The Iraq War’s unhappy 10-year anniversary

Posted by Gene Healy

At about 9:30 p.m. on March 19, 2003, the shooting phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom began, with an unsuccessful “decapitation strike” aimed at top Iraqi leadership, including Saddam Hussein. Shortly thereafter, President George W. Bush told the American people in a nationally televised address that we’d gone to war “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

Ten years later, the future of “Iraqi Freedom” is unclear at best, but it’s evident that there wasn’t much to disarm and that the world was never in grave danger.

What has the Iraq War cost us, and what lessons, if any, have we learned?

Placing all the blame for the war on neoconservatives lets everyone else off far too lightly, it seems to me. The 2002-03 rush to war was abipartisan flight from responsibility.

In 2002, very few of our elected representatives were interested in doing basic due diligence before exercising the solemn responsibility that the Constitution gives Congress in the power “to declare War.” From late September 2002 on, copies of the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate on the Iraq threat were available to any member of the House or Senate who wanted to review it. Only a handful even bothered. Then-Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. — our current secretary of state and his predecessor — weren’t among the six senators who took the time to read the report before voting for war. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., explained that getting away to the secure room to read the NIE — a short walk away across the Capitol grounds — is “not easy to do” and that NIEs make for “extremely dense reading.”

The Beltway intelligentsia didn’t comport itself any better. In a recent article for the New Republic, “The Eve of Destruction,” TNR’s John B. Judis describes “what it was like to oppose the Iraq War in 2003.” Lonely: “within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded” opponents of the war. “Both of the major national dailies — The Washington Post and The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting) — were beating the drums for war,” as were most of “Washington’s thinktank honchos.”

Not all of them, however. In a 2001 debate on Iraq with former CIA Director James Woolsey, my Cato Institute colleague, then-Chairman William Niskanen, argued that “an unnecessary war is an unjust war” and one we would come to regret having fought.

Niskanen was right. A new report from the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University tallies up the costs: nearly 4,500 U.S. troop fatalities, an eventual budgetary cost of some $3.9 trillion and more than 130,000 civilians as “collateral damage.”

Amateur ornithologist Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., calls the dovish Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a “wacko bird” for raising questions about unchecked presidential war-making. Still, Paul ruled the roost at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, winning CPAC’s presidential straw poll.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on another poll of CPAC attendees, in which “only 34 percent said the US should adopt a more muscular role [abroad]; 50 percent said the US should pull back, leaving it more to allies to take care of trouble spots.” George Will reported on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that what he saw at CPAC was “the rise of the libertarian strand of Republicanism, which has an effect in foreign policy that is a pullback from nation-building and other ambitions aboard that they never countenance from government at home.”

Bill Niskanen, who passed away last year at the age of 78, never tired of reminding conservatives that war is a government program — and an especially destructive one at that.

The message may be starting to sink in.

Article originally published at the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/iraq-wars-unhappy-anniversary

Colorado Sheriff refuses to enforce state’s new gun laws

Posted by Steve Adcock

Article Highlights

CO requiring background checks for private sales, magazine limits

Sheriff considers new gun regulations to be false security

New state laws expected to be signed by Governor

Arguing that the state’s new controls on guns offer nothing but a false sense of security to state residents, Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said that he will not enforce any of the new regulations in his jurisdiction after they take effect.

“They’re feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable,” the Sheriff told the Greeley Tribune. ”Criminals are still going to get their guns,” he added.

The Colorado state legislature passed several gun measures in the past weeks, including a 15-round magazine limit and a $10 background check for every firearm transfer, even if the transfer is person-to-person rather than a sale from a licensed gun shop. The bill originally restricted magazine capacities to 10-rounds, but a last minute amendment to the bill upped the limit to 15.

Sheriff Cooke said he, and other sheriffs from the state, will not enforce the new gun regulations due to the difficulty of tracking gun owners (which, coincidentally becomes more and more difficult as gun regulations increase) and how little the new regulations will effect senseless gun crimes.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa told a group of residents in Colorado Springs last week that he, too, will not enforce the state’s new regulations.

New York’s new SAFE Act claims first victim, Iraq war veteran

Posted by Steve Adcock

Article Highlights

War veteran victim of entrapment by state of New York police

Faces 7-years in jail after selling two now-banned weapons

Laughably, state considers man’s actions “potentially dangerous”

Benjamin Wassell of Silver Creek, New York, was arrested this week and charged with selling weapons now banned in the state of New York after the passage of the “SAFE Act” to an under cover police officer. He is the first victim of his state’s new terribly destructive gun control measure.

He is charged with twice selling now-banned AR-15s with magazines that exceed the new state-wide capacity limit and a pistol grip, telescoping butt stock and bayonet mount. The first sale included 299 rounds of ammunition and six magazines. The second sale included 21 rounds of ammunition. He is charged with felonies that could land the Iraq war veteran and weapons expert in jail for as many as 7 years.

“By selling these illegal firearms, Mr. Wassell’s actions had potentially dangerous consequences for New Yorkers,” said State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who added that the illegal sale of semiautomatic weapons will not go unpunished.

The insanity of this rammed through piece of legislation continues to amaze, and the words of the state’s own Attorney General stands as proof of just how clueless and inconsequential these gun control measures really are. ”Potentially dangerous consequences”? This man was setup by agents of the state – in this case, an undercover police officer – hell-bent on putting a knowledgeable weapons expert and war veteran behind bars for selling a weapon that was once legal just weeks ago. The implication that this arrest makes anyone in New York safer is nonsensical on its face.

This man is a victim of the systematic destruction of liberty within the state of New York.

New bill would ban those on terror watch list from buying guns

Posted by Steve Adcock

Last week, Democrat Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced a bill that would ban the sale of firearms to those who are on the terrorist watch list, which fills what the Senator considers to be a “gaping hole” in federal gun control legislation.

One question: How does an individual get into the terror watch list? Or for that matter, how does one get off that list?

Currently, federal law prohibits the sale of firearms to those who have committed a crime (including domestic violence or illegal immigration). The law does not give the government the right to confiscate weapons of, or prevent the sale to, those on the so-called terrorist watch list.

Guilty until proven innocent. Shameful.

This, by very definition, means the Lautenberg bill would prohibit the sale of guns to those who have not broken any law. Sure, the term “terrorist watch list” sounds bad, and who wouldn’t want to ban the sale of weapons to terrorists?

But nobody really knows how you get onto that list – or who is on the list. By what standard does the government consider you to be a potential terrorist, and should that standard – whatever it is – automatically disqualify you from firearm purchases when you have committed no crime?

“Our gun laws have gaping holes that allow known and suspected terrorists to walk into a gun store and leave with legally purchased deadly weapons,” he said. The sky sure is falling, isn’t it Senator?

How many of our nation’s school shootings would have been prevented by this bill?

Mr. Lautenberg needs to answer this question. The answer, of course, is simple: this bill would have prevented no school tragedy, and Lautenberg knows it. Gun control efforts are notorious for enacting legislation that historically accounts for an incredibly small fraction of gun crime in the United States, if that. This bill is no different.

In fact, the bill’s very premise is terribly flawed. To support this bill, one would have to believe that terrorists have no ability to obtain firearms through undocumented and underground channels. Further, the bill assumes that a known terrorist, who has a premeditated plan and clear opportunity to terrorize the United States, would surely use his or her own identity to purchase firearms. These assumptions, which this entire bill depends on, are laughably absurd.

And please ignore the fact that the United States government has funded and sold weapons to nations that harbor terrorists for decades, including nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Egypt. The United States is the largest arms exporter in the world, by far! But, even the most basic logic and reasoning has no place in the discussion of gun control. This bill fails the sanity check.

The Lautenberg bill brings the insanity of gun control to a whole new level. Not only does current gun legislation make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase firearms for personal protection, this bill would make it illegal to sell a gun to a person who the government believes might commit a crime. This nonsense has no place in a free society.

This is another example of rampant destruction of personal liberty in the United States and sheltered politicians who are clueless to the realities of normal life in our country. If Lautenberg has his way, you no longer need to be a convicted criminal any longer to have your constitutional right to keep and bear arms removed from you by federal bureaucrats under “less than public” guidelines and procedures.

If the government believes you might commit a crime in the future, then basic constitutional rights no longer apply to you. You are, most definitely, guilty until proven innocent.

Poll worker indicted after voting for Obama six times in 2012

Posted by Steve Adcock

Article Highlights

Poll worker accused of voting at least six times in 2012 elections

May have committed voter fraud in two previous elections

Two other workers indicted at same time with more voter fraud

A so-called “veteran” poll worker was officially indicted this week with eight counts of voter fraud in the 2012 presidential election. She admitted to voting for Barack Obama twice but has been accused of placing at least six different votes.

She is also charged with voter fraud in the 2008 and 2011 elections. Two other poll workers have been charged separately with similar vote fraud accusations.

“Yes, I voted twice,” the Cincinnati poll worker said on camera, fearing that her vote would not count if she only voted once, like a typical law-abiding citizen. She is accused of using an absentee ballot to vote through the mail along with her vote in-person on election day. Ohio county prosecutors said she has also been charged with voting under the names of at least five other people in previous elections.

This makes one wonder how legitimate any election really is in the United States.