Nobody wants to admit this: Saddam Hussein would be our ally against ISIS

[calimary]

63. Welcome to DU, shadowmayor!

Glad you're here. If they "trained" for these vaunted positions as foreign policy "experts" by playing "Risk" - then that would explain their utter recklessness in "shepherding" US involvement in world affairs. When you play a game - it's a GAME. There are no consequences when you lose. When you lose at "Monopoly" you don't really lose all your properties and go bankrupt in real life. I don't know if that's what the PNACers did, but they SURE didn't attempt to get any first-hand experience in actual combat situations. Sure didn't line up to sign up - and put their OWN asses in harm's way. They knew nothing, and listening to them gained us nothing. WORSE than nothing. Actively negative real-life consequences. Not just highfalutin "think" tank opining from the elitist chickenhawks of the so-called right. Very few of them ever got their hands dirty. Very few of them ever had skin in the game. They were quite literally arm-chair warriors.

And we who objected were completely shut out, and shut down. There was no face time made generously available to our side. The closest we got, back in the beginning, was michael o'hanlon. He was on camera a lot, representing "the left." michael o'hanlon's appearance on some news or news/talk show arose from his position as an analyst at the Brookings Institution. Back then, at the beginning of bush/cheney, and certainly in the latter days of the Clinton administration, you could name about a half-dozen different institutions, think tanks, foundations, and such on the far right. Heritage Foundation, Eagle Forum, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Hoover Institute, Federalist Society, and our favorites - the good folks at the Project for a New American Century.

When it came to naming institutions, think tanks, foundations, and such on the left - you could come up with the Brookings Institution, and that was pretty much it. Or at least that's all you saw on TV or cable. Ironically enough, michael o'hanlon is a signatory of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) along with donald rumsfeld and jebbie bush, john mccain, paul wolfowitz, scooter libby, elliott abrams, richard perle, john bolton, richard allen, frank gaffney, fred kagan, donald kagan, jeane kirkpatrick, randy scheunemann, john mccain, ed meese, dan quayle (!), charles krauthammer, bill kristol, and richard bruce cheney and just a whole cavalcade of VERMIN who promoted, then and now, a philosophy that called upon America to assert its dominance over the rest of the world. As such, it can be expected that the PNAC policy platform will be part of michael o'hanlon's mind set in one way or other. After all, he did sign off on it. Especially regarding control and dominance of strategic resources. To ensure this would be so, the PNACers advocated an America that was able "to fight and decisively win multiple wars on multiple fronts." All for the sake of our purported way of life and our alleged exceptionalism. Even aggressively imposed imperialism and forced capitalism everywhere. We had to be The Badass of the World, and assert our planetary primacy so that the flow of critical and strategic resources flowed to us without interruption. They wanted and tried to design war in Iraq before bush/cheney was even in the White House. They tried to sell it to Bill Clinton in the last quarter of his service. And they all rode in on their pal cheney's coat-tails.

http://www.publiceye.org/pnac_chart/pnac.html

THIS >>>>> "What a colossal mess we have created. Was Saddam a good guy? Hell no - but I notice very little discussion about those wonderful humanitarians running the Saudi empire? I could weep for a week for what has been done in our name, but I'm too tired." I know what you mean, shadowmayor.