The National Rifle Association is once again trying to affect the completion of a new arms treaty in New York, hoping to kill the treaty for good or include loopholes to render it toothless.

A new round of negotiations aimed at finalizing a potential Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) opened on Monday in New York, picking up with the draft where the last round left off. At stake: the regulation of the estimated $70 billion global arms trade, including the sale of small arms, tanks, and warplanes between countries.

The right-wing’s opposition to the ATT last year veered between the heated and the, well, insane. The NRA in particular was extremely vocal, including a visit by Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre to Turtle Bay to lobby. Since then, the group has had to confront a series of domestic challenges, including the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and revamped efforts to pass gun violence prevention legislation. In a firey speech to this year’s CPAC, LaPierre focused on those issues, rather than the supposed threat the U.N. poses as he did in 2012.

The NRA has not completely given up on efforts, however, to affect the final treaty:

“What we really object to is the inclusion of civilian firearms within the scope of the ATT,” said Tom Mason, the group’s executive secretary and a lawyer who has represented the NRA at U.N. meetings for nearly two decades. “This is a treaty that really needs to address the transfer of large numbers of military weapons that leads to human rights abuses. We have submitted language that you can define what a civilian firearm is.”

Requests from ThinkProgress for the NRA to clarify what it meant by “civilian firearms” went unanswered, as did requests for the language they submitted. However, Michelle A. Ringuette, chief of campaigns and programs at Amnesty International USA, believes that any inclusion of provisions for “civilian firearms” would render the treaty toothless. “There is no such distinction,” Ringuette said in a statement. “To try to create one would create a loophole that would render the treaty inoperative, as anyone could claim that he or she was in the business of trading ‘civilian weapons.’”

The last set of talks collapsed last July when the United States and others refused to allow a vote on the document as it stood. Since then, the Obama administration has reversed course, allowing the current conference to proceed, making clear they would not be in favor of any infringement of U.S. citizens’ ownership rights. “We will not support any treaty that would be inconsistent with U.S. law and the rights of American citizens under our Constitution, including the Second Amendment,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.

Even the American Bar Association has determined that the Arms Trade Treaty would have absolutely no impact on the Second Amendment in the U.S. Despite that, gun advocates in Congress are already rushing to condemn the draft treaty, with legislation already having been introduced in the House and Senate.

“I’m waiting for the architects of those policies to get up and say it didn’t work, but it’s tough to expect that because they never articulated what the hell they were doing.” This is what conservative activist Grover Norquist told the Huffington Post in a piece published today on what the anniversary of the Iraq war means for the Republican Party and foreign policy (spoiler: it’s in disarray).

But Norquist hit on an important point. While a majority of Americans — and indeed the rest of the world — know and have recognized that the Iraq war was a complete debacle that never should have taken place, those who dreamed of taking down Saddam Hussein long before 9/11 and cooked up the intelligence to make it happen either refuse to find any fault in the overall decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or their role in it.

The Daily Beast reported yesterday that some of the Iraq war’s boosters are expressing “few regrets.” The American Enterprise Institute foreign and defense policy studies vice president Danielle Pletka laid all the bad stuff that happened in Iraq on Barack Obama: “Had President Obama chosen not to withdraw from Iraq, it would be a different picture there.” Sure, Ms. Pletka.

And today, the war’s top architects seized the 10-year anniversary to play some historical defense. Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary famous for painting a rosy picture about the war that bore no relation to reality, patted himself on the back for helping liberate Iraq:

10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013

How liberating is it for the tens of thousands of Iraqis, including civilians, who were killed as a result of the war? We also wonder if the millions of Iraqis who are now refugees or internally displaced feel liberated. And as NBC News notes today, Iraq “is considered one of the most corrupt in the world, and many of the improvements promised have not materialized. Sectarian tensions regularly explode into open violence.” Liberation, indeed.

Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — wrote in USA Today on Tuesday that it’s “senseless to argue” that because Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD that “the decision to remove him was wrong.” Actually, Perle himself made that argument In 2009, he saying, “we would not have invaded” if Saddam had no WMD. Nevertheless, Perle says “the decision to remove Saddam was right,” it’s just that “the decision to occupy Iraq was not.”

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Ten years ago, “Operation: Shock and Awe” launched the war in Iraq. The next ten years would prove to be a calamity of unthinkable proportions, leading to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, trillions spent and billions wasted. ThinkProgress has cataloged the entirety in a single timeline, stretching from the early days of the war to the present. The following is just a small sampling:

MAY 1, 2003: Mission Accomplished

[M]y fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. [Bush, 5/1/03]

JULY 2, 2003: Bring ‘Em On

There are some who feel like — that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on. [Bush, 7/2/03]

APRIL 19, 2004: Bob Woodward reveals CIA Director George Tenet said there was a “slam dunk case” against Iraq

About two weeks before deciding to invade Iraq, President Bush was told by CIA Director George Tenet there was a “slam dunk case” that dictator Saddam Hussein had unconventional weapons, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. [CNN, 4/19/04]

APRIL 28, 2004: Images of torture at Abu Ghraib are revealed

JANUARY 12, 2005: WMD search in Iraq is declared over

U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN. [CNN, 1/12/05]

MAY 30, 2005: Dick Cheney: Insurgency in its “last throes”

I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency. [CNN Larry King Live, 5/30/05]

DECEMBER 18, 2005: Bush: “[M]uch of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.” [Bush, 12/18/05]

 

FEBRUARY 2, 2006: Rumsfeld doubts “long war” in Iraq

“Is Iraq going to be a long war?” Mr. Rumsfeld answered, “No, I don’t believe it is.” [Washington Times, 2/2/06]

NOVEMBER 1, 2006: Classified military briefing reports Iraq “edging toward chaos.”

A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict. … An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” [New York Times, 11/1/2006]

DECEMBER 19, 2006: The White House is “aggressively promoting” a plan to send “15,000 to 30,000 more troops” to Iraq “over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the Washington Post reports. [Washington Post, 12/19/2006]

FEBRUARY 2, 2007: National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq declares Iraq is worse than a civil war. The document states that the term civil war “accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict,” though it “does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict.” [Washington Post, 2/3/2007]

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