[h=1]West Virginia Republican explains how rape can have ‘beautiful’ results[/h]
David Ferguson
06 Feb 2015 at 09:25 ET
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Del. Brian Kurcaba (Facebook.com)
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A Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia said on Thursday that while rape is horrible, it’s “beautiful” that a child could be produced in the attack.
According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”
Kurcaba made the remarks during a House of Delegates discussion of a law outlawing all abortions in the state after 20 weeks’ gestation. At 20 weeks, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers allege, a fetus can feel pain and is therefore too viable to abort.
The bill was passed by West Virginia Republicans in 2014, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. Now the state GOP has revived the bill and voted to remove an exception for victims of rape and incest.
Kurcaba’s remarks echo a string of embarrassing statements by Republicans regarding rape and women’s bodies.
In 2012, Missouri’s Rep. Todd Akin said that pregnancy can’t result from rape because “If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”
Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that while sexual assaults are unfortunate, the resulting pregnancy is a “gift from God.”
Libertarian favorite Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) made statements of his own implying that women routinely fabricate rape stories in order to get abortions.
“If it’s an honest rape,” said Paul, physicians should allow the victim to abort, but otherwise, women should not be able to terminate their pregnancies just because they claim to have been raped.
Republican leaders convened an emergency meeting in 2013 urging the rank and file to stop talking about rape altogether lest it further alienate women voters, who have been abandoning the Republican Party in droves.
Nonetheless, Kurcaba — a financial advisor who was elected in 2014 — appears eager to bring discussions of rape back into the dialogue about women’s access to reproductive health care.
David Ferguson
06 Feb 2015 at 09:25 ET
TwitterFacebookMore
Don't miss stories. Follow Raw Story!
A Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia said on Thursday that while rape is horrible, it’s “beautiful” that a child could be produced in the attack.
According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”
Kurcaba made the remarks during a House of Delegates discussion of a law outlawing all abortions in the state after 20 weeks’ gestation. At 20 weeks, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers allege, a fetus can feel pain and is therefore too viable to abort.
The bill was passed by West Virginia Republicans in 2014, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. Now the state GOP has revived the bill and voted to remove an exception for victims of rape and incest.
Kurcaba’s remarks echo a string of embarrassing statements by Republicans regarding rape and women’s bodies.
In 2012, Missouri’s Rep. Todd Akin said that pregnancy can’t result from rape because “If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”
Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that while sexual assaults are unfortunate, the resulting pregnancy is a “gift from God.”
Libertarian favorite Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) made statements of his own implying that women routinely fabricate rape stories in order to get abortions.
“If it’s an honest rape,” said Paul, physicians should allow the victim to abort, but otherwise, women should not be able to terminate their pregnancies just because they claim to have been raped.
Republican leaders convened an emergency meeting in 2013 urging the rank and file to stop talking about rape altogether lest it further alienate women voters, who have been abandoning the Republican Party in droves.
Nonetheless, Kurcaba — a financial advisor who was elected in 2014 — appears eager to bring discussions of rape back into the dialogue about women’s access to reproductive health care.
[h=1]Ted Cruz, charlatan[/h]
Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) speaks at the Georgia Republican Party’s state convention on May 15, 2015, in Athens, Ga. (David Goldman/AP)
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer May 27
As he prepared for his presidential run over the last year or so, a hawkish Sen. Ted Cruz has said U.S. policy in the Middle East and elsewhere is a mess because of President Obama’s weakness — particularly his failure to enforce his own “red line” after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons.
“A critical reason for [Vladimir] Putin’s aggression has been President Obama’s weakness,” the Texas Republican said in a typical appearance, on ABC News last year. “You’d better believe that Putin sees that in Syria,” he added. “Obama draws a red line and ignores the red line.”
This takes quite a lot of chutzpah, even by Cruz standards. It’s true that Obama didn’t enforce his red line in Syria — in large part because Cruz rallied opposition to bombing Syria.
I was reminded of Cruz’s hypocrisy this week by Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who served three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan as an Air Force pilot. Kinzinger, who favors a muscular foreign policy, was one of a small group of House Republicans leading the effort to give Obama authority to bomb Syria in 2013 — but they were undone when Cruz began declaring that bombing the Syrian regime would make the United States “al-Qaeda’s air force.”
“I think Ted Cruz bears some responsibility for not enforcing the red line,” Kinzinger told me. “The Republican support began crumbling the more Cruz spoke. His words implied that anyone who voted for strikes would be acting as an agent of al-Qaeda.”
Condemning Obama for failing to enforce the Syrian red line after blocking him from enforcing the very same red line? This is vintage Cruz, who I’ve long suspected to be a charlatan.
As I’ve written before, I first encountered him when he was an ambitious staffer on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign 15 years ago, and he positioned himself as a young striver, not a hard-edged ideologue.
But when the tea party rose, Cruz opportunistically aligned himself with those views.
Now, isolationism is fading within the conservative movement, and Cruz is opportunistically becoming more of an interventionist.
Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the leading voice of isolationism in the GOP presidential field, disavows the label and has gone from saying there is not “clear-cut American interest” in fighting the Islamic State to saying he would vote to do so “in a heartbeat.”
As Politico’s Michael Crowley observed this week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now trying to establish himself as the leading hawk among the presidential contenders, was also opposed to bombing Syria after Obama left the question to Congress in 2013. But he wasn’t as instrumental as Cruz in denying Obama congressional support.
Back in 2013, when Obama was seeking congressional approval for Syria airstrikes, Cruz said his constituents were telling him not to “put us in the middle of a sectarian civil war, particularly when doing so would help al-Qaeda terrorists.” He belittled the significance of the chemical-weapons red line, saying, “It appears what the president is pressing for is essentially protecting his public relations.”
Ted Cruz in his own words(2:53)
Sen. Ted Cruz has declared his candidacy for president. The Texas Republican is known for his fiery oratorial style. Here's his take on immigration, Obamacare and, well, green eggs and ham. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Previously, Cruz had spoken out on the Senate floor against Obama’s plans to arm the Syrian rebels, saying, “It seems we are backing into an intractable crisis where there are no good actors but plenty of bad outcomes for America.”
But last year, Cruz became bellicose. “What we ought to have is a directed, concerted, overwhelming campaign to take them out,” Cruz said of the Islamic State in another ABC interview. In an interview on Fox News, he accused Obama of operating a “photo-op” foreign policy and of being “unserious” in handling the Islamic State. At another point, he said the United States should “bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
In a December 2014 speech, Cruz shamelessly declared, “President Obama announced his now infamous red line in Syria and then did nothing.” That “gave the green light to aggressive or oppressive regimes across the globe that America is not to be feared.”
This is exactly what Kinzinger argued — back in 2013, when Cruz was arguing the other side. Kinzinger agreed with Obama’s red line on chemical weapons, and he thought Obama should have struck the Syrian regime without congressional approval.
But once Obama dropped the issue on Congress, Kinzinger said, support for military action collapsed because of “people like Ted Cruz out there campaigning against this thing.”
And now Kinzinger is campaigning against the opportunistic Cruz; he backs Jeb Bush for president.
“If you’re somebody who is going to say you stand on principle,” the congressman said, “you can’t have foreign policy views that shift in the wind.”
Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) speaks at the Georgia Republican Party’s state convention on May 15, 2015, in Athens, Ga. (David Goldman/AP)
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer May 27 As he prepared for his presidential run over the last year or so, a hawkish Sen. Ted Cruz has said U.S. policy in the Middle East and elsewhere is a mess because of President Obama’s weakness — particularly his failure to enforce his own “red line” after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons.
“A critical reason for [Vladimir] Putin’s aggression has been President Obama’s weakness,” the Texas Republican said in a typical appearance, on ABC News last year. “You’d better believe that Putin sees that in Syria,” he added. “Obama draws a red line and ignores the red line.”
This takes quite a lot of chutzpah, even by Cruz standards. It’s true that Obama didn’t enforce his red line in Syria — in large part because Cruz rallied opposition to bombing Syria.
I was reminded of Cruz’s hypocrisy this week by Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who served three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan as an Air Force pilot. Kinzinger, who favors a muscular foreign policy, was one of a small group of House Republicans leading the effort to give Obama authority to bomb Syria in 2013 — but they were undone when Cruz began declaring that bombing the Syrian regime would make the United States “al-Qaeda’s air force.”
“I think Ted Cruz bears some responsibility for not enforcing the red line,” Kinzinger told me. “The Republican support began crumbling the more Cruz spoke. His words implied that anyone who voted for strikes would be acting as an agent of al-Qaeda.”
Condemning Obama for failing to enforce the Syrian red line after blocking him from enforcing the very same red line? This is vintage Cruz, who I’ve long suspected to be a charlatan.
As I’ve written before, I first encountered him when he was an ambitious staffer on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign 15 years ago, and he positioned himself as a young striver, not a hard-edged ideologue.
But when the tea party rose, Cruz opportunistically aligned himself with those views.
Now, isolationism is fading within the conservative movement, and Cruz is opportunistically becoming more of an interventionist.
Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the leading voice of isolationism in the GOP presidential field, disavows the label and has gone from saying there is not “clear-cut American interest” in fighting the Islamic State to saying he would vote to do so “in a heartbeat.”
As Politico’s Michael Crowley observed this week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now trying to establish himself as the leading hawk among the presidential contenders, was also opposed to bombing Syria after Obama left the question to Congress in 2013. But he wasn’t as instrumental as Cruz in denying Obama congressional support.
Back in 2013, when Obama was seeking congressional approval for Syria airstrikes, Cruz said his constituents were telling him not to “put us in the middle of a sectarian civil war, particularly when doing so would help al-Qaeda terrorists.” He belittled the significance of the chemical-weapons red line, saying, “It appears what the president is pressing for is essentially protecting his public relations.”
Ted Cruz in his own words(2:53)
Sen. Ted Cruz has declared his candidacy for president. The Texas Republican is known for his fiery oratorial style. Here's his take on immigration, Obamacare and, well, green eggs and ham. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Previously, Cruz had spoken out on the Senate floor against Obama’s plans to arm the Syrian rebels, saying, “It seems we are backing into an intractable crisis where there are no good actors but plenty of bad outcomes for America.”
But last year, Cruz became bellicose. “What we ought to have is a directed, concerted, overwhelming campaign to take them out,” Cruz said of the Islamic State in another ABC interview. In an interview on Fox News, he accused Obama of operating a “photo-op” foreign policy and of being “unserious” in handling the Islamic State. At another point, he said the United States should “bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
In a December 2014 speech, Cruz shamelessly declared, “President Obama announced his now infamous red line in Syria and then did nothing.” That “gave the green light to aggressive or oppressive regimes across the globe that America is not to be feared.”
This is exactly what Kinzinger argued — back in 2013, when Cruz was arguing the other side. Kinzinger agreed with Obama’s red line on chemical weapons, and he thought Obama should have struck the Syrian regime without congressional approval.
But once Obama dropped the issue on Congress, Kinzinger said, support for military action collapsed because of “people like Ted Cruz out there campaigning against this thing.”
And now Kinzinger is campaigning against the opportunistic Cruz; he backs Jeb Bush for president.
“If you’re somebody who is going to say you stand on principle,” the congressman said, “you can’t have foreign policy views that shift in the wind.”
[h=1]Jeb Bush’s claim that Islamic State ‘didn’t exist when my brother was president’[/h] By Glenn Kessler May 27
(REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
“ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president.”
–Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), remarks during a business rountable in Portsmouth, N.H., May 20, 2015
Our colleague Robert Costa recently wrote an interesting article about how Republican presidential hopefuls plan to frame questions about the situation in Iraq. “After more than a decade bearing the political burden of Iraq, Republicans are making a dogged effort to shed it by arguing that the Islamic State’s gruesome ascent is a symptom of Obama’s foreign policy, rather than a byproduct of the 2003 invasion they once championed,” he wrote.
Given the recent setbacks in Iraq for U.S.-backed forces, this might be an effective strategy. Former governor Bush, who was perceived to have stumbled by failing to quickly say the initial invasion was a mistake, tried this tactic in a recent appearance in New Hampshire. But does his history add up?
[h=3]The Facts[/h] Islamic State, also known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), certainly has become an important player in the Middle East, taking advantage of the civil war in Syria and the disarray in the Iraqi government to claim vast areas of both countries. In the past couple of years, the group’s activities have gathered attention in the United States; it was only a year and half ago that President Obama dismissed Islamic State as a “JV team.”
But that doesn’t mean it “didn’t exist,” as Bush put it, during President George W. Bush’s presidency. A quick check of Thomas A. Ricks’ 2009 book “The Gamble” finds a reference to a statement by Islamic State during a 2007 battle. Ricks described it as “a group affiliated with al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, to a large extent, the Islamic State of today is simply an outgrowth of al-Qaeda of Iraq. In 2007, the Times of London, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, described “a radical plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn.”
The National Counterterrorism Center puts it this way: “Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), was established in April 2004 by long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.” The NCTC notes that Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006 and afterwards his successor announced the formation of the Islamic State.
As analyst Brian Fishman noted in a 2006 report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the announcement was made on Oct. 15, 2006 — more than two years before Bush left office. (This paper, interestingly, was one of the reports that Osama bin Laden had on his bookshelf when he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.)
“Unfortunately, almost everyone in Washington, including those of us that understood and emphasized the political shifts it had made, continued to use ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ as shorthand for the group because it was widely understood nomenclature among policymakers,” said Fishman, who is now with the New America Foundation. “This was a mistake; I certainly regret conceding to convenience at the time.”
Fishman added that although the term “ISIS” was not used until 2013, after the group captured territory in Syria, “the Islamic State of Iraq, declared in 2006, was intended to be a sprawling entity like the one we see today. That was its political purpose and ambition. Today’s ISIS is the same organization, only stronger.”
As for al-Qaeda being “wiped out” by the time Bush left office, Fishman says that “despite its setbacks, the ISI was one of the strongest terrorist groups in the world even at its weakest point after the Surge.”
The 2009 threat assessment by the Director of National Intelligence, delivered one month after Obama took office, said AQI “is likely to retain a residual capacity to undertake terrorist operations for years to come.” The report, however, suggested that the group was greatly weakened. “AQI, although still dangerous, has experienced the defection of members, lost key mobilization areas, suffered disruption of support infrastructure and funding, and been forced to change targeting priorities,” DNI said.
A spokesman for Jeb Bush noted that in 2010 Vice President Biden bragged about the administration’s apparent success in Iraq, saying, the administration “will be able to point to it and say, ‘We told you what we’re going to do, and we did it.’” Later, he said, al-Qaeda disowned ISIS. “The Syrian Civil War was a massive recruiting boon for ISIS,” he said, pointing to a Washington Post article on how the Syrian conflict bolstered the organization. “As Syria became worse, ISIS grew more powerful. It returned to Iraq, from which it had been all but defeated.”
The spokesman noted that Bush went on to say that “there were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the president could have built on.”
[h=3]The Pinocchio Test[/h] Bush seems to have fallen prey to Washington conventional wisdom, in which ISIS suddenly emerged into consciousness in the past year or so. That may be fine for armchair analysts or journalists. But that’s little excuse for a presidential candidate, who might have to grapple with this problem if he or she is elected president.
With some fine-tuning of his statement, Bush could have made the case that Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq, combined with the president’s reluctance to intervene in Syria, fostered the conditions that allowed Islamic State to expand territory under its control. That’s certainly an opinion that could be expressed. (Update: Max Boot, writing in Commentary, thinks this was implied in Bush’s statement.)
Instead, Bush flatly stated as fact that ISIS did not exist when his brother was president — and that al-Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when Obama took office. Both statements are false and worthy of Four Pinocchios.
[h=3]Four Pinocchios[/h]
(About our rating scale)
(REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
“ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president.”
–Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), remarks during a business rountable in Portsmouth, N.H., May 20, 2015
Our colleague Robert Costa recently wrote an interesting article about how Republican presidential hopefuls plan to frame questions about the situation in Iraq. “After more than a decade bearing the political burden of Iraq, Republicans are making a dogged effort to shed it by arguing that the Islamic State’s gruesome ascent is a symptom of Obama’s foreign policy, rather than a byproduct of the 2003 invasion they once championed,” he wrote.
Given the recent setbacks in Iraq for U.S.-backed forces, this might be an effective strategy. Former governor Bush, who was perceived to have stumbled by failing to quickly say the initial invasion was a mistake, tried this tactic in a recent appearance in New Hampshire. But does his history add up?
[h=3]The Facts[/h] Islamic State, also known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), certainly has become an important player in the Middle East, taking advantage of the civil war in Syria and the disarray in the Iraqi government to claim vast areas of both countries. In the past couple of years, the group’s activities have gathered attention in the United States; it was only a year and half ago that President Obama dismissed Islamic State as a “JV team.”
But that doesn’t mean it “didn’t exist,” as Bush put it, during President George W. Bush’s presidency. A quick check of Thomas A. Ricks’ 2009 book “The Gamble” finds a reference to a statement by Islamic State during a 2007 battle. Ricks described it as “a group affiliated with al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, to a large extent, the Islamic State of today is simply an outgrowth of al-Qaeda of Iraq. In 2007, the Times of London, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, described “a radical plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn.”
The National Counterterrorism Center puts it this way: “Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), was established in April 2004 by long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.” The NCTC notes that Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006 and afterwards his successor announced the formation of the Islamic State.
As analyst Brian Fishman noted in a 2006 report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the announcement was made on Oct. 15, 2006 — more than two years before Bush left office. (This paper, interestingly, was one of the reports that Osama bin Laden had on his bookshelf when he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.)
“Unfortunately, almost everyone in Washington, including those of us that understood and emphasized the political shifts it had made, continued to use ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ as shorthand for the group because it was widely understood nomenclature among policymakers,” said Fishman, who is now with the New America Foundation. “This was a mistake; I certainly regret conceding to convenience at the time.”
Fishman added that although the term “ISIS” was not used until 2013, after the group captured territory in Syria, “the Islamic State of Iraq, declared in 2006, was intended to be a sprawling entity like the one we see today. That was its political purpose and ambition. Today’s ISIS is the same organization, only stronger.”
As for al-Qaeda being “wiped out” by the time Bush left office, Fishman says that “despite its setbacks, the ISI was one of the strongest terrorist groups in the world even at its weakest point after the Surge.”
The 2009 threat assessment by the Director of National Intelligence, delivered one month after Obama took office, said AQI “is likely to retain a residual capacity to undertake terrorist operations for years to come.” The report, however, suggested that the group was greatly weakened. “AQI, although still dangerous, has experienced the defection of members, lost key mobilization areas, suffered disruption of support infrastructure and funding, and been forced to change targeting priorities,” DNI said.
A spokesman for Jeb Bush noted that in 2010 Vice President Biden bragged about the administration’s apparent success in Iraq, saying, the administration “will be able to point to it and say, ‘We told you what we’re going to do, and we did it.’” Later, he said, al-Qaeda disowned ISIS. “The Syrian Civil War was a massive recruiting boon for ISIS,” he said, pointing to a Washington Post article on how the Syrian conflict bolstered the organization. “As Syria became worse, ISIS grew more powerful. It returned to Iraq, from which it had been all but defeated.”
The spokesman noted that Bush went on to say that “there were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the president could have built on.”
[h=3]The Pinocchio Test[/h] Bush seems to have fallen prey to Washington conventional wisdom, in which ISIS suddenly emerged into consciousness in the past year or so. That may be fine for armchair analysts or journalists. But that’s little excuse for a presidential candidate, who might have to grapple with this problem if he or she is elected president.
With some fine-tuning of his statement, Bush could have made the case that Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq, combined with the president’s reluctance to intervene in Syria, fostered the conditions that allowed Islamic State to expand territory under its control. That’s certainly an opinion that could be expressed. (Update: Max Boot, writing in Commentary, thinks this was implied in Bush’s statement.)
Instead, Bush flatly stated as fact that ISIS did not exist when his brother was president — and that al-Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when Obama took office. Both statements are false and worthy of Four Pinocchios.
[h=3]Four Pinocchios[/h]
(About our rating scale)
Jeb Bush’s claim that Islamic State ‘didn’t exist when my brother was president’
By Glenn Kessler May 27
(REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
“ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president.”
–Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), remarks during a business rountable in Portsmouth, N.H., May 20, 2015
Our colleague Robert Costa recently wrote an interesting article about how Republican presidential hopefuls plan to frame questions about the situation in Iraq. “After more than a decade bearing the political burden of Iraq, Republicans are making a dogged effort to shed it by arguing that the Islamic State’s gruesome ascent is a symptom of Obama’s foreign policy, rather than a byproduct of the 2003 invasion they once championed,” he wrote.
Given the recent setbacks in Iraq for U.S.-backed forces, this might be an effective strategy. Former governor Bush, who was perceived to have stumbled by failing to quickly say the initial invasion was a mistake, tried this tactic in a recent appearance in New Hampshire. But does his history add up?
The Facts
Islamic State, also known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), certainly has become an important player in the Middle East, taking advantage of the civil war in Syria and the disarray in the Iraqi government to claim vast areas of both countries. In the past couple of years, the group’s activities have gathered attention in the United States; it was only a year and half ago that President Obama dismissed Islamic State as a “JV team.”
But that doesn’t mean it “didn’t exist,” as Bush put it, during President George W. Bush’s presidency. A quick check of Thomas A. Ricks’ 2009 book “The Gamble” finds a reference to a statement by Islamic State during a 2007 battle. Ricks described it as “a group affiliated with al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, to a large extent, the Islamic State of today is simply an outgrowth of al-Qaeda of Iraq. In 2007, the Times of London, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, described “a radical plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn.”
The National Counterterrorism Center puts it this way: “Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), was established in April 2004 by long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.” The NCTC notes that Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006 and afterwards his successor announced the formation of the Islamic State.
As analyst Brian Fishman noted in a 2006 report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the announcement was made on Oct. 15, 2006 — more than two years before Bush left office. (This paper, interestingly, was one of the reports that Osama bin Laden had on his bookshelf when he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.)
“Unfortunately, almost everyone in Washington, including those of us that understood and emphasized the political shifts it had made, continued to use ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ as shorthand for the group because it was widely understood nomenclature among policymakers,” said Fishman, who is now with the New America Foundation. “This was a mistake; I certainly regret conceding to convenience at the time.”
Fishman added that although the term “ISIS” was not used until 2013, after the group captured territory in Syria, “the Islamic State of Iraq, declared in 2006, was intended to be a sprawling entity like the one we see today. That was its political purpose and ambition. Today’s ISIS is the same organization, only stronger.”
As for al-Qaeda being “wiped out” by the time Bush left office, Fishman says that “despite its setbacks, the ISI was one of the strongest terrorist groups in the world even at its weakest point after the Surge.”
The 2009 threat assessment by the Director of National Intelligence, delivered one month after Obama took office, said AQI “is likely to retain a residual capacity to undertake terrorist operations for years to come.” The report, however, suggested that the group was greatly weakened. “AQI, although still dangerous, has experienced the defection of members, lost key mobilization areas, suffered disruption of support infrastructure and funding, and been forced to change targeting priorities,” DNI said.
A spokesman for Jeb Bush noted that in 2010 Vice President Biden bragged about the administration’s apparent success in Iraq, saying, the administration “will be able to point to it and say, ‘We told you what we’re going to do, and we did it.’” Later, he said, al-Qaeda disowned ISIS. “The Syrian Civil War was a massive recruiting boon for ISIS,” he said, pointing to a Washington Post article on how the Syrian conflict bolstered the organization. “As Syria became worse, ISIS grew more powerful. It returned to Iraq, from which it had been all but defeated.”
The spokesman noted that Bush went on to say that “there were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the president could have built on.”
The Pinocchio Test
Bush seems to have fallen prey to Washington conventional wisdom, in which ISIS suddenly emerged into consciousness in the past year or so. That may be fine for armchair analysts or journalists. But that’s little excuse for a presidential candidate, who might have to grapple with this problem if he or she is elected president.
With some fine-tuning of his statement, Bush could have made the case that Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq, combined with the president’s reluctance to intervene in Syria, fostered the conditions that allowed Islamic State to expand territory under its control. That’s certainly an opinion that could be expressed. (Update: Max Boot, writing in Commentary, thinks this was implied in Bush’s statement.)
Instead, Bush flatly stated as fact that ISIS did not exist when his brother was president — and that al-Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when Obama took office. Both statements are false and worthy of Four Pinocchios.
Four Pinocchios
(About our rating scale)
When did dishonesty become hypocrisy?
If you want dishonesty you can find a ton of it in below, especially the '9/10' crap:
Hold up, Scott. You mean it isn't true that "Al-Qaeda terrorized America on 9-11, they knew America had been terrorized enough and that there wasn't a need to conduct further terror attacks"?
I mean, seriously, who believes that kind of shit? If Al-Qaeda had the chance to pull of 9-11 again on 9-12 they would've done it in a cocaine heartbeat.
And if it was Obama president that day....how do you think the right would be? You think they would be saying it didn't matter who was president? Ummm no...you would hear things like this:
"They attacked when a dem was president because they are weak"
"Did you see Obama sit in that classroom like a deer in the headlights, no doubt he was in on the attacks"
" I'm connecting the dots on Obama and al queda relationship"
" Obama had a memo showing bin laden was ready to strike, impeach him now"
