Are we nearing Peak Gibberish on Iraq?

I realize that there is no such thing as “peak gibberish,” even when it comes to Iraq, and that with the 2016 campaign literally just getting started we’re in for layer upon layer of new gibberish almost by the day for the next 18 months or so. But it’s already getting pretty bad out there. Take Marco Rubio, who schooled Fox thusly yesterday (italics mine):

Speaking on Fox News’ “Outnumbered,” Florida senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said the U.S. has a “responsibility to support Democracy” abroad, and that “the most “immediate responsibility we have is to help them build a functional government.”

When pressed on the fact that “sounds like nation-building,” a rationale given by George W. Bush and President Barack Obama for much of their policies with regards to Iraq, Rubio said “Well, it’s not nation-building. We are assisting them in building their nation.”

Is there a point here? Yes. Did Rubio make it? No. Would it have been a good point even if he had? Also no. Rubio wants to show support for heavier US involvement in Iraq without shading into any rhetorical minefields (the idea that the US should engage in “nation building” abroad is, as you might expect, incredibly unpopular among potential voters). There is a semantic difference between building a nation and helping someone else build their nation, but in the latter case there’s a prerequisite in that you have to be working with some partner that actually seems able and willing to build a nation. As Max Fisher puts it:

Is there a rhetorical needle to be threaded here, of the United States helping Iraq build up its capacity for democracy, without the US doing that nation-building itself? Not in the Iraq of 2015, unfortunately, there is not. The state is so fundamentally broken, not just in terms of security but in terms of its basic political identity, that this is not a problem that could possibly be solved by the US providing some more weapons or funding. (At a recent off-the-record Middle East policy event of bipartisan think tankers and current and former government officials, the only thing everyone agreed on with regards to Iraq was that the nation as we once knew it fundamentally no longer exists.)

The other problem with what Rubio said is that, and this is only a general guideline but I think it’s sound, you don’t usually begin the process of “assisting ‘them’ in building ‘their’ nation” by invading ‘their’ country without cause and utterly eradicating any basic elements of a nation that ‘they’ might already have in place. This can often leave ‘them’ without any hope of building (rebuilding?) a nation, regardless of whatever help you claim to be providing to ‘them.’ And since Rubio is still on record as thinking that the Iraq War was kinda OK despite its downsides, he’s really on thin ice on the whole “assisting” bit. He’d got a lot of choot-spa, to use the technical term.

On another Iraq-related subject, there’s the gibberish of John Boehner, currently complaining that President Obama won’t “get serious” about dealing with ISIS because Obama sent Congress a draft Authorization to Use Military Force that Boehner doesn’t like. Steve Benen explains why this is so absurd:

To reiterate our discussion from a few weeks ago, it’s important to understand the nuances of Boehner’s whining on this issue. For quite a while, the Speaker said the legislative branch wouldn’t even try to authorize the war unless the executive branch did lawmakers’ work for them – Congress simply would not write its own bill, Boehner said, so it was up to the president to do the legislative work for the legislators.

Obama eventually agreed to write a bill for those whose job it is to write bills, only to discover that Congress doesn’t like his bill. The sensible, mature next move seems fairly obvious: if lawmakers don’t like the resolution the White House wrote, Congress can try doing its own homework, writing its own version, and then vote on it.

But Boehner doesn’t want to. He wants the president to imagine what might make Republicans happy, then write another draft, at which point GOP leaders will let the West Wing know whether or not Congress is satisfied. If Boehner disapproves, presumably it’d be up to Obama to come up with a third. And then a fourth.

Even by the usual craptacular productivity standards of John Boehner’s House of Representatives, this is too much. It shouldn’t be lost on any of us that Boehner leads the party that spends at least half its time nowadays calling Obama a “dictator” who unconstitutionally usurps Congress’s proper role in making laws. Yet here, presented with an excellent chance to assert that law-making authority, Boehner and his caucus can’t foist responsibility off onto the White House fast enough or often enough.