Fox "News" personality (I refuse to say journalist) Chris Wallace yesterday referred to neoconservative warmongering chickenhawk William Kristol as an "expert" [sic] on Iraq. According to the link here, these are some examples of Kristol's "expertise":
September 19, 2002: Saddam Hussein was "past the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons.
February 20, 2003: "He's got weapons of mass destruction."
February 2003 (from his book, "The War Over Iraq"):
"The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though U.N., European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 troops may be required to police the war's aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries' forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two."
(Reality check: The war has cost over a trillion dollars and 120,000 US troops remain there seven years later.)
February 24, 2003: "In retrospect, [the Bush administration] probably shouldn't have gone down the inspections route ... Doing so merely handed the Europeans and the U.N. — neither of them known for their dissatisfaction with Saddam's rule — a say in the process. The idea, of course, was to mollify them (as well as Colin Powell) and in the process hope that inspectors would stumble across a casus belli. But neither aim has been accomplished.
February 24, 2003: "Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower."
March 1, 2003: "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president."
March 5, 2003: "We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction."
April 1 2003: "On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular."
Kristol is a fraud down to his toenails, one of the very worst of the soft-spoken homicidal maniacs who casually call for the deaths of other people on a routine basis. To say Kristol has been wrong on virtually every foreign policy pronouncement he's ever made doesn't quite do the word "wrong" justice. Kristol has raised being idiotically wrong to a surrealist art form, a dimension of wrongness beyond the grasp of the ordinary person. And for his bloodthirsty ranting, his total and utter incompetence, and his genuinely shocking dishonesty, he has been promoted and lionized, especially by the Radical Right.
An "expert"? In what? Inflicting grief and suffering on countless other people? Yes, in that area Kristol is virtually without peer among the degenerate class known as the conservative punditry. In every other respect, he is a malicious fool, and a particularly malignant tumor on our unfortunate body politic.
But an "expert" on Iraq? Is that a joke?
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