[QUOTE=The Other Waldo Pepper]
An occupation of Iran would probably be a disaster. A war with Iran would probably be a cakewalk. Isn’t that the lesson of Iraq?
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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.
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Should we also sell weapons to folks and maybe fund the contras?
Sure, why not as long as we keep the most advanced stuff for ourselves. And if the choice was invasion or funding a rebel group, the choice is pretty easy for me. Or do you think it makes more sense to send in our army?
Some of the debate focuses on whether Bush-41 was right to stop when he did in 1991, or should have taken the War to Baghdad. I think there was a middle path:
The 1991 War should have been continued for just a few more days, while explicitly asking the Baathists to depose Saddam. Iraq still ends up with a Baathist dictatorship, but the new dictator would surely have been an improvement over Saddam, a particularly heinous monster who allegedly enjoyed watching children’s eyes gouged out (as part of the process of torturing the father).
I’m not sure what continuing the war for a few more days would accomplish aside from preventing some elements of the Republican Guard escaping across the Euphrates. The goal of the war was accomplished; Iraq had been forcibly ejected from Kuwait. One of the factors leading to ending the war at 100 hours was the footage coming out of the Highway of Death, which rightly or wrongly was causing queasiness in the public.
Encouragement to rebel had been given since the initial air phase of the war, and there were massive uprisings by Shia in the south and Kurds in the north. The tacit hope was that Saddam might be overthrown, but publically calling for the Ba’athists to depose Saddam would have been an enormous mistake; both domestically and internationally it would have gone over like a lead balloon. I’d be seen much like encouraging Himmler to depose Hitler. Just as importantly, it probably wouldn’t have worked. Saddam had enough control over the Ba’athist party and any other potential political opponents to retain power through the humiliation of the defeat and the rebellions in the aftermath. In 2003 he remained in power until the last minutes of Baghdad falling, and for what it was worth he remained in charge of what was left of the party while in hiding.
Dunno if anyone’s mentioned it, but Frontline’s take on the matter, in a piece titled “The Lost Year in Iraq”, summarizes the major problems fairly well, and pretty much covers many of the ideas already floated in this thread - incompetent cronies given positions of power, deBaathification removing all competent experienced bureaucrats from the provisional government, scattering the Iraqi army, etc.
On second thoughts, the actual decision making people needn’t have made their decisions out of sheer stupidity. Self enrichment comes to mind in certainly one case.
When one looks back at Bush senior and he was advised not to go into Baghad because of riling up all the fanatics across the region, and now one can see the hornets nest we got into because Jr. didn’t liston to his dad. The culture there is so different than here.I hope we learned a lesson,we can’t go to a war without harming innocent children, and the enemies don’t care who they kill as long as they can keep us spending our country into the poor house!
That was enough to get him elected in 2008. Its not going to get him elected in 2012. But to be fair, I will grudgingly agree that he has accomplished a lot of good things, he just seems to cave to the Republicans all the time, its like they have a picture of him sleeping with Maralyn Monroe or Monica Lewinsky.
Yeah, how many of us knew the difference between Shia and Sunni before 2003?
You can only learn something when you fail. Therefore, for Iraq war, no lessons learned.
Now, for hundreds of thousands of Iraq war protestors from early 2003, the lesson learned is that the only difference between Iraq and Iran is the last letter of the country name.
There were people saying exactly that. Even in Congress. However, evil overcomes silly petitions by small people.
Ok, seriously now, do you really think that people who devised Iraq war were somehow “wrong” and “delusional”? The whole thing was devised and executed by people way smarter and determined by you or me so could we please aty least aknowledge our moral failing and cowardice?
Yes, they were wrong and in many cases outright delusional. And far from being “smart”, I’d say that most of them are much dumber than I or most of the people on this board - not because we’re smart, but because they are incompetent, willfully delusional fools.
Yes. History shows that to be undeniable. They thought (knew) that SH had WMDs and thought the war would be cheap and brief. Wrong on the first count, delusional on the second.
Our “moral failing and cowardice” (such as it is) does not exclude the wrongness or the delusions of the Bush administration.
It’s amusing to see how quickly Iraq seems to be falling apart after the US’s militaries departure. What is sad is that many of the people who planned and supported this catastrophe will never be able to acknowledge their failure.