Or, perhaps, the better question: are we doing any good in Iraq, either immediate or long term, that justifies the cost to our nation?
Going into Iraq was a bad idea, but I have this visceral feeling that, now that we’ve gone and messed things up, it’d be a horrible idea to just leave things the way they are now, especially in light of the news I heard from another thread, that the Iraq government is WAY behind in getting things in order. I know the “you break it, you bought it” idea has been debated here before, but my point is that I’m open to the idea that we’re laying groundwork for a stabler country, or keeping insurgents from feeding the roasted flesh of their brutally slain victims to innocent Iraqis or whatever. And maybe I expect that the majority of replies say we aren’t doing any good there - or at least, not enough to justify the costs.
But for entirely emotional reasons that I’ve already mentioned, GOING into Iraq and STAYING in Iraq feel like different issues, and so I thought this thread was justified, if only to possibly change my entirely unsupported view.
I fail to see how even the most Fundamentalist, anarchistic and anti-US/christianity/Judaism/western regime could fare any worse than the American puppets currently in place (same goes for Afganistan).
Nowhere in history has American (or any other countries for that matter) meddling resulted in a succesfull democratic society. WWII was a fluke, and the casualties needed for that scenario are a bit over the top.
We have certainly been trying to foster a democratic government in the area, but those opposed to it are much more dedicated to their cause than we as a whole are.
I believe it´s not late for the US to fix things, unfortunately it would involve a total lose of face for the country, and specially the current administration, so doing the right things to have a positive outcome are completely out of the question.
All that the people that keep the status quo is for it to turn into a SEP* and let it slip away from their concience.
No, we’ve been trying to create a puppet, colonialist government, and failing even at that.
IMHO, no we aren’t doing any good. First, because our mere presence there makes things worse, and makes a stable government impossible. Any government that takes office while we are there will be tainted as illegitimate.
Second, we aren’t doing any good because our intentions aren’t good. We want to save face, control the oil, build bases, and hand money to Haliburton, not do good. We don’t care about democracy ( and in fact have set it back many years in the region ), and we care nothing for the welfare or lives of the Iraqis and they know it. The only people fooled by our noble speeches are ourselves.
One obvious question to ask is, have things gotten better, or worse, in Iraq under U.S. occupation?
The answer is, of course, worse. They’re worse now than they were in July 2006, when they were worse than in July 2005. Ditto the July 2005 and July 2004, and July 2004 and July 2003, comparisons.
It’s hard to imagine a more intensive last, best shot than the ‘surge,’ but things certainly appear to have continued to worsen during the past six months. While there’s no way to prove that we can’t somehow improve things by staying, there’s certainly no evidence to show we can. Like it or not, the established track record is the only reasonable guide to future expectations under a continued U.S. occupation.
Then there’s the question, “won’t there be a bloodbath when we leave?” We don’t know for sure, but it’s reasonable to expect that the immediate aftermath of our departure will be a considerable escalation of the internecine violence that’s already taking place.
So if we withdraw over the next year, Iraq in 2009 will probably be a bloodier place than Iraq would be in 2009 if we stay.
The problem is, that’s a useless comparison because, even as things continue to go to hell in a handbasket under our occupation, the logic of this comparison forces us to stay indefinitely and ride this clusterfuck all the way down.
We will have to leave sometime. The appropriate comparison is leaving in year X v. Year Y - what happens in Year X+1 v. Year Y+1?
For instance, posit two choices: one in which we withdraw over the next year (2007-08) and another where we withdraw over the 2013-14 period. Will things in Iraq be better in 2015 as a result of our having stayed until 2014 than they would have been in 2009 if we’d pulled out the last combat troops in 2008?
The answer is, of course not. Since things will be worse in Iraq in 2013 than they are now if we stay, we must expect that the bloodbath of 2015 if we withdraw in 2013-14 will be worse than the bloodbath of 2009 if we withdraw over the next year.
And, I should add, if we stay in Iraq for another six years, our military capacity will continue to degrade, and our ability to do an effective intervention from ‘over the horizon’ if things turn into outright genocide will be far worse in 2015 than it would be in 2009.
Another factor is that the Iraqi security forces we’ve been training have largely been Shi’ite and Kurd. The longer we stay, the more likely it will be that the Shi’ites will have the strength to inflict a genocidal outcome on the Sunnis.
Also, at present, the Iraqi security forces lack heavy armaments, which is why the current civil war is being fought mostly with guns and car bombs. Eventually we’ll run out of excuses for not arming the ‘government’ sufficiently to protect their borders from invasion, which would mean we’d also be arming them for a much more effective war against the Sunni minority. If we pull out now, the Shi’ites will have limited ability to invade heavily Sunni areas, and vice versa. There will be areas of fighting, but also areas of safety.
The only good I see you doing now is that you are - perhaps - preventing overt Iranian intervention in Iraq.
There is a certain possibility that withdrawing U.S. troops will be replaced by Iranian “peacekeepers” allied with the dominant Iraqi Shiites. Not only might their presence excaberate attacks on Iraqi Sunnis, it would also lead to Iranian troops on the Saudi border and a direct ground link between Tehran and Damascus - two things that will seriously destabalize the region.
The main thing that we are doing right now is preventing all out civil war. Unfortunately, in my opinion, that civil war is going to erupt the minute we leave whether that’s today or 20 years from now.
This is truly a no-win situation. If we stay, we continue to take casualties. If we leave, Iraq falls into chaos and we get the blame. There is just no good answer.
As I think I’ve said before the major mistake the backers of the war made was thinking that the American electorate would tolerate an open-ended conflict in Iraq that required a steady drip-drip-drip of casualties. That sort of thing gets used up quickly. Even WWII had people in the States arguing against continuing involvements during most of the war.
Long-term, committed warfare is just something we as a society are not good at without the voters seeing strong, clear evidence that we’re in a societal survival situation. Once that first impulse after 9/11 was lost the war effort was doomed.
It’s not a matter of if we pull out but when and what we’ve accomplished over the years we were in. If that means all out civil war in Iraq and an eventual Iranian domination of the Iraqi government then we should be preparing for that. Because it’s coming, be sure.
While I think that going into Iraq was a disaster, using lies about WMDs as justification, I don’t think your comparison with WW2 has any relevance.
What you describe as ‘meddling’ began when Britain responded to Germany invading Poland by declaring war. The conflict escalated world-wide, but the war certainly resulted in the overthrow of a genocidal regime and the restoring of various democracies (e.g. Holland, Belgium) that had been invaded.
Although millions died in the conflict, it was justified (and the US joining a few years after the start was much appreciated).
Just to emphasise the differences:
Germany invaded many countries, Iraq didn’t invade any
Germany had a powerful war machine, Iraq didn’t
Britain had a treaty obligation to fight WW2, the US had nothing for Iraq
Germany didn’t have a lot of oil, Iraq did :rolleyes:
Britain had a post-war plan, the US doesn’t
Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were statesmen, George Bush isn’t :smack:
It’s possible that had we bombed Iraq continuously for three or four years and the ground fighting hadgone on for 6 months over the whole of Iraq it would be different. If every major city and many small towns had been reduced to piles of wreckage it’s just barely possible that the populace would have been so numb that there might been a chance. That didn’t happen and I think it’s too late now, although it might happen to some extent in the sectarian war that’s going on.
It would also take a substantially larger occupation force, the cooperation of allies and something on the scale of the Marshall Plan for any hope of success.
Comparisons to WWII and its aftermath are futile. The situations aren’t anywhere near the same.
I saw some figures last night. CNN (I think…I was flipping through the channels) said that there are 550,000 Iraqis dead, which is more than the number of Vietnamese dead during our involvement over there.
Now…they did say that the vast majority of those deaths are directly connected to the Iraqis; not the US. But that doesn’t let us off the hook. They’re dead because we’re there.
I think this will go down as the worst military/political clusterfuck in our history.
I don’t know what you mean by that. Halliburton stock is down a bit from its high. And while it is up over a long time period, that is true for many stocks, given the overall good economy.
Whether we should stay or go aside, I hope no one thinks that when we do go, it’s all going to be kittens and rainbows for the Iraqis. There’ll be a genocidal bloodbath of previously undreamed of proportions. How bad it will be compared to now depends on whose word you take for current Iraqi casualties, but it’ll be pretty damn bad. The only hope will be some other power, like Iran, imposing some stability.
That’s odd. I’d always heard about a million and a half Vietnamese. This link agrees:
“U.S. casualties in Vietnam during the era of direct U.S. involvement (1961–72) were more than 50,000 dead; South Vietnamese dead were estimated at more than 400,000, and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese at over 900,000.”
Certainly not. Those companies would generally have profited handsomely anyway, given that they had long standing supply and contract relationships with the American military.
If Halliburton was such an evil and horrible company to do business with, I wonder why the Clinton administration would grant them so many contracts over the course of eight years. Not to mention the contracts they got in the Vietnam War.
It is no secret that there are companies that profit by selling things, including arms, to the military. By and large this is honorable and necessary work, and it would need to be performed whether we go to war or not.
(As a full disclaimer, I have worked for companies of this type for nine years. Before this I was active-duty military for five.)