Precisely when did you know Iraq was a mistake?

The BBQ Pit
121

[QUOTE=Colibri]
At first I assumed they were just bluffing. I couldn’t believe they would actually go through with such a plainly idiotic idea. Until the moment the invasion began I thought they might pull back. Then they did go ahead, and proceeded to exceed my worst expectations as to how badly they could cock everything up.
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[QUOTE=Bambi Hassenpfeffer]
From the get-go.

Right after 9/11, the rumbling was in the media – listening to the stories coming out, you could pull out a subtext of blaming Iraq. I didn’t give it much credence, until the SoU speech referencing the Axis of Evil. As soon as I heard it, I knew we’d be in Iraq within a year, for many years to come.

So my timing was a little off, but I was still right. I will never understand how so many people could be so willfully blind about something so obvious. I had no love for Saddam, and I thought his removal (well-planned and internationally supported) would be good, but I knew we wouldn’t do it right.
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I’m in the same boat as you except I wasn’t completely convinced Bush would actually go to war until late 2002. As I previously stated in this post in this thread, I naively assumed all the saber-rattling was a ploy to make sure Saddam didn’t even think of acting up while we tried to get Osama and smash Al Quaeda in Afghanistan. Of course, I was proven wrong.

[QUOTE=David Simmons]
Everything about the onset was suspicious. There were the stories about “cherry picking” intelligence. These were answered by the standard, “If you knew what we know, you would agree with us. Of course we can’t tell you how we know what we claim to know for national security reasons. But trust us, the skeptics are wrong.”

Added to all of that was the lack of support by our former allies such as Germany and France and by nearly everyone else. It just didn’t figure that nearly everyone else was wrong and GW was right.
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Even before I realized Bush was dead serious about going to war, I had a hunch there was something shifty going on. The extreme defensiveness of the Administration and its supporters in Congress and the media when responding to inquiries about the existence of WMDs and alleged ties to Al Quaeda raised a number of red flags in my head. It just seemed that whenever anybody even expressed the slightest bit of doubt about the need to invade Iraq and depose Saddam, the standard reply would be to accuse the person of being blind, stupid, crazy, and/or a traitor.

122

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
And we bomb weddings, or just level the city. A vast improvement I’m sure.
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Why are you saying this to me? I made it clear that I was totally against this war. I also made it clear that I would have had no problem if Bush had arranged to have Saddam and his sons removed via snipers without anyone knowing just who was behind it. So it doesn’t make sense to me when you post as if to make it sound like you didn’t grasp my other comments.

As far as people having a problem with my idea of taking those scumbags out because it’s so uncivilized or whatever, who cares? What kind of a world do these people think we live in?

Grow up; it can’t always be about having milk and cookies.

123

Yeah, Chuck Norris could have done it, easy. Chuck Norris is cool.

124

[QUOTE=madmonk28]
Also the idea that the CIA can just assasinate national leaders is fantasy, too much Tom Clancy, not enough reality.
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I know, right? When could that ever happen? That’s almost as crazy as the idea of the CIA orchestrating coups and training death squads to kill thousands of people.

125

[QUOTE=marshmallow]
I know, right? When could that ever happen? That’s almost as crazy as the idea of the CIA orchestrating coups and training death squads to kill thousands of people.
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It’s a matter of practicality. That kind of assassination against someone with paranoia and the resources of a nation is unlikely to succeed. Saddam had doubles and thousands of bodyguards; a hypothetical sniper would have almost certainly been caught or shot the wrong man.

126

True enough but it seems to me if we really wanted to we could think up something clever, especially if we managed to sneak in an inside man or we figured out his daily routine.

127

I still don’t get it-you send troops into a muslim country with a tradition of sectarian violence-and then you are surprised at the results? face it, sunni and Shia have been slautering eachother for 1300 years now-and we provided the opportunity! Those who won’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. granted, somalia was a small version of Iraq-but the same thing happened. Wjich actually gives me some hope-if we withdraw, the factions will destroy eachother.

128

[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
Oh yeah? Why don’t you ask Castro just how much of a fantasy it is! Oh, wait. . .
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This actually proves my point. The CIA TRIED to kill Castro, but couldn’t. In fact, the CIA is pretty fucking incompetent. The idea that modern day ninjas are going to kill a foreign leader in his own country without everyone knowing they did it is fantasy. We tried to kill Saddam with a bunch of cruise missiles at the start of the invasion and instead slaughtered a neighborhood of civilians.

[QUOTE=GuyNblueJeans]
Some of the things I read in the papers about him and his sons was that they were so out of control that they’d crash weddings and kill the husbands and rape the brides. But if I understand you correctly, you think that sort of thing isn’t so bad, that we shouldn’t do what I suggested. Okay, to each their own, I guess.
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Uh, what? I said that one of the United States’ complaints about Saddam was that he tried to assasinate Bush Sr. and it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to assasinate someone to teach people that they shouldn’t try to assasinate people.

Yes, Saddam was a bad man. There are many bad people in the world. Yup, you got me there.

You seem to be arguing that the US should organize a team of assasins to travel the world killing bad people? That’s a reasonable proposal. Maybe they could be called Fox Force Five.

129

It’s a strange thing, there was a time I was against it simply because I am generally against war, but not for any specific reason, and this is a hard position to defend when folks are throwing quotes around.

It was when the 45 minute claim by Blair made big news that I had my hook to hang my coat on, that for me was when I was certain in a way that was quotable and didn’t rely just on my personal morals.

The 45 minute claim was always completely proposterous, Hussain had absolutely no way of delivering any weapon into Europe and it undermined every other claim, if our national leader was using such a specious and untrue argument then all else had to be a lie.

From that point I looked backwards to when I might have realised it sooner, the more I looked, the further backwards in time the signs went.

The earliest time that I could use to state that this war was a crock was when Rumsfeld started his reorganisation of US forces, and his claims that a far smaller military force could carry out the operation.

The Chiefs of staff had stated they needed around 400k troops to take and hold Iraq, as a minimum - but this was politically unacceptable as committments elsewhere meant the US could not raise this manpower and cover the troop rotations without having a draft.

When Rumsfeld then announced that it would take 140k troops, it seemed to me that he was preparing the ground for war as this was just about doable without a draft, and so it was politically acceptable, altough operationally unrealistic.

All those heads of staff must have known this was was a complete crock of shit from that time too, they knew what would be needed as a minimum, its a pity we didn’t see a few resignations from the upper tiers of the military, so in my view, their lack of personal convictions gives them plenty of blame, they put their careers before the interests of the US, and its service personnel.

Even if the US had invaded with 400k troops, I doubt that this would have been adequate, remember, this was a minimum, and I wonder if it ever was possible with far far more.
I think an interesting question for many posters is to ask themselves, **when should you have known the Iraq war was a mistake ? **
For me an outstanding moment is the resignation of Robin Cook, the British Foreign secretary, I think that we should all have known from that moment on, but plenty of us just let ourselves be carried along, not making much noise.

130

[QUOTE=marshmallow]
True enough but it seems to me if we really wanted to we could think up something clever, especially if we managed to sneak in an inside man or we figured out his daily routine.
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IIRC he didn’t have a daily routine, for just that reason. And for slipping in an “inside man”, that is far harder than people seem to think. Especially since it would need to be a suicidal inside man, given the unlikelyhood of surviving performing an assassination, successful or not. That’s one reason dictators seldom get assassinated, no matter how hated they are.

131

Cervaise:

Man, you can say that again. I left for a year or so and when I surfed back in I couldn’t believe the shift in attitude.

The second thread you link to in your post is especially interesting to me, since I participated in it, and the response to my posts still strikes me as rather surprising. Before I split I often expressed frustration over the fact that no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to be able to convince a single war supporter with my arguments. Then, in that particular thread, I was able to sway a couple of people to favor the war with one simple post. It makes me wonder if people are somehow predisposed to accept arguments in favor of war over arguments against it.

Anyway, with regard to the OP: I thought invading Iraq was wrong from the first time I heard the cockamamie idea. I’m not sure if that’s the same as thinking it was a mistake, since, depending on one’s perspective, doing something wrong might not always be considered a mistake.

It took maybe a year or so after the invasion before I became strongly convinced that it was also a mistake, in the sense of a strategic and tactical blunder. At first I wasn’t 100% sure, what with propaganda regarding us being greeted as liberators, schools being painted, and so forth. But the steady litany of bombings, massacres, kidnappings, and so, combined with the every-rising costs, both in terms of treasure and blood, eventually convinced me that it was a mistake as well as being wrong in every conceivable way.

PS.

Hey, everybody.

Anybody miss me?

132

[QUOTE=Subterraneanus]
Since the summer of 1990.
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Add me to the anti-original invasion list.

I was very public about my issues with the first Gulf war. I was publicly flogged by my so called fellow conservatives at the time that it began my movement to more isolationist / libertarian mindset. I dropped my Republican party registration until such a time as California forced me to re-register if I wanted to participate in the primaries.

I have long felt that our ME policies were crap. I had issues with Bush Sr., Clinton’s daily bombings, AND our current mess.

I do have to admit, however, that just leaving bothers me as well. I have this feeling of “we broke it, we need to fix it.” If we can fix it by leaving - fine. I think it is going to take more than that, however.

133

Yes! Welcome back. :slight_smile:

134

[QUOTE=Mr. Svinlesha]
Anybody miss me?
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Hey! You’re the guy RedFury pitted all those years ago!
Where are your Aluminum tubes now?

135

That’s one of those “does this make my butt look big?” questions. Yeah, sure.

136

[QUOTE=Dinsdale]
Of course, I should admit that when making the case for American Imperialism on 9/10/02, I wrote:

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How eerily prophetic you were!

137

Now don’t be jealous, if you went away for a long time we’d miss you too. :wink:

138

Well, ok, then. I guess.

139

Are we talking about the Gulf War or the Gulf W. War?

Iraq had a more legitimate case for being in Kuwait than the US had for being in Iraq.
The only WMDs Hussein ever had were the ones the US sold him or helped him develop. The only reason he’s not still a Good Guy is that he menaced the US oil supply.

140

Kimstu:

Thanks!
Squink:

Yes, the world’s first anti-pitting.

I got yer tubes hangin’, pal.
elucidator:

Well, I missed you, anyway, even if you do have a big butt.