Cross-posted from Consortium News
After Islamic militants captured the major Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, the danger of Official Washington's false narratives again asserted itself, a direct consequence of the failure to enforce any meaningful accountability on the neocons and others who pushed the Iraq War.
The emerging neocon-preferred narrative is that the jihadist victory in the northern city of Mosul and the related mess in neighboring Syria are the fault of President Barack Obama for not continuing the U.S. military occupation of Iraq indefinitely and for not intervening more aggressively in Syria's civil war.
What is perhaps most striking about such accounts, which are appearing across the major U.S. media, is that the narrative doesn't go back to the most obvious starting point: President George W. Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was that invasion and the ensuing occupation that hurtled Iraq and -- to an extent -- Syria into their current chaos.
Bush's invasion, which was justified by bogus claims about Iraq hiding weapons of mass destruction, was in clear violation of international law, lacking the explicit approval of the United Nations Security Council. Yet, even after the WMD falsehoods were exposed and the body counts soared, there was almost no accountability enforced either on the public officials who carried out the aggressive war or on the opinion leaders who rationalized it.
In many cases, the same pundits and pols continue to shape U.S. public opinion today and are dominating the narratives on Iraq and Syria. Thus, there is almost no attention to the fact that before the U.S. overthrow (and subsequent hanging) of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, there was no al-Qaeda threat in Iraq or Syria.
That threat emerged only after the U.S. invasion and the Bush administration's rash decision to disband the Iraqi army. Then, as U.S. forces fought to crush Sunni resistance to Iraq's new U.S.-backed Shiite-dominated government, Iraq became a magnet for Sunni extremists from across the Middle East, a force that coalesced into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Yet, the great divide in the Iraq War narrative came in 2007-08 when the neocons sought to salvage their blood-spattered reputations by inserting the myth of the "successful surge," hailing Bush's decision to escalate the war by dispatching some 30,000 additional U.S. troops. Though the "surge" initially was accompanied by a surge in killing, the gradual reduction in the violence was cited as proof of Bush's heroic wisdom.
Other explanations for the decline in Iraqi violence were ignored, including the fact that some key policies, such as buying-off Sunni tribes in Anbar Province and applying high-tech methods for hunting down al-Qaeda leaders, were initiated before the surge although their impact only became clear later. And, the violence also subsided because the Iraqi people finally recognized that a timetable was being set for the removal of all U.S. troops, a process completed in 2011.
However, across Official Washington, the simplistic -- and self-serving -- conventional wisdom was that the "surge" was the sole explanation for the drop in the killings, a myth that had lethal consequences in 2009 when pro-surge hardliners, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton maneuvered President Obama into adopting a similar "surge" in Afghanistan.
The Unsuccessful Surges
It should now be clear that neither "surge" was successful in altering the strategic arc of those two conflicts. At best, one could say that the military "surges" -- paid for by about 1,000 U.S. military deaths each and many tens of billions of dollars -- bought time for Bush and his neocon advisers to depart the government before the ultimate failures of their war polices became obvious, a "decent interval" that now has enabled these war architects to reframe the narrative and shift the blame to Obama.
The new narrative, which you can find across the media spectrum, is that Obama is to blame for the unfolding disaster in Iraq because he didn't insist on continuing the U.S. military occupation indefinitely. He's also being blamed for the spread of Islamic militancy in Syria because he resisted demands from Official Washington's opinion leaders for a major U.S. intervention aimed at overthrowing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Thus, the same U.S. news media that fumes over speculation that Russia may somehow be aiding separatists in eastern Ukraine and sputters about Moscow's violations of international law has been openly lusting for an expanded U.S. military intervention in Syria in clear violation of international law.
Though U.S. assistance to Syrian rebels has so far been limited to light arms and non-lethal supplies, U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have been the principal supporters of radical Sunni jihadists who have flocked from around the Middle East to wage war against Syria's government, which is run by Assad, an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Regarding Syria, Official Washington's narrative is that if only Obama had intervened earlier in support of "moderate" rebels or if he had launched a full-scale bombing campaign last summer as he threatened, everything would have worked out just wonderfully -- Assad would be gone and "moderates" would be governing Syria.
The fact that none of the U.S. interventions in the Middle East have had such a happy ending doesn't deter this latest "group think" on Syria.
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