Yes, it is: General Powell understood this-there is NO winning a long war of occupation. Hasn’t Iraq taught you this?
To John Mace.
Well, Paneta was not only trying to have the troops stay, but to ensure that the troops also continued to have immunity from Iraqi law.
Something that many, not only Iraqis, would notice is a very abusive thing and demonstrates to all (not only Iraqis) that in reality there is a complete lack of independence for the propped up Iraqi institutions and there is really no trust whatsoever from the very institutions the propaganda claimed that it showed progress in Iraq.
I do think that one big lesson is precisely that leaders have to avoid falling for propaganda, specially their own.
Issues like immunity and demands to have Iraq pay for reparations to the USA(!) were items that angered the Iraqis even more and forced even the pro-american presence Iraqis to finally say no to the continued presence of American troops.
What I’m trying to say here is that crass insensitive blunders like those are ones that do come from believing in their own propaganda, and it is a lesson that unfortunately is very unlikely to be learned from guys like Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.
Under your criteria, I’m not worried about too few wars, I’m worried about too many. The world is ripe for the picking with cheap, easily winnable wars. We could probably take over Nevis with a medium-sized cruise ship and a skydiving club dressed in khakis. That is not sufficient reason for doing it.
GIGO: Yes, it was more than just “stay”, as you say. I was not implying that I thought the Iraqis should have agreed to allow more troops to stay. I can understand why it was politically difficult for Maliki, even if he would have preferred to have some US presence past Jan 2012.
Just because the locals are being oppressed, it doesn’t mean that they’re nice people, just that a more ruthless arsehole has achieved the position that many if not most of them would be happy to assume if they had the chance.
If a nation is made up of contrasting cultures, ethnicities, religions or branches of religion, then the odds are that without the dictator clamping down on them they’ll start acting out their hatreds, payback time !
See the former Yugoslavia
If you really, really must invade another country, secure any captured weapons, particulary small arms and weapon dumps, if you don’t then the locals will soon be using them on each other and YOU.
Secure also art treasures, assets, and utilities.
NEVER expect gratitude from the locals for ridding them of a regime, however brutal.
Do not go to war because John Smith, who has no idea where a country is, let alone understand its history and culture, has read about the political system in his local tabloid and thinks that its a BAD thing.
It may surprise some of us in the West but, not all cultures are as enamoured with Western Liberal Democracies as we are.
Finally, it is always better to make life uncomfortable for a hostile nation by being outside the tent pissing IN, ie. cruise missile/air strikes, sanctions, assisting dissadent forces within the country, propaganda, disruption of media etc.
Then it is to take on the responsibility of occupying and running the country, where every power out, every water shortage, whatever is blamed on the foreigners who had the arrogance to think that they can run the country better then they can themselves.
For all of the billions the West spent in money in Iraq and the the blood we shed , the Iraqis not only don’t feel that they owe a debt to us, they actually harbour a resentement against us that they never previously held under S.H.
Next time there is a war, move to DC and get in on the contracting business. Profit!
People think of the Iraqi war as 2 wars when it was actually one war with an agreed upon cessation in between.
What we should have learned:
- when you’ve won a war against a known, organized dictator/army, FINISH IT. We stopped what was seen as a turkey-shoot because it looked bad. We should have demanded unconditional surrender from Saddam Hussein and introduced free elections then.
- when you’re going after a dictator/army don’t advertise it as Shock and Awe on day one. Even if there is a populace that would prefer not to be raped and pillaged by their own dictator they don’t want to be “shocked and awed” by a giant know-it-all invader.
Why on earth do you assume it would have turned out any different 20 years earlier? If anything, it probably would have been worse.
20 years ago we had a mandate with great worldwide support. Iraq invaded Kuwait. defeat would have been more on the order of Japan losing the war. Out goes the offending leadership and in comes a political system created with the involvement of the people who had to live under a brutal dictator.
Seems like it would have been a win/win for everybody concerned. Instead, we became what was seen as an occupying force in a very backward part of the world and that gave OBL the support he needed for 9/11.
If we had gone it, finished it and got out I think the outcome would have been much different.
We spent decades trying to stop the two communities in Northern Ireland trying to butcher each other, in the end normal people got fed up with wth what was going on and thats when it stopped.
Unfortunately there are people who used to be the "Big Man "in the community, who miss it.
And are trying to start it up again.
Continuety IRA I’m looking at you!
We didn’t have a mandate to invade Iraq. We had a mandate to kick him out of Kuwait. But even if we had the 1990 Coalition, why would things have gone more smoothly in Iraq after SH was ousted? We would still have been a occupying force in a country riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions. The only difference is that SH would actually have had some WMDs at the time. And he had one of the largest armies in the world.
It would have been worse.
I disagree, we had a mandate to stop SH. Had he been removed before we became an occupying force in the region it would have been a radically different dynamic to both Iraqis in particular and Muslims in general.
We couldn’t remove him before becoming an occupying force. You’d still have Sunna and Shi’a hating each other, and the Kurds would not have had time to set up a semi-autonomous region. The dynamic would have been worse.
You are making up your own history. What you believe is a fiction, no different from the bogus history told to children that George Washington had wooden teeth, Christopher Columbus proving that the world was round, and so on. It’s a nice, convenient, feel-good story that is totally at odds with the facts.
Says James Baker, the man who conducted virtually all the face-to-face diplomacy running up to the Gulf War:
He also says:
Again, you are totally making up your own history. There was no mandate for the US (or the coalition) to force Saddam out of power. The historical record indicates that most countries assumed that there was a fair to good chance that Saddam would fall after being schwacked decisively, but it was politically and diplomatically impossible to achieve the massive kind of “mission creep” that you suggest should have happened in 1991.
And that’s exactly what you are suggesting: mission creep.
Again, read your history. Iraq was a nation set up by the British-out of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire. The British set up a monarchy (was it Hashemite?), which was overthrown by a bloodthirsty dictator (General Kaseem). Kaseem was every bit as brutal as Saddam Hussein, and died in the same way. Hussein came to power, and plunged Iraq into war (with Iran). It (Iraq) will be unstable-as it consists of rival groups (Sunni, Shia, Kurds), who would gladly butcher eachother, given the opportunity.
How we expect a unified nation to emerge from this mess, I have no idea.
Its a larger version of Somalia (we had another great success there).
All the Somali tribes are more or less the same culturally . . . Iraq is more like Yugoslavia. A lot like Yugoslavia, a multinational state cobbled together out of Ottoman provinces, where for decades an authoritarian dictatorship kept the lid on ethnic hostilities, and when that lid was ripped off, everything boiled over. But, things seem to have settled down now in Yugoslavia. They’ve gotten it mostly out of their systems, as it were. Maybe the Iraqis have too.
I think it’s the height of naivety to think we could push SH to Kuwait’s border and leave the next day. The mandate was to stop him. He had a long history of internal and external brutality.
What you call mission creep was the reality of not finishing what we started. We had the moral authority at the time to remove SH regardless of what Baker thinks will look good in a dusty archive.
The Sunna and Shia hated each other because one was used against the other politically. It was very much like Rwanda from that perspective. And considering how Islam interweaves politics backed up by private armies that was a dangerous dynamic to be sure so your point is not without merit.
Nation building is a failure and anyway too expensive. Next time, and there’s always a next time, it’s back to the traditional true and tested method of destroying the enemy with whatever means is most effective. How they pick up the pieces afterwards, they’ll have to sort out themselves.
This is just unsupportable nonsense. What we started was a military effort to get Saddam out of Kuwait – nothing more, nothing less. That’s what the guy in charge of the diplomacy to create the coalition has said, yet you dismiss because it doesn’t fit in to your bias.
You are suggesting that in the middle of the mission, we just up and change our minds and decide that the limited objectives of the invasion plan drawn up by General Schwarzkopf should be completely changed and rewritten on the fly to create a mission that was never planned for.
That’s called mission creep. In fact, what you are saying is the textbook definition of it. It’s no different than deciding that rebuilding Somalia would suddenly be a great idea.