Invasion of Iraq 10 years later: Good move or mistake

[Amnorix]

10 years ago today the US invaded Iraq to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. The after-effects of that decision are still being felt to this day, and obviously will continue to play out in the years and decades to come. At this milestone, however, knowing everything that you know now, should we have gone in, or not?

Regrets and hypotheticals aren't really the goal here. We could go on and on (and have, many times) about how the post-invasion situation was handled, etc. ad infinitum. You should vote simply on the facts as they have actually occurred over the last 10 years.

Poll forthcoming. Note that it will be a public poll.

[Comrade Crapski]

Originally Posted by Bowser

You should start a thread about it.

I can't start threads.

But I can bump them if you'd like.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by oldandslow

This is so much BS...

GWB pushed the button to go to war with Iraq. No one else. Congress did not even give him a declaration of war. The dems may have been accomplices but it was GWB who pulled the trigger. Don't give me the "well they didn't stop me" argument.

Sure, Bush pushed the war button. But loneiguana is trying to advance the idea that he lied to get us into that war. The truth is that Bush/Cheney believed what they were saying (within the normal bounds of political puffery) and they had lots of company on both sides of the aisle and around the civilized world in that belief. There were differences of opinion about what to do about it, but much less difference of opinion about the threat that Saddam represented.

[Comrade Crapski]

FDR didn't warn the Navy of an imminent Japanese attack.
LBJ sent thousands of troops into a tropical environment to fight a war with a new rifle designed for urban fighting tactics.
Clinton bombed Belgrade.

And on and on and on.

But Bush is a "war criminal".

Gitmo still open? We still in Afghanistan? What was that whole thing about in Libya? Why are we in Chad? Syria?

Hello, hello? Anyone, anyone? Moonbat?

[oldandslow]

[quote=Comrade Crapski;9515780]

Originally Posted by oldandslow

The only one talking BS is you. But this is what I knew was gonna happen in this thread so have at it. you miss the glory days of move on dot org and daily koz daily spewings of george bush is a war criminal.

The same ****ing dopes who suck obamas cock all the live long day on this forum.

You have no integrity. None. But if you want to amuse yourself go ahead.

Voted for Romney. Had threads about it. Did vote for Obama the first time...it was a mistake.

Doesn't change the fact that GWB pulled the trigger in a pre-emptive, unnecessary war.

And pushing Iraq into Iran's lap is EXACTLY what I said would happen a many years ago when we first went to war. There are threads saying that too.

BTW, I actually fought in a war for this country, so perhaps you would grant me just a bit of integrity there.

You, on the other hand, are the definition of internet warrior.

[FishingRod]

Originally Posted by Amnorix

Not in my book. Not when the North Koreans were clearly the aggressors and when we didn't even expand the war into mainland China. All Chinese casualties were necessarily military casualties. All North Korean casualties were a result of their own aggression.

1 million, 10 or 20, I wouldn't care. Just like Germany. Or Japan. I feel badly for the civilians, but their government is to blame, 100%.



No. For several reasons:

1. The Chinese civil war was entirely internal, not an invasion of one country by another.

2. We would have no "moral obligation" to send massive troops into foreign countries to support one government versus another, absent our own national interests. While "who lost China" was a Republican witchhunt for years, the fact is that it wasn't ours to lose, and that the corrupt and pathetic nationalist government was no more "save-able" than the South Vietnamese government. If we couldnt' save South Vietnam, a much smaller country, how the hell would we have saved the Chinese government of our choosing.

Korea had only been North and South for 2 years due to a failure of the US and USSR to sort out the post WWII mess. That same nationalist government was an ally of the US became Taiwan who we threatend Communist china with Nukes in the 50's

Like I said fWIW I actually think it was worth it but it is an interesting what if had we done nothing

[Otter]

(Insurgent) Bombings in Iraq kill 65 a decade after invasion

http://durangoherald.com/article/20130319/NEWS03/130319546/Bombings-in-Iraq-kill-65-a-decade-after-invasion

BAGHDAD – Insurgents sent a bloody message on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, carrying out a wave of bombings across the country Tuesday that killed at least 65 people in the deadliest day in Iraq this year.

The nearly 20 attacks, most of them in and around Baghdad, demonstrated in stark terms how dangerously divided Iraq remains more than a year after American troops withdrew. More than 240 people were reported wounded.

It was Iraq’s bloodiest day since Sept. 9, when an onslaught of bombings and shootings killed 92.

Violence has ebbed sharply since the peak of Sunni-Shiite fighting that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006 and 2007. But insurgents are still able to stage high-profile attacks, while sectarian and ethnic rivalries continue to tear at the fabric of national unity.

The symbolism of Tuesday’s attacks was strong, coming 10 years to the day, Washington time, that President George W. Bush announced the start of hostilities against Iraq. It was already early March 20, 2003, in Iraq when the airstrikes began.

The military action quickly ousted Saddam Hussein but led to years of bloodshed as Sunni and Shiite militants battled U.S. forces and each other, leaving nearly 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis dead.

A decade later, Iraq’s long-term stability and the strength of its democracy are uncertain. While the country is freer than it was during Saddam’s murderous rule, its Shiite-led government is arguably closer to Tehran than to Washington. It faces an outpouring of anger by the Sunni minority that was dominant under Saddam and at the heart of the insurgency that followed his ouster.

“Today’s attacks are new proof that the politicians and security officials are a huge failure,” said Hussein Abdul-Khaliq, a resident of Baghdad’s Shiite slum district of Sadr City, which was hit by three explosions that killed 10 people, including three commuters on a minibus.

The apparently coordinated attacks around the country included car bombs and explosives stuck to the underside of vehicles. They targeted government security forces and mainly Shiite areas.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Iraqi officials believe al-Qaida’s Iraq arm is to blame. The terror group favors car bombs and coordinated bombings to undermine public confidence in the government. It has claimed it was behind two large-scale, well-coordinated attacks already this month, including an assault on the Justice Ministry in downtown Baghdad last week that left 30 dead.

Sabah al-Nuaman, a spokesman for Iraq’s counterterrorism services, said al-Qaida is trying to exploit political instability in the country. He also linked the violence to the civil war across the border in Syria, where largely Sunni rebels – some with ties to al-Qaida – are trying to topple President Bashar Assad.

“The terrorist groups are trying to move their operations back to Iraq. They want to make Iraq part of the regional struggle,” al-Nuaman said.

The violence started around 8 a.m., when a bomb exploded outside a popular restaurant in Baghdad’s Mashtal neighborhood, killing four people, according to police and hospital officials. It blew out the eatery’s windows and left several cars mangled in the blood-streaked street.

The deadliest attack was a 10 a.m. car bombing near the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in Baghdad’s Qahira neighborhood. Seven people were killed.

Another car bomb exploded outside a restaurant near one of the main gates to the fortified Green Zone, which houses major government offices and the U.S. and British embassies. Six people died, including two soldiers. Thick black smoke could be seen rising from the area as ambulances raced to the scene.

At one point amid the chaos, authorities shut bridges spanning the Tigris River in the capital, hoping to thwart further attacks.

Car bombings, roadside blasts, suicide attacks and other mayhem were reported in other parts of the capital as well as in Taji, Tarmiyah, Baqouba and Iskandiriya. In the northern city of Mosul, a local police commander was killed along with two bodyguards by a suicide bomber.

The U.S. and Britain, the two countries that contributed the bulk of the troops for the 2003 war effort, condemned the attacks.

“The vast majority of Iraqis want to leave behind the violence of the past to build a peaceful and prosperous country,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement.

Amid the political tensions, Iraq’s Cabinet decided Tuesday to postpone next month’s local elections in two provinces dominated by Sunnis.

Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr blasted the decision and threatened to withdraw his bloc’s support from the government.

“Staying in this government has become harmful and not useful at all,” he said.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by WhawhaWhat

Watch the show I posted about. Also.. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21786506. This is the news piece that the show is based on. I can't post a link yet so that's the best I can do. Sorry. Here is part of it -

I just finished watching it. Not only is what you typed completely wrong, but the show doesn't even falsely make that claim. The take away from that show should be:

1. Raw intel is composed of a lot of conflicting data of varying degrees of detail and reliability. It's never as easy to sort it out at the time as it is when you have the full benefit of hindsight.

2. Intelligence services are not monolithic creatures. They're made up of a large number of individuals with individual biases and the capacity for internal miscommunication. It's not surprising that at times, what one person within the organization "knows" is not known by another person and vice versa. It's also not surprising that sometimes a person has more confidence in his own opinion than he would if the entire universe of facts were known to him, which is obviously never the case.

3. The show is about a failure of intelligence and lies/fabrications made by intelligence sources, not about the lies of policymakers.

4. There were opinions that turned out to be right and opinions that turned out to be wrong within our intelligence community. It certainly doesn't add up to the idea that CIA and MI6 "knew there were no WMDs and that Iraq was no where close to making one." Some believed that and some didn't. But we can agree on one thing... the intelligence services failed our policy makers, by definition.

[Comrade Crapski]

Originally Posted by oldandslow

I Voted for Romney. Had threads about it. Did vote for Obama the first time...it was a mistake.

Doesn't change the fact that GWB pulled the trigger in a pre-emptive, unnecessary war.

And pushing Iraq into Iran's lap is EXACTLY what I said would happen a many years ago when we first went to war. There are threads saying that too.

BTW, I actually fought in a war for this country, so perhaps you would grant me just a bit of integrity there.

You, on the other hand, are the definition of internet warrior.

You want to make this personal? Fine. Here we go.

First of all, I don't have to qualify any of my opinions with "I was in a war, man". That's terrific, Billy Jack. I'm proud of you. And between that status and being an American Indian, you've probably milked it dry for everything you got to get pushed to the front of the line for everything.

You're just another self-important self entitled baby boomer crybaby. Your generation is the reason why America is in the ****ing toilet.

You're a tenured professor, which is a nice way of saying for most of your adult life you haven't worked. What do you make, 6 figures? And you present yourself as some kind of DIY homesteader on the range? Give me a break with yor BS.

You voted for Obama? It was a mistake? Sorry? Oh well? ha ha?

How many people you report to the EEOC, Billy Jack? How many people you **** over? What did you do in Viet Nam? Saigan Cowboy, right?

You can go **** yourself.

[WhawhaWhat]

Originally Posted by patteeu

I just finished watching it. Not only is what you typed completely wrong, but the show doesn't even falsely make that claim. The take away from that show should be:

I guess we get different impressions then. Agree to disagree.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by WhawhaWhat

I guess we get different impressions then. Agree to disagree.

Normally, I'm an agree to disagree guy when someone has been polite and offers it, but I can't do it here. I don't know how you could have been left with such a wildly mistaken impression if you really watched the show. I was surprised at how reasonable it was. I expected some kind of slightly more respectable Loose Change hatchet job, but even though the show cast some mild aspersions at intel distillers and decision makers (e.g. saying that they fooled themselves into accepting intel that met their preconceived notions while ignoring that which didn't and by interviewing only one side of certain "he said / she said" disputes), they were pretty fair when it comes to presenting the story.

Your characterization was a simplistic characterization of a complex situation. While it's true that a few individuals might have believed something that turned out to be both true and contrary to the final intel assessment, it's completely misleading and essentially false to say that the CIA (or MI6) knew that their final assessment was wrong.

At best, you're guilty of the same thing this documentary accuses top level intel officials and senior policy makers of doing (i.e. seeing what you want to see and ignoring that which doesn't fit your preconceived notion).

[DanT]

The war (or, if you prefer, the determination that the conditions for the cease fire from the original Gulf War had been violated) had zero moral or legal justification. There's a lot of post-hoc rationalization going around that the war was based on false intelligence. Had any of those widely believed intelligence reports that are now known to be false had in fact been true, there still would have been zero moral or legal justification to attack Iraq, which had not attacked us and was not even capable of an imminent attack.

With regard to the intelligence for the war, the United States set a standard of proof for the claim of an imminent threat way back in the early 1960's, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Our government didn't even meet that standard (convincing photographs) in 2003, despite the advances in technology that had occurred from late 1962 to early 2003. From what I could see, there wasn't a credible argument that Iraq posed an imminent threat.

If there had been a misperceived imminent threat, then as far as I can tell, it hadn't grown in magnitude from the time that Congress gave permission to pursue the military option, which in my mind means that anybody who disagrees with me about whether an imminent threat existed should fault the Executive Branch of the American Government for taking so long to respond to whatever threat they supposedly were responding to. (In other words, if the President thinks that the Easter Bunny and his herd of flying unicorns are getting ready to tow their Winnebago of Death across the Atlantic Ocean in order to gas Americans, then the President needs to address that threat the moment that she perceives it, not after months and months of wasting everybody's time pretending that the U.S. needs to get permission from the United Nations and then deciding that, on second thought, the U.S. doesn't actually need that permission.) In fairness to the Executive Branch, the Congress asked them to pursue diplomatic options first. Still, if you don't actually feel like you need to get a particular endorsement for an action, don't waste time pretending you do. All that does is give the Easter Bunny more time to sharpen the unicorns' horns.

[BucEyedPea]

Actually Dick Cheney has admitted he lied. Also those making those claims about Iraq knew he didn't have activated wmd.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by DanT

The war (or, if you prefer, the determination that the conditions for the cease fire from the original Gulf War had been violated) had zero moral or legal justification. There's a lot of post-hoc rationalization going around that the war was based on false intelligence. Had any of those widely believed intelligence reports that are now known to be false had in fact been true, there still would have been zero moral or legal justification to attack Iraq, which had not attacked us and was not even capable of an imminent attack.

Iraq attacked our aircraft in the no fly zone on a regular basis.

Originally Posted by DanT

With regard to the intelligence for the war, the United States set a standard of proof for the claim of an imminent threat way back in the early 1960's, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Our government didn't even meet that standard (convincing photographs) in 2003, despite the advances in technology that had occurred from late 1962 to early 2003. From what I could see, there wasn't a credible argument that Iraq posed an imminent threat.

If there had been a misperceived imminent threat, then as far as I can tell, it hadn't grown in magnitude from the time that Congress gave permission to pursue the military option, which in my mind means that anybody who disagrees with me about whether an imminent threat existed should fault the Executive Branch of the American Government for taking so long to respond to whatever threat they supposedly were responding to. (In other words, if the President thinks that the Easter Bunny and his herd of flying unicorns are getting ready to tow their Winnebago of Death across the Atlantic Ocean in order to gas Americans, then the President needs to address that threat the moment that she perceives it, not after months and months of wasting everybody's time pretending that the U.S. needs to get permission from the United Nations and then deciding that, on second thought, the U.S. doesn't actually need that permission.) In fairness to the Executive Branch, the Congress asked them to pursue diplomatic options first. Still, if you don't actually feel like you need to get a particular endorsement for an action, don't waste time pretending you do. All that does is give the Easter Bunny more time to sharpen the unicorns' horns.

The Bush administration made it clear that they believed in a world where nation states no longer necessarily mass troops on a border before waging war on their neighbor, traditional analysis that requires an imminent threat to justify preemptive war can no longer satisfy the security requirements of a modern nation. Agree or disagree, your focus on imminent threat is a strawman. No one claimed that Iraq was a direct and imminent threat to the US homeland.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

Actually Dick Cheney has admitted he lied. Also those making those claims about Iraq knew he didn't have activated wmd.

Sure he did. Link?

[Loneiguana]

Originally Posted by Comrade Crapski

Only Vichy Regime made "misleading statements"?

You have a real selective memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

You are an angry person.