Following the news of an attack by the Taliban in on a restaurant in Kabul, Afghanistan that killed 21 people, who better for Faux "news" to bring in for some commentary than war criminal and history revisionist Oliver North, so he could continue with his routine of attacking the Obama administration for their foreign policy? Because god knows everything that's gone wrong in the Middle East is a result of President Obama wanting to pull our troops out of the region, and not the fact that we went in there to begin with.
NORTH: You're gong to see more of that kind of chaos in Kabul and elsewhere around the region, not just in Afghanistan, as a consequence of what we have failed to do, not militarily, but politically and diplomatically in this administration.
PEMMARAJU: So you think it's going to get worse before it gets better?
NORTH: I don't see how it gets better because the administration has been so half hearted, quite frankly, incompetent. Set aside what their real intentions were. When Obama said he was ending the war responsibly in Iraq, he didn't. The cut and run, when there's a bilateral security agreement already negotiated by the previous administration, sitting there waiting to be signed. Instead, he chose to use one of Maliki's little nits, to say, “That's it. We're gone.” Almost like a petulant child. So inside of thirty days, every American support troop, logistics adviser, intelligence, all of the stuff that wasn't in the Green Zone left.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's because he's been pulling this same routine since President Obama was elected. Our own Bill W took him apart for some similar hackery back in 2008:
After lauding Oliver North for his new book that apparently has more pictures than it does pages (No doubt North's picture-book tells a much different story than the truth-laid-bare photos and accounts from an award-winning unembedded photojournalist like Dahr Jamail, but I digress), Sean Hannity asks North for his opinion on whether the President was right to compare the want to hold diplomatic talks with Iran to the appeasement of Nazis in the 1930’s.
Oliver North: As you know, I’m the history guy at Fox News Channel, right? I’ve done this WWII series – 52 of our episodes about WWII. Had it not been for Chamberlain going to sit down with Adolf Hitler and try to cut a deal in Munich, WWII might never have happened, but it emboldened the dictator. That’s what the President said yesterday in Jerusalem. And a little reminder today, a shot across the bow here at the NRA, when John McCain got up and said, 'You cannot have these kinds of unconditional, no preconditions discussions, with despots and dictators' - dead on the mark.
For someone who was lucky not to have spent the better part of the last two decades making license plates, he's got some nerve touching this topic. This is the guy who oversaw the arms for hostages deal with Iran in 1985 (among other crimes), right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war in which the US was actively and openly arming and supporting Saddam Hussein. Ollie North didn't just talk with Iran at a time they were our enemy in a proxy-war, he actually helped to arm them, bypassing Congress by violating the Boland Amendment to help fund an illegal war in Nicaragua.
Lacking even a shred of credibility, Fox News' "history guy" is to the truth in the historical record what Dick Cheney is to gun safety. He shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the subject, and anyone who believes a word of what he says about it is a fool.
Negotiation is not appeasement and there are zero parallels between simply opening up a diplomatic dialogue with Iran and the capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement. It's a ridiculous assertion, especially considering that the Bush administration itself has negotiated with Libya and North Korea, yet Iran's previous offers to put everything, including its nuclear program, on the table and peacefully negotiate have been completely ignored even after Iran had been an important ally of the coalition against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
If there's one thing you can count on from Fox, it's that they're going to rely on their viewers having absolutely no knowledge about the history of the United States and they're really counting on them forgetting the last half a century or so and just erasing it from their memory banks altogether. Iran-Contra never happened. George W. Bush was a hero for invading a couple of countries that were not a threat to us and was spreading "freedom." And President Obama screwed us in the Middle East because he decided to "cut and run" instead of keeping our military there forever.
