporations aren't given direct cash infusions [2], I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Surely our elected officials would never directly transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest of the rich unless the alternative was truly grave.
Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to transfer wealth from working people to the ownership class on an unprecedented scale.
So when the President stands before us today and speaks for 45 minutes without saying anything of consequence, without providing any evidence that the threat is so dire, so imminent, so cataclysmic that we must relinquish our freedoms to preserve our freedoms, I can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.
No more vague threats. No more fear. No more intimidation. No more secrecy. These are fatal to a political system that relies on an informed citizenry.
It's insane to me that people don't think this way. The mainstream US media, in perfect lockstep with the gov, told us all that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and then we found out it was a complete fabrication. And most of those people still have jobs!
I remember when American experts claimed that Iraq had masses of WMDs. After being lied to for so long and with such disastrous consequences, I'm not surprised people have (unfortunately often to kneejerk extremes) taken 'experts' with a grain of salt.
She systematically exfiltrated a lot of information which exposed several lies that the U.S. government was telling its citizens and the rest of the world. This information can be divided into four groups: Cablegate, Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War, and the Afghan War.
The US government was telling U.S. citizens that the people who were stuck in Guantanamo Bay were very dangerous terrorists who would likely be responsible for the deaths of civilians if they were released, but could not be processed via normal US law for unknown reasons either. In fact they were largely being held not because of the danger they posed to society, but the intelligence that they could provide the US. Collateral damage included two British nationals and a journalist. It also made it clear that this intelligence was largely extracted via torture.
The US government had downplayed civilian deaths in Iraq, arguing that it wasn't a huge issue and that most of our killing was very reliable and well-targeted. The current estimates of civilian deaths are closer to 2:1, that's 2 civilians killed for each insurgent killed. I am not misspeaking when I say that: the current estimate is that the majority of deaths were civilian casualties. (One particular hot-button video showed two front-line reporters with cameras gunned down from a helicopter even after they'd apparently shown themselves to be not a threat; the video however lacks two pieces of context which somewhat ameliorate one's outrage: that one of the people they were with did have a rocket-propelled grenade, and that there was a lot of fighting in that region anyways: it was a preventable overstep rather than the murder that was claimed in the video description.)
The US government in Iraq indicated that they take reasonable precautions to prevent things like torture, prisoner degradation, and other abuse of force; these documents revealed that this was not quite correct: while the US government was certainly making efforts to keep its own nose clean in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, it often turned its back on similar awful practices happening at the behest of both the Iraqi police and the US mercenary corporations that it contracted, allowing them to go on with little objection and little indication to the rest of the world that these things were happening. In fact it was not just tacitly accepted, in many cases it was encouraged: US forces turned over thousands of prisoners to the Iraqi police, even though they knew that this was likely to cause them to be tortured and abused. It was damning that US forces ousted Saddam Hussein nominally for being awful to his own people (after we got into the war because he was nominally pursuing nuclear and biological weapons, which it turned out he wasn't), but then bolstered a follow-up regime which was just as awful to its own people.
A related disclosure of Afghan war documents revealed as I recall both the brutality of the Taliban and also surprised us by telling us that there was a good chance our nominal ally in rooting them out (Pakistan), was colluding with the Taliban behind the scenes. It was also a scandal for Canadians, who told their people that certain Canadian soldiers had died in a firefight with the Taliban when those documents appeared to document their dying because the US had accidentally dropped a bomb on them. For the US it was mostly scandalous because we'd understood that we were winning the war in Afghanistan; the results of these documents were much more bleak.
Finally Cablegate shocked the world because it revealed what US diplomatic informants were really saying. For example, US informants revealed a close connection between Putin and Berlusconi, and that Al Qaeda was getting its funding from Saudi Arabia, and that Qatar was a virtual safe haven for terrorists, and that Bashar al-Assad was systematically telling the US with his right hand that he wasn't arming Hezbollah while arming them with his left, and that the Yemeni government was systematically claiming responsibility for US counterterrorist operations in Yemen so that we wouldn't know that that was a front in the War on Terror. Other things emerged, e.g. the US was trading visits by President Obama for other people taking Guantanamo Bay prisoners off our hands; and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was embarrassed because he had privately called the then-heads of Iraq and Pakistan awful people; there were some other embarrassments in Cablegate too.
For her disclosure of these things, Chelsea (who at the time was nominally cisgendered and named Bradley) was detained and treated indecently to widespread criticism, and was finally convicted of every charge but the most severe, being sentenced for the remaining 21 crimes to 35 years in jail. This is despite the fact that her disclosure (in combination with WikiLeaks) was carefully redacted to protect vulnerable people, she won several awards around the globe for revealing the information that she did, and her disclosure ultimately caused the Arab Spring which was generally seen as a good thing for the US and democracy. It is hoped that Obama might commute her sentence at the end of his presidency, but that's a pretty slim hope; he has not publicly expressed any sympathy for her.
Amazing how there are still those who are gullible enough to downvote your post only 20 years after Iraq war... They must think the media collectively collaborating to push the WMD lie without even one of them breaking the line was a 'one time' affair and not the act of an orchestrated, organized and well-run establishment. They lied just 'that one time'. Not before, not after. Even if lying is immensely profitable and with absolutely no consequence.
> When we say "rose under Foo" we typically mean from start to finish.
Huh, I don't. If I ask you if you got out of bed yesterday, I don't care whether you are currently in bed or not. I'm asking if you rose at all. On economics, if I ask you if there was mass unemployment during the 30s, I don't mean "only in 1939."
On WMDs, well, here we go again. Sarin tipped missiles were found in Iraq according to intelligence declassified in 2015:
Before that, in a hearing at the HASC in 2006, regarding weapons found in Iraq during the war in various states of functioning, Army Col. John Chu reported, "These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes ... they do constitute weapons of mass destruction."
On the minimum wage, I know what you're getting at, but I'm sure Card and Krueger would quibble with the phrasing of the question, arguing that they also have an economic theory with different results.
I think you're exaggerating what is clear cut and what's not to support your own bias that the world is comprised of simple uncomplicated facts, and people are either wrong or right. The more charitable explanation is that most issues belie significant nuance.
Not every issue, to be sure. Obama was born in the US. Rain is wet. But a lot of these studies cherry pick issues of controversy that are issues of controversy precisely because they hide layers of nuance that some people want to pretend isn't there at all.
The Iraq WMDs though... we just have HASC testimony on the record saying it's true, I don't know where you're coming from on that one. ;)
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