Actually, the second Gulf War could have been easily avoided if we had simply not started it. Nothing more was required.
As you arlready noted:
With that attitude, there was utterly no reason to invade Iraq, at all. The no-fly zones already prevented Iraq from invading either Kuwait or Iran, (with the additional benefit of allowing a number of Iraqis to live in relative peace).
The mandate came with the declaration of war by Germany. As an aggressor against our country, Hitler established our right to take the war back to him in extremis. Hussein never threatened the U.S., much less declared war on us. That is a significant difference. In addition, going into Iraq in 1991 would have cost us the good will of all the Gulf nations who actively opposed us doing that.
There is also no reason to think that it would not have given bin Laden and his cronies more anti-U.S. fervor to recruit even more terrorists and sparked more repression throughout the region, delaying the Arab Spring for another twenty years.
the no fly zones bought HS time. He built a mobile refining system (magnetrons) for uranium and was eventually caught. What exactly did you think would happen 10,20,30 years down the road if we continued to operate as a military overlord to Iraq? SH still had control of the oil wealth and we would still have had bases in Saudi Arabia. Do you think that was going to be another Korea where we just sit there unnoticed while nothing changes? Did we stop NK from building a nuclear weapon?
Magiver is a time traveller from 2002!
That seems like the best idea in hindsight, now.
He’d be dead of old age; we probably only cut a few years off his span as it is. And Iraq II wasn’t about Saddam, we would have attacked even if he left or shot himself in the head. I recall some Bush official or other admitting as much before the war in fact.
Saddam was safely in his box, had no WMD program and no WMDs, was under UN sanctions, was importing no weapons of significance, had no domestic military production capacity of significance and no longer presented any meaningful threat to any of his neighbors. Nothing about that situation was going to change by choosing to not electively go to war in 2003.
There’s plenty of reasons going to Baghdad in 1991 wouldn’t have resulted in anything of the sort. There was no mandate to conquer Iraq and overthrow Saddam. Moving to do this would immediately cause the coalition to fracture and shortly thereafter shatter completely. Britain might have gone along with us, but that’s pretty much it. Every other member of the coalition would drop out as there was no mandate for it and it wasn’t what they signed on for. Even Dick Cheney was smart enough to realize this. Personally disliking the man doesn’t make what he said in 1991 untrue. I didn’t care very much for Bush Sr. overall, but that doesn’t make him wrong on his handling of the 1991 war. He handled it quite well and was wise enough to not send the army off to Baghdad in '91 after Iraq had been decisively defeated and driven from Kuwait – something he’d been given a mandate to do by pretty much the entire world, no mean feat, and something entirely lacking in his son’s 2003 venture.
An attack on Baghdad in 1991 would have resulted in what we saw IRL in 2003. There would have been a year or so of relative calm and then the place would have blown up as the Iraqi resistance identified and exploited coalition vulnerabilities. In 1991 all the command had been junior officers in Vietnam and they knew exactly what they were getting into. The Vietnam generation had retired by 2003.
And incidentally never mind Cheney, Powell in his book devotes a large amount of pages to exactly why they choose not to go to Baghdad and knock Saddam off and the reasons are pretty much what came to transpire in 2003-2011.
Lesson probably not learned from Iraq: Don’t start a new war until you finish the one you are currently fighting.
This was my main argument against the war in 2003 (I actually believe he had WMDs at the time). Has it ever in the history of military strategy made sense for a country currently at war to open a new front against a different enemy if they didn’t have to?
You know who else opened up two fronts in a war?
FDR!
Can’t actually think of anybody. Hitler had three, as did CHurchill and FDR, Togo had at the end 4. Stalin had 2, but they were never at the same time.
I was in Teheran 2 years ago on business. It was far more functional than the gulf countries, by way of comparison. Nearly all western views of countries like Iran are colored by the (fervently anti-Iran and pro-Israel) media.
Could Iranians say the same thing about the USA by pointing to OWS?
That’s not what I asked.
And no, they could not say the same thing in reference to OWS.
It probably wasn’t viewed as a primary target. Even though they were using them in a textbook “force projection” way, even the Japanese thought of the Aircraft Carriers as a sideline to the Battleships that were the main thrust of the attack.
Saying that Pearl was a failure because the carriers were missed is viewing the attack in hindsight. For the goals at the time, and the doctrine of the time, it was a smashing success.
I learned that even if the president says it’s true, it 'aint necessarily so. Even now, nobody can answer the very simple question of “why did the Bush jr administration invade Iraq?” He told us it was because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which was not true. His administration knew it was not true, as they took steps to prevent the honest reporting of such. Pretty much any time my president tells me we need to go attack some country in the future, I’m going to loudly protest. I’ll be damned if they fool me the same way twice.
Very true, before the war both the Japanese and the United States high commands thought very much in terms of the battle line still being the queens of the seas. In hindsight, having all the battleships but Arizona and Oklahoma sink in the shallow water of the harbor where they could be raised and repaired in a process taking years while missing the carriers may have been an inadvertent blessing since it forced the US to rely on its carriers while the older battleships were able to be used later in the war for shore bombardment and in the last battleship vs. battleship engagement ever fought at Surigao Straits where 5 of the 6 US battleships involved had been sunk or heavily damaged at Pearl Harbor. That is all with the benefit of hindsight, though; it was viewed at the time as nothing but a major strategic victory for Japan and even with hindsight it remains so, taking out the major part of the US capital ships in the Pacific for several years allowed them to run wild in the early months of the Pacific War taking the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, New Britain, etc without fear of major US naval intervention.
That’s a very interesting perspective… although I’ve visited and lived in most of the gulf states and never thought of them as dysfunctional.
These all seem like different ways of saying that in the debate between neocons and the professional military on how to conduct a war, the professional military was proven correct.
I still remember Shinseki getting the shitcanned for estimating a required force of 500,000 soldiers to get the job done where the Vice president and secretary fo defense was hoping for a number closer to 50,000. I still remember west point graduates holding up banners at their graduation saying “Shinseki was right”
I against the invasion of Iraq to begin with (mostly because they lied us into the war) but I was absolutely horrified by the way it was conducted. Strategies were built around neocon ideology rather than military principles.
What absolutely fucking boggle my mind is that we see Republican repeating these discredited principles almost verbatim. Has the Republican party really distanced itself enough from the Iraq war and the bush presidency that they can trot out these positions once again? I know that Obama is difficult to attack on foreign policy but dso you really need to go all the way back to Doug Feith levels of neoconservatism to launch an attack on oabam’s foreign policy positions? For fucks sake!!!
What always amazes me about some of these warhawks is the belief that while we iron willed, tough, hardened Americans would never allow ourselves to be defeated by any military force; we seem to believe we can bend anyone in the world to our will if we beat them up enough.
I just wanted to add my voice to teh chorus of people who think you are engaging in revising history and wishful thinking.
Um no. You were taking one bright point of an otherwise disastrous engagement and highlighting how well that went. Pearl harbor is similar.
Well, I think the lesson of the past decade is that you limit your military wars of choice to predator drones providing air support for a grassroots opposition or rebellion. Run all our elective wars the way we ran Libya and I think we have the beginnings of the Obama doctrine.
Twain was a distributionist? Did McCarthy know about this?