Is it time to pull out of Iraq regardless?

Great Debates
81

No doubt you are correct. Still, I don’t think this was his primary reason for holding back. Bush I was a diplomat and I think his primary reason was to hold the coalition together and use it as a stepping stone to improved relations with several countries in the region (and throughout the world) that were historically unfriendly to the US.

I almost wish I had voted for Bush Sr. now to be honest (I won’t tell you who I did vote for…kind of embarrassing now :)). In retrospect he’s a better president than I thought he was at the time. Ah well…

-XT

82

These two phrases seem contradictory. Why would a coup not equally cause the break up of Iraq?

Assuming the Arabs and so forth would have allowed it, I would think the time was right to invade and topple Saddam. He had just lost the Mother of All Battles, his army was crushed flat and surrendering to everythng that moved and had a US flag on it, the coalition forces were in place and moving rapidly - it is possible that the advance to Baghdad would have been faster than it was in 2002. A better psychological moment than in 2002, in fact.

Bush Sr. was much more of a waffler. Maybe he did go “all wobbly”.

Regards,
Shodan

83

Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that if I had typed this sentence today, omitting the brackets and adding the parenthetical word:

“Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, [would have] destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we (once) hoped to establish.”

I would be labeled a Bush-basher. Anyone disagree?

84

A coup is the sudden overthrow of a government, usually done by a small group that just replaces the top power figures.
The “trains still run on time” and the oil still get refined.
Harder for Joe Iraqi to get worked up about Hussein getting his when Joe’s life is relatively unchanged.

85

Getting back to the OP’s question, I’d ask, “what does anyone think we can accomplish by staying? What’s the best believable case?”

If the current government survives, it’s going to be an Islamic theocracy. That’s the best case, IMHO. It will represent a Shi’ite - Kurd entente against the Sunni Arabs. A bad solution, but even that sort of stability is, IMHO, better than flat-out civil war.

It’s hard to see how we can be helpful to their endeavor, though. Our presence is what draws the suicide bombers. How many Arabs are going to travel to Iraq to be used as suicide bombers against the Shi’a, once they’re no longer collaborators with the United States? Damned few. So a good deal of the problem will go away once we do.

That isn’t to say the civil war will go away if we do. But we can’t get rid of it either - the insurgents can’t beat us, but we can’t beat them either. Meanwhile, we’re effectively blocking the winners from winning - we’ve demanded a military and a police force that includes all groups, and accordingly is well known to be infiltrated by the insurgents. The Sunni insurgency (that’s the only insurgency there is, these days) will not be beaten by either us or the new Iraqi army/police; it will be beaten, if at all, by the Badr Corps, the Sadr Corps, and the peshmerga. But we prevent that.

So, which alternative seems to have better prospects of diminshing Iraq’s civil war in the relatively near future - our presence, or our absence? I think the latter. While we don’t want to disappear overnight, we should think about how best to gradually withdraw to those ‘enduring bases’, and reduce troop strength in country, with a goal of being entirely out by, say, spring of 2007.

86

Ummm… you might want to make sure you know who you’re talking to.

You saw something in the news that you found “disturbing,” and it influenced your thinking that things in Iraq were going badly. Forgive me if I fail to see how “discouraged” is some sort of horrible misrepresentation.

Ummm, you must have missed me saying nearly the exact opposite a few posts back – “there is not a singular narrative coming out of there, but a whole complex slew of them, and it would be quite foolish to claim that one has absolute foresight to know how it will all end based on second-hand reporting.” When I say it would be foolish for “one” to do that, I mean anyone. Including me.

If it’s a full-on democracy with freedom and rights for women and minorities, and whose existence and example works to create pressure for a more progressive Middle East? Yes, I think that is an outcome worth paying a price for. YMMV. And while I don’t think we’ll have a* full * view for many years, I wouldn’t say that we’ll have no idea before that. I’d say if the violence is just as bad after the constitutional government in Iraq is in place for a year or so, it will be a very bad sign.

Ah, now I see: in a country of 25 million, the 33 (or more) killed in the manner described in the article are the decisive element. No other indicators could possibly counter that story. Why, it has quotes from individuals! And anecdotes!

I apparently misunderstood the title as a sincere question: i.e. you were asking because you didn’t already have a firm conclusion. I see I was wrong. I’ll bow out now.

87

Draft chapter of Iraq’s constitution raises concerns about women’s rights

88

Defense Department Regular Briefing, July 26, 2005

All last year, the insurgency consisted of 10-20,000 hardcore elements and regime holdouts. Now we’ve killed or captured 50,000 in 7 months and it’s still going strong. The constitution will have to be awfully damned popular if it’s to have any chance of knocking the wind out this unexpectedly large resistance movement.

89

You are entirely correct. My mistake.

Your assumption that a single news article caused me to become discouraged and want to get out of Iraq is off the mark. I was against the invasion in the first place. I considered it completely aimless as far as doing anything about the threat of terrorism and inimical rather than useful in promoting the security of the US. All of my posts (since the meltdown I guess) are available for you to confirm that if you want to.

We all are getting second-hand reporting and I don’t recall trying to forcast how it will all end.

We disagree. I know that many war opponents also say we need to stay there at least a year or two but that seems to me like too much of an investment for such a problematical projection of expected results. What do you place the odds as for, “a full-on democracy with freedom and rights for women and minorities?”

Bad news travels much faster than good news when the bad news is about an occupying army that isn’t too popular in the first place. The number of deaths are those reported which might well not be the total, and those incidents are not the only sore point between our military and the Iraqis. The breaking through a whole block of walls in places like Fallouja in order to search the houses without the danger of going house to house down the street also comes to mind.

It was and you have answered it. Your answer seems to me to be a pie-in-the-sky repetition of GW’s line about how wonderful it will be when Iraq is a democratic example to all the nations of the Mid East. Of course we might have to wait up to 30 years to see whether or not all the hundreds of billions in our money, thousands of our wounded and I don’t know how many thousands killed has been a good investment. Not to mention all the Iraqi’s killed and wounded and the ill-will we have gained around the world by the war.

90

Least of all by supporters of the very Party that supported and provided the means of delivery for those WMDs. How quickly you forget your friends and allies – OBL must be sooo dejected!

Actually, most of the WMD claims made prior to the invasion were debunked before the attack proper. What little doubt there was left of Iraq’s WMD potencial was about to be cleared-up by Blix & Co. In addition to which, the oft repeated mantra – though I see you’ve slightly modified it – that “everyone thought they had them,” is just that, a mindless repetition of a lie in the vain hopes that it magically transforms into a truism. Fact is, it’s simply NOT true, for the additionally simple TRUTH that if such was the case, few would have opposed the invasion.

Moreoever, also prior to the unprovoked invasion, BushCo. had already been caught in a web of outright LIES – unlike you, myself and many more like me haven’t forgotten the aluminum tubes, the inexistent report from the IAEA, the drones of death, the 45 minute missiles , the UN Powell Show etc.

(In response to: Under sanctions, Iraq was no threat to anyone.)

And I’d say if I were to label your reponse as it should be, I’d get a mod’s warning for breaking GD etiquette. From attempting to justify an illegal and immoral invasion due to “an inminent threat” (or whatever contrived legalese was used to convey the notion) to a country with rape rooms is not a leap – it’s Bob Beamon on steroids and rocket fuel.

Besides, as we all know, it’s so much better now: Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the video

:rolleyes:

What “terrorists” are you babbling about exactly? Do you mean any/all Iraqis that oppose foreign troops on their soil? Or are you actually trying to sell us the notion that every Iraqi that’s actively involved in the resistance movement is, by your definition, a “terrorist”? 'cause if you are, I’d like for you to tell me how, exactly, your country became a nation.

91

Why use such an old story?
July 2005:
Iraq: call for investigation into torture and suffocation of nine prisoners in container

Iraq to inquire into Sunni deaths

92

Yes, since after 1988 he then went on to invade Kuwait and conduct a Stalinesque purge thereafter. In 2002 he was not, and had not been for over a decade, operating at anything like the death rate the invasion caused and continues to cause.

Because then it was time sensitive. If we invade for decades-old reasons, we just make things worse since a vastly higher death rate now does not affect that death rate then. Yet again I say: Iraq between 1992 and 2002 was a dictatorship, but it was stable. You might be ‘disappeared’ for a bad word against Saddam or the Baathists, but you could go about our daily life without fear of being blown up or shot at a checkpoint. A UN survey found that living conditions are now undeniably worse than under Saddam.

I ask you the same question in a way you might understand. Why wasn’t Hans Blix allowed to finish his work, as the French rightly requested? In your police officer analogy, Iraq was not even holding anything, and the policeman’s senior officers were telling him not even to get in a position to look at the suspect’s hands.

You apparently have not even read the Duelfer report. This omission is as idiotic as it gets.

And what was the rate of such murder and rape, according to your statistics? I would argue that it is actually worse now, from more sources than just the videoed (“unsubstantiated”?) Abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Iraqis are now 58 times more likely to die a violent death - The Lancet (one of the worlds leading medical journals lest you seek bias). This was from a sample space of 1000 (ie. as statistically valid as even the most rigorous medical study), and larger studies assessing the reported deaths find a similarly increased death rate post-invasion. Perhaps you could find a rigorous study from a world-respected journal showing a similar or lower death rate to pre-invasion Iraq?

93

Incidentally, “Saddam gassed the Kurds” is not so cut and dried a proposition as many here think. Not that he did not commit many barbarous acts, but the Halabja 1988 gas could have been Iranian (or both sides could have used chemical weapons with Iraq using them first).

94

And to clarify: there is no doubt that, chemical weapons or not (and most sources do conclude that Iraq was responsible for Halabja), Saddam did carry out a campaign of genocide against the Kurds, for which Iraq should have been invaded, IMO. Instead, Rumsfeld went to Iraq and shook Saddam’s hand.

95

Well, no offense, but it sounds rather like all that is ever necessary is to wait for a given set of atrocities to be over, and then an invasion becomes a moot point.

IOW, simply wait for the Serbs to kill enough people to satiate their blood lust, and then the regime becomes stable and can be tolerated. If Saddam invades Kuwait, wait for him to terrorize the populace into submission, and then things stabilize and no action is necessary. IOW, there was no need to invade Iraq after Saddam gassed the Kurds, since we can simply wait for it to be over, and then the time-sensitivity goes away and we can be friends again.

Regards,
Shodan

96

When we could make a difference right now? I don;t advocate isolationaism, but neither do I advocate current action based on a situation which has long since ceased to be the case. I suppose we’d best get cracking at invading any other country where atrocities happened in the last few decades, had we not? Even if the death rate now is low and stable, we can ramp that baby up just like old times, yes?

We cannot change the past, only the present. My position on what should be done in Iraq was different in 1988 to 2002 and is different again today. In 2002, invasion was a mistake, as evinced by the vast differences in death rates and living conditions before and after. Now that we broke it, we must ask what is necessary now. I am starting to think that the presence of US troops is doing more harm than good, and that blue helmets paid for by the US and UK is the best option for preventing the even worse-case scenario of all out civil war.

97

That particular campaign took three years, during which Rumsfeld shook Saddam’s hand. Then he invaded Kuwait. Then he purged his opponents over the course of many months. I advocated interference at any of those points, but over a decade afterwards? *Where[/]i was the pressing need which prevented Hans Blix’s team carrying out his crucial work, exactly?

98

Well, no offense, but it sounds rather like all that is ever necessary is to wait for a given set of atrocities to be over, and then an invasion becomes a moot point.

IOW, simply wait for the Serbs to kill enough people to satiate their blood lust, and then the regime becomes stable and can be tolerated. If Saddam invades Kuwait, wait for him to terrorize the populace into submission, and then things stabilize and no action is necessary. IOW, there was no need to invade Iraq after Saddam gassed the Kurds, since we can simply wait for it to be over, and then the time-sensitivity goes away and we can be friends again.

[/QUOTE]

Apparently you seem to think like that…

[QUOTE=Shodan]

99

RedFury, thanks for once again clearing up exaclty where on the loony left fringe you stand for all of us. It saves me the time of having to respond to you seriously.

It’s very hard to say which of these arguments is more stupid. They are both so outragiously mind numbingly dumb, that it’s hard to even parse them.

You think that it was widely known that Saddam didn’t have WMD’s prior to the invasion? This is simply false. Every intelligence agency thought they had them. The UN thought they had them. Clinton thought they had them. Even the fringe left liberal posters on the SDMB thought he had them. It was widely believed that he had them prior to the invasion. To say otherwise is simply false.

But, just when you think it can’t get any more ridiculous we have you comparing the terrorists in Iraq who are blowing up children with roadside bombs to the patriots who founded America fighting the British! Marvelous. Simply fantastic.

You really aren’t worth responding to.

100

This is misleading, and conflates several different views of the situation.

You’re right that it was not generally known before the invasion that Saddam had no WMDs. Many people did believe that he might have them, and many thought he probably had them. That’s why everybody thought it was worth while sending in the weapons inspectors.

But there was not a widespread conviction that he definitely had them. Still less was there any widespread belief that he had developed them to a state of immediate readiness and was prepared to use them against us at any moment.

Those were the arguments that the Bush and Blair administrations dishonestly used in order to justify a precipitate invasion before the weapons inspectors had completed their investigations. They were not believed by “everybody”, or even most people.