All Republican hopefulls now agree Iraq war was a mistake

I'm an Internationalist Lib that thinks the war was a rousing success. You had a murderous tyrant in power that threatened his neighbors with war and his people with genocide. It should be the responsibility of free people to band together and spread freedom and democracy. Iraq in 1991 would have been the perfect test case. Less so in the 9/11 hysteria that clouded the issue and confused the players and motives.The 'success' was that his regime was brought down and the proof that a second class military power can be crushed by Western might, a useful example.

The hindsight is the civil structures should not have been so radically dismantled although you probably would have had a Shia uprising if the Sunni/Baath faction retained power. I'm sure that was the consideration that led Bremer to do it.

The insight is.... you never know what the unintended consequences will be for broad and radical actions, aka: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

I agree it was clear mistake. We'd still have Saddam there otherwise, but it's not like things are much better with Isis running around

 

The invasion created the power vacuum but while the US was filling it there wasn't a problem. Once we decided to cut bait and run before the Iraqi infrastructure was strong enough to stand on its own that's when the power vacuum was a problem.

I've said it numerous times, the US should have stayed there with a peacekeeping force semi-permanently like they did in pretty much every country they've gone to war and there wouldn't have been the problems there are now. A nation cannot properly rebuild and thrive without stability, we didn't provide them that stability so now they are in trouble.

Also, I'm fine with blaming Bush for pulling out of Iraq if that'll make those on the left more intellectually honest about their opinions on the matter. Pulling out of Iraq as early as we did, as completely as we did was a much larger mistake than the war in general.

 

Agreed with everything you said until the last sentence. Going into Iraq will go down as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history.

 

Only because of how it ended. If the US did the right thing and kept a strong presence there until Iraq was truly stable it would have been viewed as an eventual success, or at best a mixed bag. Right now because of how the end was blundered, it was an outright failure.

Like I said earlier though, we can blame how it ended on anyone you want, but if we had kept a presence there and had a stable Iraq today, as we did before the pull out, I don't think we'd see it as a total failure. Sure some would still think it unnecessary, but not a failure.

 

How can you say this? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, diverted money and manpower from the true base of al-Qaeda (who actually attacked us) in Afghanistan, prolonged the Afghan War to 10+ years because of neglect and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. None of that would have happened had the Bush Administration not contrived "reasons" to invade Iraq.

 

I don't think it comes close to all of the anti democratic CIA operations.

 

There were plenty of legitimate reasons to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam completely unrelated to 9/11. The man was a menace to the region who stockpiled chemical weapons and had a history of using them.....is that not reason enough?

Also, when it comes to Afghanistan, that was always going to be a long, drawn out affair due to the terrain, higher numbers there would have just led to greatly increased casualties because the mountains make numbers almost irrelevant.

Anyway, the removal of the Hussein regime and the stabilization of the region would have been a really great accomplishment.....but the US screwed it up by abandoning the country before they were able to stand on their own.

 

This is revisionist history at its thinnest. By that logic, at the time, why did we not invade North Korea? Syria? Pakistan? Myanmar? Russia? Libya? Also, you're conveniently ignoring that the US and CIA effectively sanctioned Saddam's use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against Iran (Foreign Policy: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran)

 

It's really not revisionist at all. Saddam had weapons he wasn't supposed to have in violation of the cease fire agreement made in 1993 at the end of the first gulf war. That's the difference between Iraq and the other countries you named besides North Korea.

All you are doing is bringing up irrelevant information in an attempt to "muddy the water". The reasons for regime change in Iraq were pretty straightforward. It's too bad we blundered it by abandoning the country too soon.

 

No, you're muddying the water by trying to move the goalposts for why we invaded in the first place. First it was Saddam definitely had WMD and supported al-Qaeda. Then it became "Well, he was THINKING about getting WMD." Then, it became the harder-to-defend "Well, he was just a bad guy and we didn't like!" It'd be less intellectually dishonest if you just said "We felt like big-dicking him."

Note I don't disagree with you about pulling out too early and creating another power vacuum. But, by that point, any support for staying there would've been politically toxic, regardless of party. Paying for that continued presence would've also been harsh given our aversion to ever raising taxes for anything. That's a stickier hypothetical.

 

The "country" was never going to stand on it's own. There are no unifying themes to make the people of Iraq cohesive or cooperative. The roots of the conflicts are inherent religious differences over which the US had no influence as infidels. The neighboring powers are on opposite sides of the religious civil war and fully support the opposing proxies. And, as a three way divided nation, there was never going to be an easy compromise over who controlled the oil money.

No Iraqi's identify as Iraqi, they identify as Sunni, Shia or Kurd. There is no symbiosis achieved by their union, no common outside threat, no tradition of democracy. The US could have been there 50 years and it would break down as soon as we left. And, frankly we couldn't afford to stay there 50 years. The only reason we stayed in Germany and Japan was to counter the communist threat and ISIS is not an existential threat to us like the communist bloc seemed to be.

 

It's always been that he had chemical and biological weapons that were violating the terms of the cease fire from the gulf war......and we found chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and found evidence that even more were shipped out of the country in the days and weeks that led up to the invasion. When Saddam kicked the weapons inspectors out, he was begging for the US to invade....so they did.

 

This is a winning position for the Republican party and they should keep trying to persuade the nearly 70% of Americans that disagree with them now before November 2016.

 

It was always going to take a long time for that country to rebuild to where it would stand on its own, had we provided the security and stability necessary to achieve that goal it very well could have happened. If the US stayed there 50 years, the country would have looked a LOT different and would have a very strong chance of standing on its own after we left. It would have been a completely different generation of Iraqis in power by then.

Either way it doesn't matter, we abandoned them......like pretty much everyone always knew we would, so now the country is in shambles. Ever since the bay of pigs it's been clear that the US will abandon people as soon as things get tough. We've proved it over and over again, there's absolutely no reason to trust the US.

 

Oh, I don't think anyone should run for office on the truth. The really loud, ignorant voices will shout it down for sure. If you want to appeal to the ignorant masses, you have to give them an ignorant message....it's the only way they can relate.

 

"Long Time" is an undefined term, most people would say we were in Iraq for a long time.

Iraq is not Germany or Japan. They both had homogeneous populations with no undercurrent of civil strife.

And again there is no compelling reason to stay in Iraq resembling the post-war Communist threat.

I'd be interested to see a comparison of the expenditures of the Marshall Plan as compared to what was invested in Iraq (google google)

(most of the information is 2006 or older, I did find this astonishing fact)


The United States Has Outspent the Marshall Plan to Rebuild Afghanistan
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/30...ent-the-marshall-plan-to-rebuild-afghanistan/

 

It was a great idea until it took 8 years and became a disaster. Bobby logic.