Iraq is not Vietnam, you say?

[tdn]

@Starving Artist

Secondly, the motives and goals behind our action in Iraq is completely different than was the case in Vietnam, where we were trying to keep a country from being overrun by its antagonistic neighbor to the north who was being supported by a superpower.

I don’t think the comparison has to do with motives any more than it has to do with location. It has to do with the notion that we’re looking at a never-ending war with no clear goal, no clear exit strategy, and a never-ending suppliy of corpses.

And as to your addressing immediate results, didn’t the Bush admin originally promise that it would all be over in a few weeks? IIRC it wasn’t until much much later that they said things like “These things take time.” How long ago was the “Mission Accomplished” fiasco?

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

Thanks, tdn – you summed it up quite nicely for me. My only addition would be that I believe the long-term consequences of our MIddle East adventure will be further destabilization of the region as Iraq spirals deeper into civil war and neighboring countries are drawn in, directly (Iran) or indirectly. Rather than promoting freedom, democracy, and Western-style secularization of government and society, the long-term results I believe will be more radically islamist governments, more rigidly restrictive societies, as a backlash to our bumbling.

I could of course be wrong. I sincerely hope that is so. But the evidence so far does not support, IMO, the rosy scenario of the war’s supporters – even in its currently downsized version.

[Starving_Artist]

@tdn

I don’t think the comparison has to do with motives any more than it has to do with location. It has to do with the notion that we’re looking at a never-ending war with no clear goal, no clear exit strategy, and a never-ending suppliy of corpses.

And as to your addressing immediate results, didn’t the Bush admin originally promise that it would all be over in a few weeks? IIRC it wasn’t until much much later that they said things like “These things take time.” How long ago was the “Mission Accomplished” fiasco?

Context, tdn, context.

We had a goal, which has long since been acheived, namely removing Saddam Hussein from power. Our exit strategy is simple: we will exit when we decide the time is right, not because our enemies are awaiting our foolishly declared deadline; far fewer corpses are being generated now than were under Hussein, and besides, the ones that are being generated are primarily being generated by our enemies in order to drive us out. To exit because of terrorist bombing related murders of innocent civilians would be the weakest and most reprehensible thing we could do; and finally, (remember the context statement above) it (the military defeat of Hussein) was over in a few weeks. And the things that take time - as is obvious to anyone not adamantly opposed to the war on any basis - are stabilization and the establishment of self-rule in Iraq.

[Maeglin]

@Starving Artist

Context, tdn, context.

We had a goal, which has long since been acheived, namely removing Saddam Hussein from power. Our exit strategy is simple: we will exit when we decide the time is right, not because our enemies are awaiting our foolishly declared deadline; far fewer corpses are being generated now than were under Hussein, and besides, the ones that are being generated are primarily being generated by our enemies in order to drive us out. To exit because of terrorist bombing related murders of innocent civilians would be the weakest and most reprehensible thing we could do; and finally, (remember the context statement above) it (the military defeat of Hussein) was over in a few weeks. And the things that take time - as is obvious to anyone not adamantly opposed to the war on any basis - are stabilization and the establishment of self-rule in Iraq.

By what metrics can we judge this war a success? What is the maximum allowable timeframe? At what point can we say that the costs of the war in blood, treasure, and credibility exceed the positive utility of the outcome?

[Psycho_Pirate]

@Starving Artist

Fourth, I don’t believe the opinion of one senator - Republican though he may be - is the definative final word on the success and/or character of our action in Iraq. The tone of your OP, plus the question it poses, seems merely to expose your own eagerness to prove us wrong, rather than to prove that we were actually wrong, which is a question that won’t be settled for many years, and probably not ever to your satisfacton.

Well said. In my view, we went to war in Iraq because of the “Bush Doctrine” of considering those who are terrorists or harbor terrorists as one in the same, and to take the offensive in this war on terror instead of waiting around for another attack. Though war obviously comes with the cost of american lives, it saves lives in the long run to fight terrorists (and that is what Hussein and his regime were) on their own turf instead of on american soil.

[Larry_Mudd]

@Starving Artist

…far fewer corpses are being generated now than were under Hussein…

This is only true if you’re comparing the sums from the decades of Ba’ath party rule with the sums from the last two and half years.

On a day-to-day basis, there are far more corpses being generated in Iraq today than there were in 2002 – and certainly more American corpses.

How grateful are the people who suffered the most under Saddam? How eager were they for war?

But while an American-led military campaign to topple Mr. Hussein holds out the possibility of making their freedoms more secure, the Kurdish leaders, backed by almost every Kurd who discussed the issue, said Washington would be asking them to put all they have gained from their decade of autonomy at risk of a fresh Iraqi offensive.

“We are not ready to take any risks, and if we are not sure of the outcome of any step, then we are not ready to take that step, because we are not sure of improving our circumstances,” Massoud Barzani, leader of one of the two main Kurdish political groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said at his mountaintop headquarters outside Salahuddin, north of Erbil.

He added, alluding to the centuries of oppression Kurds suffered from Turks, Arabs and Persians, “This is a golden era for Iraqi Kurds.”

Their concerns are so deep that the Kurds have set aside political differences among themselves to speak with a common voice on the possibility of American action against Mr. Hussein. […]

Their main message, the Kurdish officials said, was that Washington should not expect Kurds to subordinate their own safety to American priorities. “Nobody has suffered more from Saddam than the Kurds,” one senior official said. "We told the Americans, `This time, the Kurds will put their own interests first, and last.’ "

Kipling’s White Man’s Burden has been brought up in the Cafe, and, rereading it, you can’t help but wonder if some people will ever learn.

[tdn]

@Starving Artist

We had a goal, which has long since been acheived, namely removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Sure, but this was one of my complaints from the very beginning: What next? IIRC, Bushco sold us on a short war that would be over with very quickly. I seem to remember Rumsfeld saying something like 2-3 weeks. I was one of the few people I know who was wondering how long the rest of the mess would take to clean up. The impression I got from Bushco was that as soon as Saddam was out of power, Starbucks and Walmarts would sprout like mushrooms all over the Middle East.

And the things that take time - as is obvious to anyone not adamantly opposed to the war on any basis - are stabilization and the establishment of self-rule in Iraq.

It’s obvious to war opponents as well. In fact I’d dare say it was obvious to us long before it was obvious to supporters. Hence the opposition. Bush never said a word about how it would take a long time until we were ass deep in war and it was too late anyway.

He reminds me of a slick salesman. “Sure, we can have that Lexus in your garage by this afternoon, and you can have it in phthalo purple for $9000.” It’s only after you’ve signed the order that you get hit with the service charges, extras, backorders, and “only available in pink.” As Americans, we’ve been irresponsible consumers.

[Ponder_Stibbons]

@Maeglin

By what metrics can we judge this war a success? What is the maximum allowable timeframe? At what point can we say that the costs of the war in blood, treasure, and credibility exceed the positive utility of the outcome?

Metrics. Hmm. How about this:
[ul]
[li]If American troops are in Iraq for less time than Vietnam (about 7 years), it’s a success.[/li][li]If fewer Americans die in Iraq than in Vietnam (about 58,000), it’s a success.[/li][li]If whatever government in Iraq lasts longer than the Republic of Vietnam did after we left (a little more than 2 years), it’s a success![/li][/ul]
So far, it’s a success!

[Giraffe]

@Psycho Pirate

Well said. In my view, we went to war in Iraq because of the “Bush Doctrine” of considering those who are terrorists or harbor terrorists as one in the same, and to take the offensive in this war on terror instead of waiting around for another attack. Though war obviously comes with the cost of american lives, it saves lives in the long run to fight terrorists (and that is what Hussein and his regime were) on their own turf instead of on american soil.

(emphasis mine)

No, it’s not what they were! Terrorist is not a catch-all term for bad guy. As has been repeated about a million times: there is no evidence of any connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda or any plans by Iraq to engage in terrorist attacks against the U.S. Saddam was fundamentally opposed to radical Islam, and was about as likely to team up with al-Qaeda as he was to quarterback for the 49ers.

I know it makes your case stronger to pretend reality actually matched your lazy pre-war ignorance, but Middle Eastern expert after expert explained over and over again how it wasn’t the case, to deaf ears.

[tdn]

@Psycho Pirate

Well said. In my view, we went to war in Iraq because of the “Bush Doctrine” of considering those who are terrorists or harbor terrorists as one in the same, and to take the offensive in this war on terror instead of waiting around for another attack.

IMO that was a grave mistake. You can’t take the doctrine of “All them turrists is alike”, because they are not. It sounds very noble to meet the “bad guys” on their own turf, but if you use all brawn and no brains, you end up getting the wrong bad guys. Yeah, we got Saddam out in – what, 6 months? A year? How long after “Mission Accomplished”? Great!

But wasn’t it bin Laden that we were supposed to be going after? Committing so much of ourselves to the quagmire of fighting terrorism, what do we have left over to find the guys who actually terrorized us? Oh yeah. Bush doesn’t care.

[tdn]

@Giraffe

Terrorist is not a catch-all term for bad guy.

Hmm, sounds like somebody’s been ignoring the memos.

[buttonjockey308]

Seems to me that there are logical comparisons to Vietnam, but it also seems that the comparisons begin and end dynamically, and that directly and completely comparing Iraq to Vietnam is crazy wrong, ignoring completely the wild political meanderings of an '08 hopeful.

Iraq is a debacle, a straight-up, holy-shit-this-was-a-dumb-idea-no-question-about-it genuine American debacle. American soldiers continue to die. Iraqi civilians and civilian combatants continue to die. All in the name of what? WMD? No. Freedom for America? No. The war on terror? Clearly not.

This mess is now, and has always been, about three things. Payback, Progress and Petrol.

Hussein is out. Payback.

Eventually, there will be a Constitution in Iraq. Progress.

After the Constitution, we’ll charge Iraq for the price of the war we’ve waged on thier deposed leader. We’ll take the payment in, you guessed it, Petrol.

Sure, Bush probably lied, or maybe he didn’t, maybe he got bad info, maybe it was a little bit of both, no one of us is ever going to know the truth about that, what we can determine is, how to contain the ‘problem’ at hand. Bush can’t pull out now, he can’t SAY when he plans to, and despite what the media reports, or what Chuck Hagel has to say about it, there are positive things happening in Iraq.
Those things are leading to progress in a region that has needed to taste progress since the 11th damned century.

That progress, like all progress, comes with a price. Today, that price is blood, but unlike most revolutions, this is no where near as bloody as it could be, or, in fact SHOULD be. In 10 years, Iraq will likely be free, or at least MORE free than it was several years ago. The hope, I think, is that once people are visited by the niceties of progress, that they will actually enjoy them, and will strive to get them, just as we do here. And if troops have to endure Vietnam-style combat for a while, despite the hand-wringing, they DID sign up of their own free will, and there’s nothing more American, than that.

[Enderw24]

@Ponder Stibbons

Metrics. Hmm. How about this:
[ul]
[li]If American troops are in Iraq for less time than Vietnam (about 7 years), it’s a success.[/li][li]If fewer Americans die in Iraq than in Vietnam (about 58,000), it’s a success.[/li][li]If whatever government in Iraq lasts longer than the Republic of Vietnam did after we left (a little more than 2 years), it’s a success![/li][/ul]
So far, it’s a success!

Likewise, Apollo 1’s mission was a success in that the fire only killed three astronauts as compared to Columbia’s seven.

But then, the space shuttle Columbia nearly made it back to Earth before it exploded, versus 73 seconds after takeoff for the Challenger. Thus, Columbia’s mission was also a success.

[Ponder_Stibbons]

@Enderw24

But then, the space shuttle Columbia nearly made it back to Earth before it exploded, versus 73 seconds after takeoff for the Challenger. Thus, Columbia’s mission was also a success.

Isn’t “nearly” good enough?

[Larry_Mudd]

@buttonjockey308

…despite what the media reports, or what Chuck Hagel has to say about it, there are positive things happening in Iraq.
Those things are leading to progress in a region that has needed to taste progress since the 11th damned century.

Or not…

Iraq has been an officially secular country. But leaders of the Shiite coalition, which dominates the parliament, are pushing for Iraqi law to be based on Islam. They want changes that would, in effect, allow religious courts in family matters such as marriage and inheritance to take precedence over the civil courts now deciding those issues. That is opposed by groups of women and minorities, including Christians, as well as the largely secular Sunnis and Kurds.

“For the women, it is a disaster,” said Christian lawmaker Yonadam Kanna. But he worries that the Kurds could drop their opposition to a more religious government in the rest of Iraq if the Shiites back their calls for Kurdish self-rule.

Well, they got those changes. Protections for women that have been in place since 1959, making Iraq one of the most progressive states in the region in that regard? Kiss 'em goodbye.

Hooray! The glorious future is the past.

[ShibbOleth]

@danceswithcats

I remember reading that “it’s for the oil” which I guess is true, given that prices haven’t increased over the last year. .

First, regardless of the price that Americans are paying at the pump, the Big Oil is anything but hurt by this whole situation:

from MSNBC
When major oil companies report their quarterly profits next week, they’re once again expected to post record numbers. With crude trading around $60 a barrel, the oil industry is enjoying one of the biggest windfalls in its history. But as the industry looks for places to put that cash, it’s finding it harder and harder to put funds to work finding new deposits of oil and natural gas.

By just about any measure, the past three years have produced one of the biggest cash gushers in the oil industry’s history. Since January of 2002, the price of crude has tripled, leaving oil producers awash in profits. During that period, the top 10 major public oil companies have sold some $1.5 trillion worth of crude, pocketing profits of more than $125 billion.

“This is the mother of all booms,” said Oppenheimer & Co. oil analyst Fadel Gheit. “They have so much profit, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. They don’t know what to do with it.

from ABC News online
As American consumers increasingly feel the pinch at the pump, oil companies have watched their profits soar.

The newest numbers from the second quarter of this year show Exxon Mobil with a 32 percent increase in earnings over this time last year — that’s more than $7.6 billion.

BP saw a profit increase of 38 percent, totaling $6.7 billion, while Conoco Phillips — the third largest oil company in the country — recorded a 56 percent increase in profit, more than $3 billion.

“The huge profits are enormous because the public is drastically overpaying what it costs to produce,” said Joan Claybrook, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

Many of these companies long ago bought oil reserves at prices of $10 to $25 a barrel. With prices peaking near the $67 mark, the profit margin has been enormous.

Even more eye-opening is the profit in Saudi Arabia. Saudis are making an average of $208 million more each day since the increase in crude oil prices first began in December 2003.

I don’t believe that the war was started to drive up the price of oil. Frankly, I don’t think Bush is that clever. But it certainly hasn’t harmed his “base”. His buddies the House of Saud is in the best position it’s been in for years. There were people claiming that the war was to keep the price of oil low, which was more or less the case, through the 2004 election (relatively speaking), but now it seems all bets are off.

But I do believe that a considerable part of the argument was that our strategic interest, ie, oil supplies were threatened by an unstable Middle East. Without oil then what happens in the Middle East could be largely ignored.

[Squink]

Rush Limbaugh had an interesting take on why we must stay the course today:

By abandoning, either emotionally or psychologically or even intellectually, the current policy and the effort, you are handing the left a huge victory and big ticket, and I think it matters.

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@Squink

Rush Limbaugh had an interesting take on why we must stay the course today:

Dude, don’t ever use Rush Limbaugh as a reputable cite. In retrospect, had I known that things were going to go down like this in the last 5 years I would have voted for Gore, and it has nothing to do with left and right. It has to do with right and wrong. I think what we are doing now is wrong (which admittedly is a reversal of thinking from a few years ago) and I don’t really see any way to fix it. One thing is for certain, however: our current administration is not the way to fix it.

[RedFury]

@Starving Artist

Our exit strategy is simple: we will exit when we decide the time is right, not because our enemies are awaiting our foolishly declared deadline

Simple alright. As in simplistic, because, just in case it has escaped your notice, there are a myriad of factors that are completely out of your control. Like, for instance, most everything outside the Green Zone.

far fewer corpses are being generated now than were under Hussein, and besides, the ones that are being generated are primarily being generated by our enemies in order to drive us out.

1-Hypothetical: Say you and your family were tranfered to Baghdad for a period of two years. Say that you could use a time machine to choose said timespan, and furthermore, that you were given the past ten years as a window of opportunity.

What would your choice be? Goes without saying that I believe you to be a loving husband and father.

2-Your premise (feel-good platitude, really) of the number of civilians killed does not hold-up to rigorous scrutiny:

A Dossier of Civilian Casualties in Iraq

Who was killed?

* 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years.
* Women and children accounted for almost 20% of all civilian deaths.
* Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths.

Who did the killing?

*** US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.**
* Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
* Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
* Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period

What was the most lethal weaponry?

* Over half (53%) of all civilian deaths involved explosive devices.
*** Air strikes caused most (64%) of the explosives deaths.
* Children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance (including cluster bomblets).** (bolding mine)

To exit because of terrorist bombing related murders of innocent civilians would be the weakest and most reprehensible thing we could do

If I read you correctly, you deny that that there is a legitimate Iraqi (mostly Sunny-led) resistance to US occupation? Further, do you deny that the majority of the attacks are directed at military targets – percieved collaborators included?

And then, there’s this:

Insurgency seen forcing change in Iraq strategy

Despite US estimates that it kills or captures between 1,000 and 3,000 insurgents a month, the number of daily attacks is going back up. Down to about 30 to 40 a day in February, attacks are now up to at least 70 per day, according to statistics of US Central Command.

<snip>

A major reason why the insurgency has remained so undeterred, US and Iraqi officials believe, is the continued, if passive, support it is receiving from large parts of Iraq’s Sunni minority.

Specialists say they believe Iraq’s estimated 5 million Sunnis fear that the country’s government, dominated by Shi’ites and Kurds, will exact revenge on them for decades of Hussein’s brutal rein. There are only 17 Sunni members in the 275-person Iraqi National Assembly.

Meanwhile, a recent internal poll conducted for the US-led coalition found that nearly 45 percent of the population supported the insurgent attacks, making accurate intelligence difficult to obtain. Only 15 percent of those polled said they strongly supported the US-led coalition. (my bolding)

Think about that for a sec and then try to tell me that nearly 45% of all Iraqis are “terrorists.” Because if you do, there’s this ocean-front property in Nebraska I’d like for you to see.

[Squink]

@Airman Doors

Dude, don’t ever use Rush Limbaugh as a reputable cite.

No worries Airman. I was just surprised that Rush would be so foolish as to mention that particular ‘reason’ for keeping up the fight. Is there any lower gutter into which to he could sink?