They didnt know if Iraq had WMDs, that’s why they supported inspections over invasion (unless WMDs now include obsolete stocks of chemicals). And they were probably being diplomatic on that matter, considering the lack of evidence the US presented to back the claim that Iraq may have WMDs.
Well, that, is, as you see here: Like Vietnam, people will still discuss it – and some will discuss it passionately – when you bring it up; but nobody seems to bring it up much any more. And you have to wonder why. But then, when somebody does bring it up – you have to wonder why.
It was complicated. Liberals will say that Bush never mentioned Saddam’s general humanitarian violations and solely focused on WMD, conservatives will try to pretend WMD were a minor issue.
In truth, the WMD was the smoking gun for sure, but from the very first speeches Bush gave that were directed at the removal of Saddam Hussein he was talking about Saddam’s “rape rooms” and things of that nature.
When WMD weren’t found that became all the GOP wanted to talk about, obviously.
For me, I remain unconvinced it was in America’s geopolitical interests to invade Iraq, but I do think long term Iraq will now be better off. Another 30 years of rule by Saddam’s family would have left Iraq in even worse shape. It’s difficult to say how the “Arab Spring” would have turned out in Iraq, most likely similar to Libya–Saddam would have used massive military force against civilians and the west would have intervened.
I do not believe you should invade a country if it is not to your national interest. The funny thing about the “no blood for oil” schtick is we’ve profited not at all from the Iraq war, and at this point all the oil reserves in Iraq probably wouldn’t pay for it. Further, most of the American oil companies haven’t substantially made a lot of money there either. So the idea that we’ve benefited economically is questionable.
I will say that Saddam could have significantly reduced domestic support for an invasion if he had actually gone along with the weapons inspections; because his playing cat and mouse games allowed us to say he had WMDs because he wasn’t being compliant in letting people do their inspections. Eventually pacifist Hans Blix tried to say Saddam was in the clear, even though he hadn’t really complied with proper inspections. To this day I don’t know why Saddam did not do that, maybe he didn’t have a proper understanding of how American domestic politics worked, but if Saddam had aggressively worked to comply with UN inspections he’d potentially still be around today.
It’s unlikely any problems we had in Afghanistan are linked to Iraq. Afghanistan is more a region than a country, our best bet in Afghanistan has always been that we just work to keep it from becoming an active base for terrorists directed against the American homeland. Which basically means we shouldn’t have troops there, we should be propping up the warlords who will keep their areas mostly clean of terrorist training camps and using drones to kill those who won’t. I actually think under such a scenario the Taliban would actually work pretty hard to make sure terrorist training camps didn’t pop up in their territory–if they did that they would receive American aid and wouldn’t be getting bombed, and could more easily reclaim the country.
The Taliban probably wishes it had just fucked over al-Qaeda 10 years ago at this point, we weren’t fans of their ideology but we didn’t give two shits about them until we found out they were the ones harboring OBL initially.
False belief. Iraq was pretty westernized when Saddam was in power. Women wore western clothes if they chose to and were 60 percent of the college students. They could drive cars. Different sects intermarried and were peaceful toward each other.
It could be a hell hole if you crossed Saddam or got on his radar, but most people went on with life .
We did not do them any favors. Saddam was their problem, not ours.
Does it really make a difference? I can’t think of any decision a president makes that’s more important than sending troops to war. I’ll give Bush enough credit to say that he probably didn’t flip a coin. But if he put all the resources at his disposal into this, how is incompetence better than dishonesty?
Well, rotating through the tomahawk inventory is always a hoot. And extra bases!
Wow! 
:smack:
I don’t want to get into another silly argument over whether 1 TRILLION dollars is “just chump change” or a “rounding error,” but I’d like a cite for the “relatively few lives.” A survey by Opinion Research Business estimates over 1 MILLION “deaths as a result of the conflict” over just a 4+ year period; Lancet estimates 600,000 “violent deaths” over just a 3+ year period. Many estimates are lower but all are in 6 digits. And that’s just deaths, to which child malnutrition and psychological damage, etc. must be added. Not to mention 4 MILLION displaced refugees, including many of the trained professionals that would have helped Iraq’s future.
Wow. :smack: Forget the cite on death numbers. Just give any vague clue that you have the slightest idea what you are talking about.
And please PLEASE do not lecture rationalists on how vile Saddam was. We knew that 3 decades ago when the heroes of your War, Rumsfeld and Cheney, were supporting this monster with money and munitions. And if humanitarianism were a goal, one could have invaded any of several other countries, especially in Africa, where oppression was far worse, intervention would have had more local and international support, and where suffering saved per U.S. soldier would have been far FAR greater than would have been achieved in Iraq even in a best counterfactual scenario.
It might be amusing to hear what you think the real reasons for Bush’s War were. To get you started, these reasons included neither real fear of WMD’s, nor the humanitarian pretence you’ve devised.
As Bill Maher quips, caricaturing W. during the run up to the war:
- “He gassed the Kurds ! He gassed his own people !”. Errr, yeah, in the 80s… and your Daddy *almost *interrupted his golf game over that one…
I think this often gets lost in the finger pointing. Christ almighty, we went to war over this. War! It is THE most serious thing a government can do, and this one was completely unnecessary, WMDs or no WMDs.
First, while Saddam was vile, there are plenty of vile rulers out there, some of which we support (including, as mentioned, Saddam.) And some of the people Saddam killed were exactly the ones we killed when we went in. However, it is seldom permissible to invade on these grounds, so a self-defense justification was required, in other words, WMDs.
While I agree that there was a consensus that he had some WMDs, a rusty missile or two would not be grounds for war, and in any case the whole country was open to inspection. This was showing that there was few if any WMDs. They followed up all the intelligence reports, and found nothing, and we now know how we were snookered. Remember, they had intended to bring it up in the Security Council, but there was a question about whether they would actually get a majority let alone no vetoes, so it was never done.
Remember, the lack of evidence from the UN inspections just made the Administration more frantic to launch the war. It is hard to tell if Bush was lying or just stupid, but in any case you don’t worry about the motives of Mortimer Snerd. Cheney and Rumsfeld set up the intelligence so Bush would think there were WMDs, and Bush lacked either the critical judgment or the will to push back.
IIRC, polls before the invasion were against it unless there was international support. Of course after the invasion lots of people fell into line.
Not sure why that article says 2009, as it was originally published in Oct 2002.
As far as removing Saddam Hussein from power as a motive, keep in mind he was 66 years old in 2003. Human mortality was going to remove him from power in the not too distant future.
Was he going to be succeeded by one of his sons or some other brutal dictator? Probably. But do we have any reason to believe Iraq won’t become a dictatorship now? It’s not like Iraq has a stable democratic government in place.
They are more likely to be considered war criminals than heroes. Who is it that considers them heroes? I hear no one speak in praise of them. And they should never have been in office.
Murders are not morally superior just because it’s Americans doing the killing. And Iraq is a much worse hellhole than it was. They are not better off. Go tell women who can no longer get an education how much better off they are. Go tell the people with dead family and friends how much better off they are. Go tell the people living in refugee camps. We destroyed their economy, their infrastructure, their government their society and left behind nothing but ruins and suffering.
Especially since we’ve worked so very hard to convince the Iraqi people that “democracy” is a synonym for bloodshed, suffering, chaos and poverty.
Thanks for making my day.
At the time we invaded, Iraq had been under sanctions for twelve years. We now know that these sanctions were working. There’s no reason to assume they wouldn’t have continued working for another twelve years if necessary. Would Saddam have still been alive in 2015 at age 78? 2020 at 83? 2025 at 88?
We’ve held the line in Korea and Cuba for decades. We could have outlasted Saddam Hussein however long he lived.
The inspections were, in large part, to check to see whether WMD that had been sealed in earlier inspections were still sealed. The inspectors gave negative reports because the Iraqis did not show them the previously tagged materials.
It’s true that the US was pressuring the inspectors to expand their role to actually looking around the country for hidden weapons. Do you recall the issue of inspector access to the presidential palaces? This US demand for an expanded UN inspector role was not adopted.
According to many people on the left, not to mention at the UN, they were indeed working in the sense that the sanctions had killed half a million children:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072100-03.htm
Or, some said, 1.5 million total:
http://addictedtowar.com/docs/sanctions.htm
This put pressure on US presidents to do something about Iraq. Even more pressure came from the more credible reports of Saddam being responsible for deaths numbering in that range. And even more pressure than that came from the situation where, for the past decade, the US and UK (and sometimes France) had been bombing Iraq every few weeks, to no effect. This obviously was not as big of a crisis as the war would become, but it seemed a crisis at the time. Also setting the stage was our complete failure to make a success of the Clinton-signed Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. This isn’t to blame Bill Clinton, who knew the Act was a bad idea, but couldn’t veto it for a host of reasons – even though his rhetoric was fuel for such mistakes. Bill Clinton, February 1998:
Alistair Cooke said, in one of his last BBC Letter from America broadcasts, that Bill Clinton had wanted to end the long-term low-level war by expanding it into an invasion, but Clinton couldn’t because of the Lewinsky scandal. There’s may be no real proof of that, but based on my last link above, I think that Cooke was right. Comparable quotations from Al Gore, who sadly lacks the self-awareness to know he would have gone to war the same as Bush, are available on request.
After 9/11, the US was in a more bellicose mood where the idea of continuing to bomb a country, every few weeks, without outcome, was unacceptable. In the American political center, disagreements were over the timing of invasion rather than its fact. No president could have resisted the mainstream opinion pressure to stop the halfway measures and do something definitive.
If ever there was a war determined by historical, economic and political causes, and shaped by events rather than personalities, this was the one.
Cite please? As I recall it, the inspectors then did get access to presidential palaces, unlike the previous round. They were not just looking at sealed WMDs, they were looking for them in locations given to them by intelligence reports. Before the invasion began I heard an interview with Hans Blix on NPR which convinced me that there were no or very few WMDs. And I was right.
It doesn’t matter what people thought about WMDs in late 2001, only the evidence at the time of the invasion. And that evidence made it pretty clear there weren’t a lot.
I believe the word used by inspectors to describe the quality of pre-war US intelligence regarding these alleged weapons was “garbage”. I think they were being too nice.
I guess 500,000 Iraqis dying over a period of twelve years is a problem that could be solved by war if you feel the problem was Iraqis weren’t dying fast enough. The invasion killed that many Iraqis in half the time.
It’s not a black and white world. I’m not claiming that Iraq was a wonderful place before the invasion. But it’s not a wonderful place since the invasion either. I just don’t see that the changes we caused were worth the cost.