The US bombing its own guns perfectly sums up America’s total failure in Iraq

It was merely a colloquialism, the "role" I was assigning the US is the authority figure and peacekeeper, which is what they were. I could have very well said "when the adult leaves the room" and it would have meant the exact same thing. When the authority figure leaves a room full of children, and there is not another around, the kids go nuts. That's what happened in Iraq because we left before their government was seen as strong enough to keep everyone in check.

One would think the lesson would have been learned in Germany after WW1, everyone left after the war and Germany was in an awful state that directly led to the next war.....we never left after that one and haven't had another problem from them and today they are one of the strongest economies in Europe. When you abandon a country and leave them in shambles after a war, you are causing the next war.

 

I think this will sum it up nicely:

+

 

It was under control until Obama followed the treaty we signed with Iraq. Where did the "stupid" come from exactly?

Try again, rookie.

 

A lull is not peace. An indigenous population can always just wait a occupier out.
What could have been hope for peace would have been a diverse, compromising representative government and a unification and tolerance movement by Shia and Sunni clerics. But this conflict has been ongoing for 1000 years, infideles were never going to solve it.

And I just don't think democracy works without a highly educated populace and a pluralistic divide between factions. Once you loose a general liberal education for a large percentage of the people or get too divided between just two factions you lose any willingness to work out compromise.

Dumbing down and polarization has rendered the US unworkable too.

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

 

Far better to be lectured by a Canadian! *giggles*

 

Obama negotiated for a small stabilizing force, but Maliki wouldn't agree to the terms. So, it's not like he wasn't trying to. Would Romney have accepted terms that Obama did not? No one really knows that. I think any mistake to point at would be supporting Maliki in the elections in 2010. I don't know that any alternative would have been better, but the problems in Iraq now are problems created by Maliki. Your solution is to have soldiers there forever to hold his hand whenever he screws up. I think that's not right. In fact, I'm rather glad we don't have soldiers around supporting a government that was making the sort of decisions Maliki was making. He deserves to lose -- it's just unfortunate that so many people have to suffer because of him. So what would have happened if someone else won in 2010? Could it have been any worse than this? And what would Romney have done in Obama's place then? Probably the same damn thing.

 

Actually Obama campaigned on pulling the troops out of Iraq...

 

Actually, that's totally irrelevant because he negotiated to have them remain. Pulling out the troops wasn't supposed to mean, when he was campaigning, that we'd have no troops there at all.

 

What's amusing is that anyone actually believed that the second the US drew down its troops, which was inevitable, that the crazies wouldn't fill the vacuum. Five years, ten years, twenty years, this is what was going to happen. These people have been killing each other for centuries, how naive is it to believe you could change that. Surprise!!!!

 

Had we stayed long enough, there wouldn't have been a vacuum....that would be the point of staying rather than abandoning the Iraqi people like we did.

 

Who is paying for that Bobby?

 

The same people who have payed for a base in Germany, Japan, Korea, and everywhere else the military deploys. Why is Iraq any different in your mind?

 

Which people?

 

As I said in the other thread, peaceful deployments are not as costly as hot wars, in supplies and in people. Nobody gets IED'd in Germany.

Those deployments are to counterbalance economic powers of China and Russia. Iraq has no such requirement.
They ensure our most important trading partners.

Also, they ensure the dollar as the world currency which lowers our borrowing rate and allows us to run huge deficits (and counter them with inflation... borrow expensive dollars pay back with cheaper dollars) so they actually lend some support to their own costs.

Iraq has no compelling issues that equal those. It can even be argued that having Islamic fundamentalist focused there means we don't have to counter them directly, yet.

 

And the situation was cooling down rapidly, pretty soon things would be just as they are in other "peaceful deployments". Also, don't get it twisted, the reason we are in Korea still is because if we left, about 5 seconds later the North would invade and conquer the South.....a very similar situation as in Iraq.

 

Cooling down? No, the Sunni Saudi's and the Shia Iranians are just getting started. The US is just like the teacher standing between two brothers fighting... an outsider temporarily delaying the inevitable.

 

The lesson after WW1 was don't cause collective punishment to a nation and try to strip it down to nothing, because those people will remember hyperinflation, and elect a madman, strongman tyrant.

As for WW2, I guess the lesson is attach aid without almost any conditions (Marshall Plan), and make people fear a greater enemy (the USSR at the time, ISIS now?). Maybe people will learn that the way to end war is to build, and collaborate, rather than continual occupation.

 

But I thought they were going to greet us as liberators.