(bolding mine)
This is completely wrong. I suggest you go back and re-read UN Security Council Resolutions 660 and 678, and any of the ones between. You will find no language in any of them that matches what you describe.
They order Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and for member states to enforce that withdrawal, but that is all.
Churchill oversaw the conquest of Iraq from the Ottomans in 1914, its rule after the First World War, as Colonial Secretary crushed an Iraqi uprising in 1920, as Prime Minister crushed another German backed uprising in 1941 and made Iraq a client state of the British Empire until 1958. Somehow I doubt he was a big fan of liberty and freedom for the Iraqis?
-More occupation troops
-If you make a mess clean it up or die trying
-Get the facts straight before starting a war
-The invasion of Iraq in 2003 as opposed to the occupation of it from 2003 to 2011 was an unparalleled success comparable probably only to the dramatic fall of France in 1940 in sheer military success.
Yes, and Pearl Harbor was a smashing success for the Japanese if you ignore what happened in 1942 and after.
You must agree, right?
The lesson learned is: people never learn nothing.
We had Vietnam as an object lesson, and we thought that horrible experience made us wise, taught us to be skeptical about starting foriegn wars, to mistrust leaders who jingoed us into them, to doubt their estimates of time, money, soldiers’ lives needed to finish them, and to heed those who warned us against them.
We didn’t learn shit, as it turned out.
That would only be an appropriate analogy if the US was utterly destroyed by Iraq.
We cleaned up our own mess here.
Your first paragraph is wishful thinking allied with historical revisionism. Your second paragraph simply indicates that you were not following the events as they unfolded.
We had no mandate to invade Iraq. The coalition included al the Gulf states aside from Iran and they would have never supported an invasion and they made that clear at the time. Baker was not writing something to “look good,” but an accurate assessment of the real world situation of the time, rather than the wishful thinking of those who think that unilateral actions by the U.S. ever result in desired results.
It’s not fair to compare an invasion that took three weeks with a battle that lasted a matter of hours.
Why are you arguing that Pearl Harbor wasn’t a huge success (discounting everything that came after it)? It pretty much is the bar by which large scale surprise attacks are measured, as long as we don’t consider anything that happens after it.
It was blatant lies.
Acknowledging that much is the minimum of decency.
Yes tactically is was a great success.
Or we can simplify even more and say “listen”.
That’s like saying we had no mandate to invade Germany in WWII. We were there to maintain the flow of oil in the region which resulted in a permanent presence as long as SH’s regime stayed in power. That presence is the reason OBL gave behind 9/11. Had SH been neutralized up front then the situation would have radically changed as it related to our presence in Saudi Arabia because without the “2nd” Gulf war we’d still be there trying to keep SH from invading other countries as well as enforcing the no-fly zones that prevented him from slaughtering his own people.
Only if your mode of gathering acorns is to follow a blind squirrel.
Sorry, the US cleaned up its own mess in Vietnam? While I expect most of what you post to be so ideological as to be wrong, this is one of the most fantastical statements I’ve yet seen you make. Where on earth do you read your history? Or, as I’m beginning to suspect, do you just make it up?
Errr no. The invasion of Iraq was badly planned and badly executed. There was very little resistance outside (except for at Basra and to a lesser extent at Kut). There was no attempt (probably due to lack of capability resulting from paucity of troops) to capture or destroy the Iraqi military or secure weapons dumps, most of the Iraqi army melted away and became the focus of the resistance. I remember in summer 2003 when the USA was busy orrahing experts elsewhere were warning if this exact point.
Wrong. Germany declared war on the U.S. in December, 1941.
The U.S. did not have a mandate, (i.e., an expressed set of instructions for a particular action), from either the UN or the Gulf states who were members of the coalition.
You might consider it a strategic error to have stopped at the Kuwait border, but your claim was that we had a mandate and you are wrong.
You are also probably wrong regarding the rest of your speculation. I have never seen any reason to believe that the Iraqi people would have been any more willing to play democracy at the end of the first Gulf War than they did at the end of the second. Clearly, we had even less planning regarding how we should proceed within the Iraq borders than we did in 2003, (when the planning was miserably inadequate), so wild guesses that Iraq would have done wonderfully better if we had made the same stupid moves twelve years sooner is little more than wishful thinking.
As for bin Laden, whatever reason he gave for attacking the U.S., his attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon actually delayed withdrawal negotiations that were already in progress. Maybe he would have refrained from that attack, or maybe he would have found some other reason to do the same thing, (such as a sympathetic attack in protest of the (hypothetically earlier), occupation of Iraq). That is little more than unsupported “what if” speculations with no bases in fact.
It is funny how we are congratulating countries on tactical successes – Pearl Harbor, the invasion of France, the invasion of Iraq – when we know perfectly well that each of those battles was totally unnecessary and wrong. Thank god we don’t let even the merest shadow of critical thought and introspection into our judgments of military success!
Where is the mandate to depose Saddam Hussein expressed? Who said it, where is it written down, and can you point us to it?
This;
and this;
and
There certainly were people that had learned the lessons. That saw this war for what it was.
Problem is, what do you do when you’re outshouted by the idiots and their lying manipulators?
So the core problem is that there are too many idiots in the US.
How did that arise and how are we to remedy this?