Aceplace57 vs Der Trihs in this thread: Aceplace 0, Der Trihs 1
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s not like AP is being a Bush apologist. He spoke factually and DT is as usual speaking in hyperbole.
I’ve been a critic of the Iraq war for a long time. I remember the news stories right after Saddam fell. It was obvious even then that there wasn’t any well thought out plan.
Paul Bremer’s policies completely wiped out essential government services even at the most basic city level. The majority of the middle class were Ba’ath party members working in the government or military officers. They were wiped out by Bremer’s policies. Iraq has never recovered from abolishing the Ba’ath party and putting the middle class out of work. The middle class is the economic foundation of any country.
Bremer worked for the State Dept and they took their orders from Bush. The destruction of Iraq is his legacy.
It’s all a bit like Korea, where some of the fiercest and most protracted battles were over taking, being driven off, then re-taking the same hill… more or less because some general said to.
Which fact did you find particularly hyperbolic?
And what books have you read about the Iraq War? I’ve read several and when I hear from apologists I wonder what informative books that I’ve missed they get their facts from.
The best book I’ve read on Iraq is, Constitution Making Under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq. It goes very deeply into our failed attempt at recreating a new government in Iraq. It does a good job analyzing Paul Bremer’s decrees and the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I was there for a lot of the war in Iraq and I pretty much agree with him.
CNN has a good report. Crafty al-Maliki is spinning the truth just a bit.
I’m amazed al-Maliki is still alive and in power. Running Iraq is a dangerous job.
on the plus side in the article I read “al Queda linked mutants”… see, it wasn’t mutants after all. There’s a plus side to everything.
Which one? the kuwait invasion, the Iran invasion? the wholesale slaughter of kurds? Historically, the region has a long and bloody history.
No.
I listened to the debate in the UK Parliament at the time and the sole reason for sending our troops was that Saddam had WMDs and could hit British bases.
Nothing about rebuilding the country.
Here is the speech by the UK Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook on the eve of the war. He resigned over the shaky reason for going to war.
Some devastating points that he made:
-
I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support
-
The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner – not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council
-
None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will “shock and awe” makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands
-
Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?
-
Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq
It kinda makes you wonder if all of that was worth it
The reconstruction plan for Iraq was real. It quickly became impractical when the insurgency began.
I wonder what the future will be for Iraq? Will it fall into a decade long civil war like Lebanon? The divide between the Sunni and Shiite regions of Iraq seems insurmountable.
I haven’t read too many books. I prefer not to dwell on what I lived through.
But if I have to pick one thing the whole we did it to gain control of the oil thing is complete bullshit. The US never controlled the oil, never attempted to control the oil. If we did we would now control the oil. Iraqi oil production was handed over to the Iraqis almost immediately. Of course while all the troops and tanks were there we forced the Iraqi government to higher Haliburton to run the oil fields and line Chaney’s pockets. Wait, I’m sorry what actually happened was Iraq gave those drilling contracts to China’s state owned oil company. But of course the US was able to get cheap oil from Iraq when a sweetheart deal was forced on them. Nope, Iraq sells most of its oil to China. Hell, if we had gotten oil out of the deal maybe there would have been some benefit from going there.
Of course if there was no oil in the region no one would care about it. The reasons for the conflict may have been dumb but it wasn’t an oil grab.