Well, its pretty much conceded (by most0 that Iraq has beena disaster. My question; could the bad turn of events have been antiucipated? i must say, i forsaw it (and I DON’T have a Ph.D in Middle easter Studies from harvard). So, how did our "brains trust’ manage to get everything so wrong? I wonder what would have happened had we marched in, deposed Saddam, and left Chalabi in charge? what’s the concensus in academis on this/
Saddam was no danger to the U.S. and had no discernable ties to Al Queda. We should have concentrated on Afghanistan, using more troops, especially civil affairs units that are trained in advising, guiding and establishing government control at a local level. We had a good chance of turning that country into some form of democratic rule. Success there would have put the U.S. in a much better position to elicit aid from other middle east states in the event that we needed to remove Saddam in the future. The Bush administration was duly warned of many of the pitfalls awaiting us if we invaded Iraq and most of those warning have proven accurate.
For starters, all they had to do was look at the first Gulf War, where we used almost twice as many troops and the only mission then was to push Saddams troops out of Kuwait and inflict enough harm to convince them not to try it again. Any fool could see that to occupy Iraq and establish a new gov’t. would require more than “shock and awe”.
I’m not sure I understand. This disaster was anticipated. A good portion of the country, including most experts, was predicting exactly this outcome (civil war, which you’d be hard-pressed to claim isn’t what’s happening) before the war started (although many of us anti-war folks were against it on purely traitorous principles like “murdering tens of thousands of non-terrorists doesn’t stop terrorism” that had nothing to do with the war’s likely outcome in terms of Iraqi stability.)
Why else would the administration have felt to need to bray that estimates that it might take more than a year and cost more than $60 billion were irresponsible inflations by a small number of naysayers?
Did Bush Sr. write in his autobiography what a mistake invading Iraq would be? It wasn’t only predicted, it was predicted by W’s freakin’ Dad.
To continue the pile-on … yes, it was certainly anticipated. I remember being horribly depressed about the run up to the war in 2002-2003 because much of what I had read at the time led me to think it would be a disaster. Iraq has always been a deeply fractured society with strong ethnic and religious divisions. These were kept in check only Saddam the strongman’s brutal repression. Remove the lid on the pressure cooker and boom!
Numerous expert warned of this. Here’s Brent Scowcroft, HW’s national security advisor, on Face the Nation in 2002:
But in the run up to war seious policy analysis was jettisoned in favor of an extreme “support the war or be called a traitor” jingoism. There was virtually no serious discussion of the coming war in the mass media.
(In the interest of full disclosure I should admit that I wasn’t psychic. 
I thought the war would go badly but I was wrong about how. I thought that Saddam Hussein’s army would fight more of a guerilla war and would therefore trigger the inevitable civil war earlier.
I also thought that we would find enough WMDs to provide a fig leaf for the invasion. There was nothing to indicate that Iraq had WMD’s in sufficient amounts to be a threat to American interests, but I assumed there must be some odds and ends lying around.)
While the media did an abysmal job of providing anything remotely resembling a critical evaluation of the case for war, the many potential pitfalls were often raised by those of us trying to slow the rush to war. I remember asking pro-war folks about post-war plans, and specifically how we would handle the post-Saddam power vacuum and never really got a response beyond “Saddam is bad! Invade!” It was very frustrating then, and it’s even more frustrating now listening to some of the same people try to pretend no one could have foreseen the current situation.
I just realized I didn’t really address your original point:
The Bush Administration ignored whatever intelligence they received from the CIA and the State Department experts that didn’t agree with their own rigid ideological world views.
So … because Donald Rumsfeld was convinced that the Army was bloated and inefficient he fought the Iraq War to demonstrate that an agile, technologically advanced force was superior to more boots on the ground. He was more interested in proving his abstract point than in winning the war. So we never had enough troops on the ground and generals who suggested otherwise were ridiculed.
So … because there’s a strong belief on the right that private enterprise is ALWAYS better than government interference – reconstruction in Iraq was focused more on creating a utopian free market state and less on stability. So big chunks of the country rapidly descended into chaos, radicalizing the many Iraqis.
So … because many in the White House insisted on seeing this as an epic clash of civilizations like World War II they relied on faulty analogies from that past war instead of actual policy analysis. We don’t need to plan for the occupation because they will greet us like liberators just like the French did. We need to purge the army and government of Ba’athists just like we did with the Nazi’s in the German Government. We must strike quickly lest we be appeasers like Chamberlain.
And so on. Basically there was a deep failure to understand Iraq AS IRAQ and an overreliance on high-flown abstract concepts and faulty historical metaphors. The foreign policy experts at the CIA and the State Department in many cases knew better but they were systemically ignored by the ideologues.
According to this CNN article, they predicted it would be a huge mess in 1999.
Adding to what was said, I do think these 2 items were also important:
-Torture did work to get us information of the Al-qaeda – Iraq connection, Unfortunately it was shown later that it was FALSE evidence.
-This administration forgot (and I think on purpose) the biggest lesson of the Bay of Pigs fiasco: Basing your plans on the dissidents of the nation to be invaded is idiotic. Then just like now, the hatred and self interest of dissidents did color the estimated results.
Those items were virtually ignored by the mainstream media even to this day.
The invasion was not a disaster - it was wildly successful. The occupation afterwards has been an entirely different story. The briefest look at history - WW2, Vietnam etc - shows that you cannot control a country with soldiers. We should have left after bagging Saddam.
Akin to saying “I had a plan to get a haircut by jumping off the Bay Bridge. The jump was wildly successful, but as I see the water rushing up at me, I find that the rest of the plan has been an entirely different story.”
You’re saying that the Nazis didn’t control France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland etc with soldiers?
Have you read the UK Foreign Secretary’s resignation speech? (given before the war):
‘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.
To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse.
Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible.’
‘Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.
The threshold for war should always be high.
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.’
'It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk.
Nor is it fair to accuse those of us who want longer for inspections of not having an alternative strategy.
For four years as foreign secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment.
Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long-range missiles programmes.
Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. ’
‘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.
That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.’
‘What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.’
Anyway the war has been a success … for some:
- Bush got re-elected
- various companies that support the Republicans (Haliburton, Bechtel) got loads of money in war contracts
- there are now no WMDs in Iraq :rolleyes:
And the only cost was a shattering of international confidence + support for the US, plus hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties (none of whom vote in US elections, so don’t count).
:smack:
If you don’t like those, try post-war Germany and Japan.
Even the invasion could hardly have been described as “wildly successful.” Even against the significantly crippled, underequipped, and technologically inferior, the invasion could scarcely be characterized as “wildly successful”, at least per the pre-invasion claims from Rumsfeld et al asserting that the US would be in control of Bagdad inside of a week. Disrupting communications, logistics, and infrastructure in Iraq certainly eliminated organized resistance quickly and with minimal US/Coalition casualties, but this was never seriously in question outside the intellectual circle of Baghdad Bob.
The occupation was always guaranteed to be a disaster, in part because the Administration specifically and apparently intentionally had no exit strategy, partially because the Coalition had no concordance from any succeeding authority, but mostly because it was a giant power vacuum of a nation with artificial borders crossing several different ethnic and cultural divides.
Stranger
I predicted it, based solely on the fact that prior to the US invasion - and depending on whose numbers you believe - there were anything between 40 and 75 Iraqi opposition parties based in London, Paris and Washington - and they all hated each other’s guts.
Yes. The Resistance did a pretty good job in WW2, don’t you think?
Too bad. Such powers are useful. According to Uri Geller, a remote viewer was responsible for finding Saddam.
Absolutely. I’ve only ever been on one protest march, but it was a pretty big one. I got asked by a journalist the usual questions about WMDs, and I replied that I didn’t believe the stories being presented to us, and that the fragmentation of Iraq along ethnic lines would be a far greater danger.