The Common Ills: Kerry caught lying, Shi'ite fighters caught inept and still struggling

Friday, March 13, 2015

Kerry caught lying, Shi'ite fighters caught inept and still struggling

John Kerry should be thanking Hillary Clinton for both her e-mail scandal and her refusal to take accountability. ('Nah-nah-nah, it was easier for me!' is not accountability.)

The former US Secretary of State's deeds and actions has allowed many to miss that this has been the most humiliating week ever for Kerry since he became Secretary of State.

He's told one lie after another and been exposed for it.

Today, he's exposed as a liar again and, boy, does it give the right wing fresh meat if they want hop in the Way Back Machine.

Last month, he was grandstanding in Munich -- yet again acting as though he were the Secretary of Defense -- and he created a figure -- how very Brian Williams of him -- that really didn't exist as he claimed that 50% of the Islamic State's leadership had been decimated in Syria and in Iraq.

Eli Lake and Josh Rogin (Daily Beast) take on that claim today:

When asked about Kerry's 50 percent claim, Army Captain John J. Moore, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told us: "We currently don't have a percentage attached to that statistic."
Experts told us Kerry’s estimate is tough to understand, because defining the Islamic State’s “leadership” is subjective. Cole Bunzel, a Princeton University scholar of Near Eastern Studies who closely follows Islamic State, said its leadership structure is opaque, and not much is known about the true membership of its Shura and Sharia councils, which play an important role in the organization. When the Islamic State has announced major decisions, such as its decision to expand into Syria or declare itself a caliphate, said Bunzel, it has made clear that one or both of those councils were consulted by Baghdadi.
"I am very skeptical of the claim that the coalition has killed 50 percent of the leadership of the Islamic State, whatever that means,” said Bunzel.

He later added, "The Islamic State has publicly announced when senior members of the group have been killed. But they have never talked about anyone in the core leadership being killed since 2010."

Again, this has been a very bad week for John Reporting-For-Duty Kerry (his 2004 DNC acceptance speech in Boston).

Very bad.

Lying about kills.

See that goes to the heart of the attack the Swift Boat Veterans launched at him.

I don't believe John lied in the paper work to obtain his various combat decorations. Nor do I believe Al Gore was claiming he invented the internet. But both men set themselves up with their oversized egos and their chronic foot-in-the-mouth disease.

Meanwhile, the Tehran-Baghdad offensive in Tikrit took only 12 days -- only! -- to reach Tikrit, finally getting some feet on the ground yesterday.

Today, AFP competes to be named Most Idiotic Outlet.

Competes and, yes, wins.

Jean Marc Mojon usually his really big crayon to scribble:

Iraqi forces on Friday battled jihadists making what looked increasingly like a last stand in Tikrit but the Islamic State group responded by vowing to expand its "caliphate".
Thousands of fighters surrounded a few hundred holdout IS militants, pounding their positions from the air but treading carefully to avoid the thousands of bombs littering the city centre.

So they've defeated the Islamic State!

Wait.

A few hundred holdouts?

I guess that means -- exactly as we said would happen -- as the forces advanced -- at a snail's pace -- the Islamic State would pull the bulk of their fighters out -- remember the toothpaste analogy?

And that's what they did.

There's no victorious battle taking place.

A skeletal crew was left in Tikrit and the Shi'ite military and militia -- Iraqi and Iranian -- can't even seem to handle that.

Some in the press, like AFP, will try to portray this as a great moment.

Some will do so because they're trying to do propaganda, others because they were present and they want to make themselves seem more important than they are so they have to make the events seem more important than they are.

But this is no victory moment -- setting aside the fact that the Shi'ite forces are still scrambling -- because the reality is, they're so unqualified for the job that it took them forever to get the city and once there they couldn't even handles -- thousand of Shi'ite fighters -- a couple hundred left behind.

If this was supposed to inspire, it clearly backfired.

The following community sites -- plus Antiwar.com -- updated: