Iran says rejects US call to fight IS militants

View gallery France's President Francois Hollande, left, welcomes his Iraqi counterpart Fouad Massoum, ahead … View gallery French President Francois Hollande, second right, discusses with his Iraqi counterpart Fouad Massoum … View gallery This undated file image posted on a militant website on Jan. 14, 2014, which has been verified and i … Related Stories Diplomatic push grows against Islamic State group Associated Press France ready to participate in Iraq airstrikesAssociated Press Iraq premier says France to join airstrikes effort Associated Press Obama to broaden US effort to combat militants Associated Press France opens Iraq conference urging 'global' fight on jihadists Reuters

PARIS (AP) — Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says he had received a request from the United States to join the fight against extremists from the Islamic State group but rejected it because of Washington's "unclean intentions."

Khamenei said Iran privately rejected the American request long before the U.S. publicly opposed an Iranian role in the coalition that is seeking to fight the militants.

The Iranian leader made the remarks after being discharged from the hospital Monday.

Khamenei said Iran is proud not to be part of the U.S.-led coalition and warned that it will suffer the same problems it suffered in Iraq should it enter Iraq and Syria without authorization.

U.S. officials opposed France's attempt to invite Iran to an international conference to tackle the Islamic State group threat.

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Starting in 2012, the leader of the most prominent American anti-gay marriage organization unexpectedly began adding a ton of stamps to his passport.

As federal judges struck down gay marriage bans left and right at home, National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown appeared at meetings and marches for various anti-gay rights causes in France, Trinidad and Tobago, Russia and Australia—a surprising uptick in travel for the stateside activist. The result: This June, Brown’s group began discussing rebranding itself as the “International Organization for Marriage,” according to materials from a “March for Marriage” meeting in Washington, D.C.

Brown is just one of many in the American “traditional marriage” movement who are aggressively pushing their message abroad now that they face an increasingly tough sell at home. In so doing, he is making common cause with foreign activists whose anti-gay rights crusades are more robust—and more resoundingly successful—than America’s homegrown one. Among them are Americans who actively worked behind the scenes to support the passage of Russia’s law preventing gay people from adopting, as well as Uganda’s law that punishes homosexuality with up to a lifetime in prison.

The U.S. involvement in anti-gay rights international activity has become so intense that one of the premier gay rights groups in the country, the Human Rights Campaign, started up a special “global engagement program” last year to track their activities and help gay rights activists abroad. The program has a $1 million budget for its first year and five full-time staffers, and on Monday released its most comprehensive report on the internationalization of the American anti-gay rights movement.

The report, “The Export of Hate,” names the most prominent individuals and groups—Brown among them—working to pass anti-gay rights legislation abroad.

“With anti-LGBT losses mounting in the United States, and with strong indications of increased activity abroad, more must be done to expose this work and the people doing it,” the report says.

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A Ugandan man is seen during the 3rd Annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride cele …

The report calls out Scott Lively, an American missionary who traveled to Uganda to warn about what he described as the evils of gay people in the run-up to the passage of the country’s law that punished homosexuality with death. (The law was later toned down so that the maximum punishment is life in prison, before the nation's highest court invalidated it.) Benjamin Bull, the chief counsel of the conservative legal group the Alliance Defending Freedom, is also cited for the Alliance’s 2011 announcement that it would take its legal arguments against gay marriage overseas; it now supports groups that are working to uphold bans on same-sex marriage all over the world.

“Our primary focus is naming and shaming,” Jason Rahlan, global engagement press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign, said of the report. “My sense is a lot of Americans and even a lot of folks in the LGBT community have absolutely no idea this is going on.”

Some of the organizations profiled in the report have acknowledged in their own way that the line has moved irrevocably in the U.S. debate over gay rights. It’s been more than a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws allowing states to punish same-sex sex acts with prison, and the U.S. debate now revolves around whether LGBT people have a right to marriage everywhere in the country, along with anti-discrimination protections at work. Groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom have given up on arguing that same sex activities ought to remain criminal in America, and are instead focusing on preserving same-sex marriage bans. But in many other countries, including the 80 that outlaw being openly gay, the landscape is completely different—and much more welcoming to their arguments.

“Oftentimes they work under the radar and they mask their intentions,” Rahlan said of the American activists.

That’s why it took some piecing together for the group to notice that the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which was pivotal in passing the same-sex marriage ban in 2008 in California, had gone international.

“They are a lot more active in the international space but are being very quiet about it,” said Becky Parks, the Human Rights Campaign’s Associate Director of Global Engagement.

“I have been so excited to be part of this new international solidarity movement in defense of marriage, children and family,” Brown wrote on NOM’s blog last year. He did not respond to an interview request about NOM’sinternational expansion.

Many of these overseas groups and individuals are expected to send representatives in October 2015 to Salt Lake City, Utah, for a World Congress of Families summit. The Human Rights Campaign will be watching the event closely, Rahlan said.

In fact, it was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL).

Former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker said as much on this week's edition of "Meet the Press." He noted that after the first President Bush had ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. had refrained from marching on Baghdad precisely to avoid kicking over the sectarian hornet's nest that was subsequently unleashed by the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in 2003.

But it wasn't just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni's and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.

Bush's "de-Bathification program" eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn't change it. He didn't make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today's ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.

General Petraeus took steps to reverse these policies with his "Sunni Awakening" programs that engaged the Sunni tribes against what was then known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the progress he made ultimately collapsed because the Bush/Cheney regime helped install Nouri Al-Maliki as Prime Minister who systematically disenfranchised Sunnis throughout Iraq.

And that's not all. The War in Iraq -- which had nothing whatsoever to do with "terrorism" when it was launched -- created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.

And after all, contrary to Dick Cheney's absurd assertion that U.S. forces would be greeted in Iraq as "liberators," no one likes a foreign nation to occupy their country.

The War did more than any propagandist could possibly do to radicalize vulnerable young people. And by setting off wave after wave of sectarian slaughter it created blood feuds that will never be forgiven.

The Iraq War -- and the Sunni power vacuum caused first by U.S. policies and then Al Maliki -- created the perfect conditions that allowed a vicious band of extremists to take huge swaths of territory.

And now many of the same people who caused this foreign policy disaster have the audacity to criticize President Obama's measured efforts to clean up the mess they created. And they do so often without ever saying what they themselves would do to solve the horrific problems that they created.

It reminds you of a bunch of arsonists standing at the scene of a fire criticizing the techniques used by the firefighters who are trying to extinguish the blaze they themselves have set.

Oh, they say: "If you had just left a residual force after the withdrawal of U.S. troops everything would be hunky dory."

Do they really think that several thousand U.S. troops would have solved Iraq's problems when hundreds of thousands failed to do so?

And of course they conveniently forget to mention that neither the Iraqi's nor the U.S. voters wanted a "residual" force to remain in Iraq. And they forget that the Iraqi government would not agree to conditions that would allow a "residual" force to be stationed in Iraq.

Or perhaps they wish U.S. troops were now going door to door in Iraq cities rooting out adherents to ISIL? Only a few neo-con die-hards want more U.S. troops on the ground in the Middle East.

Or then there is the refrain that President Obama should have helped "arm" the moderate Syrian opposition earlier. Let's remember that had he acted at an earlier point it is entirely likely that many of those arms would now be in ISIL hands -- and we must be extremely careful even now to avoid precisely that problem in the days ahead.

The president's response to ISIL is supported by almost two-thirds of Americans because it seems to be the only reasonable response where the cure is not worse than the disease.

It recognizes that the problem posed by ISIL must first and foremost be dealt with by other Sunni's in the region. It is aimed at building an international coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy the ability of this vicious organization to threaten people in the Middle East or elsewhere. And it relies on American airpower to bolster the abilities of other Sunni forces to accomplish this goal.

But most Americans also realize this will not be easy -- and they're right. It won't be easy to clean up the horrific mess created by the Bush/Cheney policies in the Middle East.

Frankly, I don't think that any of the architects of the Iraq War should ever be invited on TV to say one word about foreign policy -- and especially the Middle East. They have zero credibility to comment. They have been wrong over and over again and created the conditions that spawned the problems we face today.

But if they are invited to act as "talking heads," interviewers must at least have the common decency to point out their failed track record -- and to demand that they do more than criticize the President's efforts to clean up their mistakes. They must also be required to tell us exactly what they would do to fix it.

And if any of them actually do propose a course of action, you can pretty much be sure that based on their past track records, that course of action is wrong.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

(The Huffington Post)