Wrong; the destruction of the regime was done terribly resulting in chaos; mass death, looted armories, you name it if it was bad it probably happened. And the Iraqi resistance could and did make it hard to take the oil; pipelines are easy targets and very hard to defend. They pretty much killed oil production for quite some time. And we failed to put in a government that was enough of a puppet to go along with our plans to send the oil money to us. They probably figured that would make their chances of getting massacred when we leave even higher.
It was, yes. But not very much. Like I said, indicators of Bush’s performance, including economic growth and approval ratings, were mixed.
Only if you count the war and terrorism as the same thing. Gay marriage was a phony issue and I think studies showed it did not have that much of an effect on bringing out religious conservative voters, despite popular perception at the time that it played a big role in winning the election.
That was the easy part. Everything else was fucked up.
Bush stopped paying attention to Afghanistan in early 2003, and as a result, the country did, too. Maybe if Iraq had never been invaded, he would have been able to play the war president card based on Afghanistan alone. But the results in Afghanistan weren’t so great either.
It may have in swing states like Ohio or Florida.
Which is what I meant. Without Iraq Bush would have concentrated his energies on Afghanistan.
It doesn’t look that way.
That might’ve happen. But since he chose to focus on Iraq instead of Afghanistan, we can assume just as easily that he would have lost focus and wasted his time doing something else instead. Or maybe he would have mishandled Afghanistan the same way he did Iraq, leading to the kind of mess that made the Iraq war so unpopular.
I don’t think so. Afghanistan’s the original war-even when the situation became bad most Americans still support the war.
The overthrow of Hussein’s regime was entirely botched. That the combined forces of the united States, Britain, and several bribed or coerced allies would overwhelm the badly trained, poorly armed, Iraqi army, suffering serious morale problems, was a foregone conclusion, particularly after we had already done it a dozen years earlier.
However, going in with fewer troops than the Joint Chiefs wanted to use to secure the country meant that when the inevitable insurrection began, (despite Wolfowitz’s idiotic claims of being greeted as liberators), there were too few troops to actually protect important resources such as refineries, water treatment plants, electric generating stations, pipelines, (both oil and water), and most of the rest of the country. Arbitrarily disbanding the Iraqi Army after several divisions volunteered to surrender if they could be allowed to remain intact meant that we turned tens of thousands of armed and unemployed men loose in a country in which feuds, both private and religious, had been simmering for decades. It also meant that the borders, previously secured by that army, were now porous to al Qaida and similar groups. Bringing in outsiders (Chalabi, etc.) with long histories as thieves and with strong alliances to the Iranians or other foreign interests as the next wave of puppets ensured that there would be massive unrest.
A military victory that actually actually encourages a rebellion is only a “victory” from the perspective of a movie plot. A successful overthrow of Hussein would have provided sufficient force to secure the infrasctructure while not encouraging rebellion and actually not inviting outsiders to come in and aid the resistance–even to the point of making it easier to enter.
There is also a separate point in this regard.
As was pointed out on this board in the run up to the war, Iraq owed a significant debt to most of the Gulf states arising from the its need to borrow funds to support its war on Iran combined with indemnities assessed following the first Gulf War. In 2003, the debt was calculated to be several times the projected oil output of the country, so that even if Iraq went to 100% production after the American conquest, (which would require borrowing even more money to increase the number of wells and expand the refineries), the projection was that it would be decades before Iraq could pay off those debts. Had the U.S. simply taken over the Iraq oil industry, it would have found itself treated as an outright enemy by most of the Gulf states along with alienating every friendly nation with the possible exception of Blair’s Britain. The notion that we could actually successfully steal Iraq’s oil had been soundly debunked even before the UN inspection teams had pulled out of Iraq in advance of our attack. It was a stupid idea that was without any redeeming quality.
We have done a fair amount of diplomatic arm twisting among the Gulf states to get some of that debt forgiven, but that is their money that they need to recoup and there is only so much that they can afford to throw away, even to make Bush look good to an undereducated American populace.
Why? I see no evidence that he actually cared about Afghanistan; it was just something that had to be gotten out of the way before attacking Iraq. Nor do I see any evidence that Bush concentrating his energies (such as they are) on something is likely to make that something better instead of worse.
He had Afghanistan without Iraq.
He publicly derided the idea of “nation building” in Afghanistan, then used the idea of (re)creating a democratic regime in Iraq to partially rationalize his idiotic invasion, there.
He also set the wheels in motion to pull most of the military’s intelligence units away from Afghanistan to go play in Iraq, setting the stage to allow Afghanistan to get away from us at a time when we could have used some actual expertise in the region to help that country fully suppress the Taliban and create a workable government.
If your quoted statement is correct, Bush needs to be thoroughly condemned for failing to act in the manner that you described.
And how the hell could anyone have failed to foresee the risk of anarchy as Saddam’s boy scouts turned tail and fled. Any dork could have looked no further back than Noriega and Panama City, much less any of the WW2 lessons. But the dumb ass Iraqi war planners couldn’t figure out something so simple as what to do when the military and police throw down their weapons before Uncle Sugar actually enters Bagdad. Criminal.
A terrorist organization that *wasn’t even there *until we made it a happy hunting ground for them. Who could have predicted that? Oh, right, we did.
Let’s just keep filling our gas tanks.
Well, in a free society, terrorist networks are free to committ terrorism. It’s a sign of how much progress they’ve made.
The whole Iraq war was done on a timetable to boost the GOP in the midterm elections (Rove : From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August) and the whole Mission Accomplished thing was filmed by some Hollywood director to be used in the 2004 election campaign. There was a great article showing how the Bush administration fitted the whole thing round their electoral strategy a few years back but I can’t find it.
And it was never the US government’s intention to take over Iraq oil. We’re a free market country, right? And our government is owned by our free market corporations. So it was the plan to appoint a bunch of exiles already on our payroll (Allawi, Chalabi etc.) to run the country and, critically, to write a constitution before anything remotely resembling a democratic election was to be held. And that constitution would have privatised Iraq’s oil and the US-backed appointees, kept in power by the US army, living in the Green Zone and advised by US diplomats and companies, would have been in charge of awarding various Iraqi oilfields to various oil companies. So it wouldn’t have been America taking Iraq’s oil, it would have been the Iraqi government awarding contracts via the free market process to American oil companies. If you remember before we invaded we were told Iraq was going to become a free market paradise with every conservative wish list thing like the flat tax brought in. Iraq was going to be a laboratory for free market ideas, transform the Middle East, etc. etc.
But the plan was foiled by an Iranian Ayatollah who issued a fatwa preventing any constitution being written until after a free election, not just one restricted to the political parties of our appointees, where the winners of the election would write the constitution. After spending months doing everything he could to ignore the Ayatollah’s fatwa and proceed with the original plan, Bush was forced to bend to the Ayatollah’s will and hold an election, which he then took full credit for, although he did manage to delay them till after the 2004 election so if they made things worse and Iraq got more violent it wouldn’t affect his reelection chances. And a coalition put together by the Ayatollah of groups already discussed then won the election and wrote the constitution.
If you’re talking about al-Sistani, it’s misleading to describe him as Iranian. He was born in Iran and he’s a Shiite, but he has lived in Iraq for the last 60 years.
The second-most powerful mullah in Iraq is Afghan, he’s lived in Iraq for decades too but I wouldn’t describe him as Iraqi either. It is a little misleading but it helps me make my overall point about Iranian influence in Iraq. Sistani has famously refused to meet with Americans to discuss anything to do with Iraq but has met clerical delegations from Qom many times since 2003 to let them lobby for Iranian interests, and has been happy for it to be public knowledge that he’s met them. He’s also OK’d billions of dollars of Iranian investment in Najaf, the new airport and so on before Baghdad agreed to it.
Mexico?! What are American troops supposed to do in Mexico?!
Take over the marijauna trade, and supply us with decent weed at fair prices.
I can’t speak for Darfur but we don’t want you here. Why don’t you clean up your own mess, starting with your idiotic drug prohibition?