Year: 2014

If you had any doubts that Hillary is running, these past few days have put that to bed. She is absolutely masterful in a video inside showing her being humorous and disarming with that costume squirrel the RNC has tracking her. That is how you defuse stalking embeds from other campaigns. You don't attack them, like Christine O'Donnell's thugs. You don't call them "Maccaca" or whatever the hell slur George Allen used back in 2006. You do with Hillary did. Brilliant. Her interview with Fox News yesterday, with was more like a deposition, and her Town Hall with CNN, went very well too. The Fox appearance went so well for Clinton that Fox News Viewers are furious at the network for giving her a softball interview. I suppose they wanted Brett Baier and Greta Van Susteren to impale Hillary with a sword and remove her head a la Ned Stark on live television. But instead she was pressed on Benghazi. And here is the thing about ginning up a tragedy into a scandal and trying to pretend that there was this massive conspiracy and incompetence, if not willful malfeasance at the heart of the Obama Administration where the attack was concerned... it tends to collapse like a house of cards when reality answers fantasy questions. My favorite moment was when Bret Baier feverishly demanded to know where the President was that night, and Hillary answered that he was in the White House, in the Oval Office itself, managing the crisis with his national security team, as this picture, available for two years on the White House Flickr account, demonstrates.

Iraq was ALWAYS going to collapse, because it was a made up country to begin with, with three major ethnic groups that hated each other. Vice President Joe Biden, it turns out, was the smartest and most prescient US elected official regarding Iraq, because he has for years lobbied for the breakup of Iraq into three different states. One of the main reasons those of us who opposed the war did so was because we knew this would happen and, short of, occupying Iraq forever and slaughtering its entire population, there was no way to stop it. But now the very same people who lied us into war criticize Obama for not going back in guns blazing. Matthew Yglesias:

The logic on display here shows the toxic self-justifying nature of American military adventures. If a war accomplishes its stated objectives, that goes to show that war is great. If a war fails to accomplish its stated objectives — as the Bush-era surge miserably failed to produce a durable political settlement in Iraq — then that simply proves that more war was called for. But there is simply no reason to believe that the presence of American soldiers in Iraq makes a durable political settlement more likely, and there never has been. If eight years weren't enough, why would one more — or two more or twenty more — be the key to success? The truth is the opposite. The speed with which the apparent gains of the surge melted away in the face of Iraq's entrenched domestic political problems underscores how futile the US-led campaign there was. The US military is the finest military in the world, the sharp spear of the mightiest empire in human history. But the considerable virtues of America's fighting forces do not give it any particular expertise in micro-managing Iraqi politics. And the fundamentals in Iraq have simply never been very good for a peaceful and democratic settlement. The country is not only divided between sectarian groups, but sandwiched between two rival regional powers, with Iran tending to favor Shiite interests, Saudi Arabia tending to favor Sunni ones, and neither power having any particular interest in democracy and pluralism. Throw in the well-known phenomenon of the oil curse and the country's lack of stable institutions, and you've got a recipe for problems, problems that a bunch of heavily armed young people — no matter how well-intentioned or well-led — are not capable of solving.

We were right to leave. We are right to stay out. They were wrong to go in. And we should not listen to their advice again.