Garbage.
This is absolute garbage bordering on blatant racism.
Osama bin Laden made the same point about the USA, citing Vietnam, Beirut, Mogadishu, etc. I guess he could have added Iraq and Afghanistan.
I suspect the point about Iraq is the peoples are tribal. An over-arching military with a national identity can’t work except as a provider of a regular pay cheque.
Ditto Afghanistan but it’ll be a couple more years before we see that.
It was
- a Drain the Swamp moment. It was believed that toppling Saddam and freeing the people from totalitarian rulers would set the nation on a path towards a freedom and modernity that it was believed everybody wanted, and which could spread to the rest of totalitarian ruled Middle East. And while they were wrong, it was actually a positive optimistic, if naïve, worldview, besides they should have invaded Saudi Arabia or Pakistan instead.
- the current situation pre-invasion was untenable. There were talk of half a million dead babies, and sanctions were crumbling so something had to be done one way or another. Either scaling up, or letting go. Scaling-up it was.
- Israel really didn’t like Saddam one bit and the pro-Israel lobby and sentiments are strong in the USA.
- Saddam had carried out genocide in the north and in the south and in between. From a humanitarian perspective something had to be done. Humanitarian interventions had been seen as something of a success in Bosnia, and was still a thing back in the day.
- Retribution for 9/11. Afghanistan was not enough, not enough blood had been spilled to pay for the 9/11 attacks. Iraq of course had nothing to do with the attacks – although Saddam had said the yanks had it coming so fuck him, and besides Bush was bff with the Saudi scum so SA was off-limits.
- Hubris. The notions of what can be accomplished with military might was oversold. The invasion was very successfully carried out. It was the subsequent nation building phase that failed.
The lessons from the Iraq war.
- Don’t start wars towards the goal of nation building. War should be entered into with extreme reluctance and only to completely destroy your enemies. Turns out Colin Powell was the tragic Cassandra of the whole mess.
- Not everybody wants what we have and not the whole world is our responsibility.
It was an attempt to enrich Bush & Cheney’s buddies, to take control of Iraq’s oil, to kill brown people and Muslims, to set up an anarchocapitalist free market utopia, to install a puppet regime, to create a base for the future conquest of the rest of the region, to eliminate a bastion of secularism, to test the neocon’s military theories, and to show up Daddy.
:rolleyes: You are describing modern America, not the ME. We only fight people we think won’t or can’t fight back, and act as if even the most lopsided in our favor casualties are a massacre of Americans.
As for the Iraqis, they certainly fought for years against the US. It doesn’t make them cowards to be uninterested in fighting for a regime we imposed on them that rules a “nation” created by an earlier wave of foreign conquerors.
Meaningless; the Bush Administration wasn’t in the habit of listening to experts, and did a good job of driving out people from government who weren’t either corrupt or incompetent.
If your explanation model is based on the belief that the other guy is evil, then it’s a pretty strong indication that you are wrong. People are often stupid, misguided and deluded, sometimes corrupt or selfish, very seldom actually evil.
No, evil is a very common human motivation; and the Bush Administration reeked of it.
And torture and mass murder are a “pretty strong indication” of evil.
The war itself was enabled by the changing of the military estimates of how many personnel were required to take, hold and maintain order.
The people who did that were Perle, Rumsfeld etc al
The original estimates stated that it would take around 400k military personnel - this was reduced dramatically, because 400k was simply too many for the military to supply and continue with its other commitments.
To recruit train equip and organise such a force would have been prohibitively expensive, and so the reduced number of around 140k was used - it had been hoped that other nations would make greater contributions, however France and Germany decided not to bother, citing their belief that the WMD issue was a crock - well it turns out they were right.
Its worth noting that the invading US / UK forces did little to protect the civilians when order broke down, having been instructed to protect the oilfield assets, that pretty much sums up what it was all about.
It is hardly believable that Germany and France knew something that the US didn’t about WMD, so the logic is that US did know that WMD was a crock and went ahead and simply lied, using Britain as a willing ‘independent of America’ report which was transparently false.
Iraq was only held together by force in the first place, the three protagonists have wanted to go their own way for generations and it took a brute to keep it together - remove the brute and the outcome is entirely predictable, it had been mooted well before the invasion.
So now we will have a land grab, as each group attempts to seize and consolidate its hold on territory.
Outside interests include Iran, Saudi, and Turkey who all have their own agendas and will add fuel to the fire, and that is not even beginning to consider the possibility of Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS etc.
All the above are what leads one to the conclusion that since all this had been predicted, and knowable, Bush and Blair are international criminals waging aggressive wars - a charge that has been brought down on many other errant nations leaders.
give credit where it’s due; systematic and institutionalised torture across a wrold-wide network. Proper teaching and manuals, bespoke transportation, and shit.
Arms merchants got rich, politicians got a war to distract from their incompetence and arm-chair warriors (and some real warriors) got a war to get their war hard-ons stroked. The PNAC people got to try out their idea to rearrange the map of the Middle East. W got to hang the guy that tried to kill his daddy.
The explanation I have read for the incompetence of these militaries is structural weakness, not cowardice. Not showing initiative at the individual or squad level, neglecting maintenance, things like that.
All banter aside, I honestly do think it was the assertion of imperial ideology, through a capitalist filter.
Those Neo-Con’s genuinely believed that once Saddam had been overthrown the population would run into the free market streets begging for MacDonalds franchises, and for the US to re-tool the oil industry.
You listen to Rumsfeld now, he’s unaplogetic; they got some things wrong but the basic plan was good.
That just is not true. The thing to grasp is that Bush, Cheney et al actually believed what they were saying and thought toppling a brutal dictator like Saddam would earn the US the undying gratitude of the Iraqi people. True, material benefits for the US might flow from that but this was by no means a mercenary war. I think the Administration genuinely expected to find huge stocks of chemical weapons stored in Iraq, and given Saddam’s previous use of them against his own people it was not an unreasonable belief.
Of course the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley and nothing turned out as planned. More astute men might have seen that coming and it seems incredibly naive now to imagine that a democratic Iraq would have sprung full-blown from the ashes, but naivete appears to go with the office of the Presidency. (Look at Obama and his the 80s are calling and they want their Cold War back or his gushings about the Arab Spring which turned out to be bitterly cold Winter.)
No, do your enemies the courtesy of believing them not to be James Bond villains but sincere men, albeit misguided.
I disagree. They want money, power and prestige at the expense of others.
Suicide bombing isn’t so much a strength of conviction as it is desperation/despair/etc…
That’s because there are no ‘Iraqi’s’. There are Kurds, there are Shia and there are Sunni. The Kurds want to be independent and control the Kirkuk oil fields and the other 2 want to keep a boot permanently on the throat of the other.
There’s no ‘Iraq’ either.
I was not a ‘reasonable’ belief. It was an excuse.
The Kurds occupied Kirkuk Thursday I think? All the better for Kirkuk I might add. The peshmerga won’t be fleeing anytime soon.
Not reasonable? Thousands of people died when Saddam used chemical weapons against them during the Kurdish uprising in 1988. He certainly had them then and you don’t think a reasonable person might have concluded there were more where those came from? If so then we have very different concepts as to what constitutes reasonable belief.
It wasn’t a preposterous belief, up to November of 2002, when the UN inspectors were readmitted. But they quickly determined that both the defector’s reports and the CIA guesses from satellite photos were wrong. Every site identified as a possible WMD facility or stockpile was searched, and not only were they not what was claimed, in many cases it was obvious that they had been unused for years, or never suitable for that purpose (e.g., an alleged chemical weapons factory that didn’t even have running water).
The UN inspections continued. They used helicopters to travel to remote sites with no warning to the Iraqis, so there was no time to hide stuff. They used ground-penetrating radar to search for hidden basements and false walls, so there was no place to hide stuff. And by January 2003, it was clear to everyone that the dangers had been grossly exaggerated.
No problem so far. I don’t blame the Bush admin for believing the worst-case CIA guesses about their satellite photos, or the claims of Chalabi’s paid defectors, before the UN inspectors went in. In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, you have to be ready for the worst.
But now we had hard, conclusive evidence that the CIA had been wrong, and the paid defectors had been lying. It was no longer reasonable to believe those worst-case scenarios.
The inspections continued, even in the formerly sacrosanct Presidential compounds. And on March 7, 2003, Hans Blix reported to the UN Security Council that the only questions remaining were ones of accounting, i.e. the destruction of obsolescent stockpiles was not properly documented. He said that the Iraqi government was cooperating proactively, even to the point of destroying some conventional missiles that flew a few miles farther than the UN-mandated maximum of ~100 miles (Iraq is ~8000 miles from the US), that it should take no more than a few months to clear up the remaining discrepancies, and that as long as the inspectors were there, the world would have plenty of warning if Saddam attempted to resume the manufacture of WMDs.
http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm
No inspection can be perfect in a country that size; in March, 2003, it was reasonable to believe that the UN inspectors had missed something, although years of further searching by a huge US team after it had occupied Iraq showed that Blix hadn’t missed anything significant in the five months his team ran the inspections.
So while it was still reasonable to believe there might be a stray mustard gas shell here or there, it was no longer reasonable to believe that Iraqi WMDs constituted a serious threat to the region, let alone the US.
Bush didn’t care. He wanted to invade, but the October 2002 vote authorizing invasion had a provision that for some reason is rarely mentioned today. Blix had just certified to the UN that the inspections had turned up no evidence of WMD facilities or stockpiles, and that Iraq was actively cooperating with the inspectors in resolving the remaining discrepancies. But the 2002 bill required that in order to use military force, Bush had to write and sign a formal declaration to Congress that all other measures had failed, and that nothing short of military force could remove the threat Iraq posed to the US.
No problem for Bush – he simply lied, and signed a letter to Congress stating exactly that — eleven days after Blix’s report proved that he was lying.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-1.html
May he burn in hell forever.