The present government doesn’t have much legitimacy since it was established under American occupation, and Iraq is one of those artificial post-colonialist countries that people never had much loyalty towards anyway.
The Sunni Arabs will be begging us to come back very soon. Or they’ll try and get Saudi Arabia to intervene. Not sure how successful that will be.
If that’s true, it will be funny (not funny “ha-ha”) since the insurgency was the “Sunni insurgency.” I’m not sure why they thought they’d be able to retake control of the government if they could just kick us out, considering they’re such a minority.
If I had to make a prediction for worst-case scenario, I’d wager Iraq’s in for an ethnic cleansing that will make Rwanda’s look like a golden age of enlightenment. Saudi intervention will likely not be as significant as Iranian pro-Shia influence. Are the Saudis really willing to intervene in Iraq to support a minority population in defiance of Iran? I doubt it. The west is extremely unlikely to put any real effort into protecting Sunnis in Iraq, either. It could get really bad, and it’s mostly our fault.
IIRC, many of them didn’t realize they were a minority thanks to decades of propaganda.
They have demonstrated that they were delusional and they were clearly wrong. I am not about to get into some silly game involving the waving of IQs, (in which I have little faith, anyway), but if those folks were intelligent, they certainly went out of their way to demonstrate that blind faith in an idea can cancel intelligence.
A few Delusions:
[ul]
[li]That the Iraqi people would welcome us with open arms as “liberators.” They did not.[/li][li]That the Iraqi people would be eager to jump on the bandwagon to form a secular federalist/republican government. Instead, when the secularist Baath party was overthrown, they immediately resorted to sectarian and ethnic violence driven by tribal considerations.[/li][li]That bringing in a well known crook, (bank fraud), who had left Iraq at age 12 and who had close ties to Iran, would be a good choice to impose as the new (U.S. puppet) Iraqi leader with no objections from the Iraqi people.[/li][li]That they would be able to pay for the war using Iraq’s own oil reserves, (never mind the moral bankruptcy of using Iraqi funds to pay for their own subjugation), when there was ample information that Iraq’s war indemnity to the other Gulf States from the First Gulf War would exhaust even the most optimistic projections of that revenue for many years.[/li][/ul]
A few more cases of being wrong, (stupid):
[ul]
[li]They insisted that the smaller force required to defeat the Iraqi army would be sufficient to hold and pacify a restless and armed nation. In order to “prove” their error, they explicitly rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to deploy more troops.[/li][li]They disbanded the Iraqi Army at the conclusion of the war, sending the troops home with no jobs and no sources of income, creating a ready pool of talent to be recruited to sectarian militias while denuding the country of an organized force that could have been employed to maintain security in restless regions while acting to keep out the many al Qaeda terrorists who flooded across the country’s porous borders.[/li][li]They were so sure that they would find Weapons of Mass Destruction to be used to rationalize their invasion that they set up a political unit to skew the intelligence reports that challenged their belief. (Of course, they also tacitly acknowledged that they knew there were not really any WMDs when they failed to include any plans, (or dedicate any troops), to securing the sites of suspected WMD caches.)[/li][*]They pulled military intelligence units out of Afghanistan to support the Iraq invasion in the belief that we did not need to keep an eye on a separate country we had invaded when the entire country was armed and about a third of it was organized into fighting units opposing us.[/ul]
Not if the war mongers are white Christians and the victims are preferably dark skinned.
The current crop of Republican candidates are almost about to promise the same thing… kill as many dark skinned un-Christians as possible. It looks like this strategy will still work for the conservative vote.
One other delusion your post reminded me of was the administration believing their own hype about the ‘coalition of the willing’ causing this small force to be even smaller. Turkey was listed as a member of the coalition of the willing, and the 4th Infantry Division was to deploy to Turkey to invade northern Iraq. Apparently nobody bothered to consult with Turkey about it beforehand, so the equipment for the entire division sat floating in the Mediterranean when Turkey didn’t grant the use of its soil or airspace to invade Iraq. Rather than sending the ships through the Suez to Kuwait in time for the division to participate in the invasion, the administration remained deluded in their diplomatic ability and left the ships floating around the Mediterranean for weeks thinking they could convince Turkey to change its mind. They weren’t sent to Kuwait until the war began, at which point Turkey really meaning it seemed to sink in.
Thanks for the history lesson
That is the tragedy of war, more inocent people are killed than the people that wish us harm. We were not attacked by Iraq, and there was no true reason to go into Iraq at the time we did!
BTW which idiot decided not to occupy or at least destroy the weapons dumps in the initial so called Guderian like invasion? Same fellow who thought it would be dandy to disband the Iraqi Army?