Matt Ortega

FOX News commentator Bill O’Reilly continues masquerading whatever it is that he does on television under the banner of “news” and “journalism.”

Last night, O’Reilly unveiled a new defense on the continued American involvement in Iraq, just two days before “Mission Accomplished Day” on Thursday: “We didn’t invade Iraq.”

Yesterday, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly made the incredible claim that the United States never invaded Iraq: “We didn’t invade Iraq.” He added, “It was a declaration of war, it was a declaration to enforce the first Gulf War Treaty.”

First, the United States did not declare war on Iraq. Congress authorized President Bush to use force against Iraq. In fact, the U.S. has not declared war against any nation since the Second World War. The U.S. declared war on other nations five times and Iraq was not one of them — in 1991, or 2003.

Second, the maneuvers that led to open warfare are immaterial to the point that a nation was, in fact, physically invaded by another nation. In fact, O’Reilly himself referred to the invasion on a number of occasions, as well as the Bush administration.

Third, there is no such thing as the “First Gulf War Treaty.”

O’REILLY: [W]e liberate Iraq — liberate Kuwait, all right, and then we have a treaty, and the treaty says U.N. weapons inspectors are allowed to do X, Y, and Z, and 17 times Saddam says — violates those. Now you can understand why the United States government might be a little teed off about that. […]

O’REILLY: But do you understand that when you have 17 violations of a treaty, a war treaty, that you basically have to take action?

BLIX: Well, you’re talking about a war treaty. It was a cease-fire. It was not a war treaty.

O’REILLY: Oh, come on. Now don’t play semantics here, sir.

BLIX: Second — all right. I’m trying to be precise. You are imprecise.

“Semantics!”

Most free-thinking people who are aware of O’Reilly’s track record and loose handling of the facts would take the opinion of former United Nations weapons expert Hans Blix over a cable television commentator who worked for Inside Edition.

The kicker: after O’Reilly’s back and forth with guest Warren Ballentine, he says to him: “It was a declaration of war, it was a declaration to enforce the first Gulf War Treaty, which you don’t know anything about, Mr. Ballentine.”

Priceless.

In attempts to justify a prolonged, likely permanent, American encampment inside Iraq, conservatives continue to make silly comparisons.

The most first and most common comparison points to the continued U.S. presence in Germany and Japan following the collapse of the Third Reich and the Japanese empire in the Second World War, or Korea following the three-year war on the peninsula in the early 1950s. Stupid, I know, but that is what they claim. (For why this is a stupid argument, there is plenty of reading on that subject.)

The conservative blog, Red State, unveiled a new and even dumber argument. From their e-mail to supporters:

Clearly McCain was talking about a peace time standing presence … Someone should ask the Democrats if they think we’re still at war with the confederacy, the Germans, and the Japanese given all the standing American armies in the South, Germany, and Japan.

Here is what Bill Scher wasted fifteen seconds of his life writing:

But hey, at least Germany and Japan are like Iraq in that they are other countries.

I can’t believe I am wasting 15 seconds of my life to type this, but having military bases in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina does not constitute a permanent occupation. Does RedState really believe that 140 years after the Civil War, American troops have a “peace time standing presence” in the American south?

There you have it — the “Union” is still occupying the “Confederacy” because, apparently, the “Confederacy” never applied nor were accepted back into the “Union” during Reconstruction.

April 9 marks the 143rd anniversary of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender that effectively ended the Civil War.

The costs of leaving Iraq are debatable. The costs of staying are completely knowable. And they are getting higher and higher, and higher.

-Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware)
(The American Prospect, 04/08/08)

(Hat tip: Rafael Noboa)

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, wrote about the differences between the Democratic and Republican arguments on Iraq in the Washington Post.

The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for “staying the course” draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush’s and Sen. John McCain’s forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of “falling dominoes” that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.

Matthew Yglesias added on his own thoughts about the Domino Theory that enveloped U.S. foreign policy after the fall of China to the communists, and coaxed American strategic thinking into full scale war with Vietnam.

The right has made a lot of hay out of the fact that some anti-war types to some extent understated the extent to which a North Vietnamese victory would be a humanitarian problem for many South Vietnamese people. Much less hay has been made out of the fact that the hawks had been quite literally arguing that there was a straight line between the Communistification of Vietnam and then the inevitable spread of Communism to Malaysia, Indonesia, all of Asia, and soon enough the United States itself. The argument really was that we had to fact them over there or else we’d be fending them off from our very shores.

Ironically, March 29 marks the 35th anniversary of the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces from South Vietnam, and any discussion of Domino Theory and the Vietnam War compels me to refer readers to the incredible 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Watch the full documentary by Errol Morris, complete with the stellar original scores by Philip Glass, online here.

With the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq fast approaching, two stories turned up in the RSS reader one after another:

Bush: Iraq War Worth It

And –

Poll: Majority of Americans Say War Not Worth It