Thursday, November 17, 2016

BUT YOU TOLD ME TRUMP HATED THE IRAQ WAR WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS

Donald Trump who swore on a stack of Bibles that he loathed the Iraq War with every fiber of his being, may be about to appoint this guy as CIA director:
Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, an ex-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he would accept the job of CIA director if it were offered to him by President-elect Donald Trump....

Hoekstra said he has been in communication with Trump’s transition team “on a regular basis” to discuss “a number of different things,” but declined to detail any specifics of those conversations. He said he is currently an informal adviser to the transition team and that he was “working through the details” as to what more formal role he might play.
As Martin Longman (BooMan) reminds us, years after the Bush administration's case for the Iraq War had been thoroughly discredited, Hoekstra was a Saddam-had-WMDs dead-ender:
Back in 2005, Hoekstra was obsessed with proving that we had not gone to war in Iraq under false pretenses or even under the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He pressured the Bush administration to release online troves of sensitive documents that had been seized in Iraq so that right-wing bloggers could comb through them for supporting evidence.

... Hoekstra won his argument and {Director of National Intelligence John] Negroponte posted the cache of documents on the internet.

... The result was predictable. They found no evidence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq.
"But," Longman adds, "they did publish a handy-dandy guide to building a nuclear weapon."

More:
... In the midst of all this nonsense about the “real unexamined evidence” that Saddam Hussein had WMD, Hoekstra held a press conference in June 2006 where he asserted that the case had been proven, at least as far as chemical weapons were concerned. But, he was wrong.
At issue is a classified overview of chemical munitions found in Iraq since 2003 that was completed in April by the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center. One of the report’s key findings was that since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, coalition forces have recovered about 500 shells, canisters or other munitions that contain degraded mustard gas or sarin nerve agent.

That finding was seized on by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence....

Yesterday, however, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel, said the study contained “nothing new” ...

That assertion was backed up by representatives of three intelligence agencies who told reporters that the study differed little from a 2004 report of a team of American weapons inspectors led by Charles A. Duelfer....

The intelligence officials ... said that the munitions referred to in the report were produced before the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and that they had degraded and could not be used as designed. “There is no evidence today of any post-1991 WMD munitions,” said the official....
Some supposedly intelligent people will tell you that, while Donald Trump initially supported the Iraq War, his eventual opposition to it is a sign that he has convincingly broken with Republican orthodoxy on the use of force. And yet Pete Hoekstra could be his CIA director.

Trump dislikes wars that his Russian buddies disapprove of, and he dislikes wars that give him a vicarious sense of loserhood. Otherwise, Trump's vaunted war skepticism is a fraud.

11 comments:

jsrtheta said...

Trump: "I love war."

Never Ben Better said...

Trump: "Bomb the shit out of them."

Victor said...

Well, in his defense, while Hoesktra is an incomptent assclown with no real intelligence or security experience, he did stay in a Holiday Inn last night - and probably many other nights, too.

Oy...

Grung_e_Gene said...

The Marine Corps Times published an article that Trump wants to double the size of the Corps. Is there any doubt recruiters will have difficulty finding he-men young conservatives ready to sign up just as they eschewed service during Bush's Phony GWoT?

Daro said...

I think the Donald hate is getting into high gear before the season officially starts. Breitbart isn't fun whether it's written by the left or the right. Can we ease up a tad? There's still 4 years of trail left to travel.

jsrtheta said...

@Daro: The "Donald hate" is at just the right gear, wear it will stay until he's gone. I doubt anyone could hate him even more than they do now. None of us will be surprised by anything he does, so?

And I wouldn't be so sure of that "4 years."

Anonymous said...

Chris Matthews has been banging for a year and a half at the idea that Trump is opposed to foreign wars. It's total nonsense. Trump thinks America doesn't fight wars _hard enough_, and that if we did, we'd shorten them. It's amazing how many people willingly got themselves snookered by this foolishness.

Feud Turgidson said...

Dump doesn't know any of this. He doesn't read Congressional reports, he doesn't read books, he doesn't read policy & position papers produced by think tanks or government agencies, he's certainly never read a CRS report, and he sure as hell doesn't read bloggers, either those who know of what they write or those who don't.

Dump is pure cable input intuition and Twitter output. Twitter's not quite perfect for him: take it down to 90 characters, that'd be all he'd need to capture every ounce of understanding he supposes he has. Within those narrow hacks of emerged reality and fake news, Hoesktra isn't the Crazy Pete Hoestra who Steve M. is describing (leave aside the absolutely insanely reckless bloodsucking monster Marci Wheeler has gone after for better part of the last 2 decades).

But other natsec advisors will at least tell Dump he can't have Gaffney; they WON'T call him off of Hoestra: crazy as he is, he's been very supportive of the more criminally insane in the ranks of the CIA. When you think "disappeard torture videos", Hoestra's among the key figures who allowed that to happen - and maybe even brought it about in the first place.

The man's demented; but then, so's this president-elect.

jsrtheta said...

@flipyrwhig: Keep in mind that Trump espouses whatever he heard from the last person he spoke to. He has no knowledge of anything.

I wonder if his love affair with Douglas MacArthur and George Patton is something he had drilled into him at military school. I doubt either represents the state of the art in military thinking, and Patton was a truly horrible human being. Maybe Trump just liked the movies.

Anyone who has to ask three times during a defense briefing why we don't use nuclear weapons doesn't know shit about history, war, or, really anything.

Feud Turgidson said...

Hey Daro, see this? I'm saluting you. One finger.

Hey Daro, what Jeff Ryan said? In spades.

Hey Daro, you might want to do some light reading about democratically elected autocrats who turn their countries into dictatorships. Erdogan would be a good start.

Hey Daro, see this? I'm leaving while saluting you again.

Same finger.

Unknown said...

Maybe if Trump would stop tripping over his dick we would ease up. The guy's hopeless.