I am no defender of the war in Iraq…or Afghanistan, for that matter. I believe that as the true costs of these wars becomes known, there will be a tremendous backlash against these interventions.
But removing Saddam Hussein made things worse? Saddam was heir to General Kaseem- another bloody tyrant. Iraq was always in a state of disruption. So maybe the present government isn’t the worst thing to come about.
I think those of us who supported the war in 2003 and those who opposed the war in 2003 can come together now in agreement that this is one of the stupidest posts ever made on the subject.
What about al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks? Wasn’t the Bush administration under-estimating that threat?
No, he’s all yours. You pro’s were all like that back then. Now it’s your turn to talk some sense into the stupid.
I don’t know if it’s the stupidest post, but it’s certainly on the board in the top (or bottom) 5% at any rate. 
[QUOTE=Latro]
No, he’s all yours. You pro’s were all like that back then. Now it’s your turn to talk some sense into the stupid.
[/QUOTE]
And, frankly, this is a pretty stupid post as well. Not all the ‘pro’s’ were like this. There were a variety of positions and reasons people supported the war, initially, and not all of them were completely brain dead. You are painting with a ridiculously broad brush. And not all the anti’s were all that rational either, to be honest. Just because it turns out they were on the correct side of history doesn’t automatically make everything they spouted correct or rationally argued or debated. There were (and are) idiots on both sides of the debate, just as there are rational people on both sides. I like to think that, like Nemo, I pretty rapidly came to the conclusion that it was a big mistake and that we’d been duped…and I’ve never attempted to deny my initial pro-war stance, or fess up that it was a mistake in retrospect.
You always have to measure the benefit against the cost. Even assuming the present government is an improvement, is it worth 100,000+ Iraqi casualties and 4,500 coalition ones (not to mention untold trillions of dollars)?
Way Worse Than a Dumb War: Iraq Ten Years Later
Much more at source.
This is very apropos; Phil Donoghue on how he was let go in 2003 for expressing anti-war views - witness the ‘secret memo’, etc:
I see that Iraq is currently rated, “Not free”. And over 100,000 have died due to sectarian violence since the early 2000s. Clearly it is time to intervene. Oh and the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad!
Yes they did. But the claim encompassed cases where an administration has advocated military force. That is when it is time to pull out the checklist. The Bush Admin was not advocating military force against al Qaeda before 9/11.
You are correct that there are false negatives to consider as well. But threat assessment is a separate issue from evaluating a case for military action put forth by one US administration or other.
ETA: Would the checklist be too daunting? I dunno. But once you’ve drafted one, you could run several thought experiments on it, starting in 1900.
That’s one of the traditional definitions of a just war. It’s recognized that any war creates some measure of evil. For a war to be just it must stop more evil than it causes.
Before you start calling people uninformed, have you given up your source for your claim that Saddam Hussein didn’t KNIW he didn’t have any WMD?
I apologize if I missed it.
I don’t have anything good to say about pre/ or post invasion Iraq, because there is nothing good to say except it’s good to be out of the quagmire.
Afghanistan suffered because of Iraq, but you’d need to explain how toppling the Taliban, and then leaving would have ended the terrorist haven there with Pakistan supporting the Taliban at the time.
Look what the Taliban were able to with 30,000 NATO troops there for five years.
Now they’ve been thrown out of most the populated areas which should have happened by 2005, except Bush decided to invade Iraq and empower the Taliban to take large swaths of territory and control it, until 2011.
James Fallows points us toward 2 former advocates of The War of the Missing WMDs. David Ignatius:
And that gentlemen is the way you deliver a mea culpa.
Another advocate of war was the Washington Post’s editorial page. They remain under the same leadership: what do they have to say during the 10 year anniversary?
That’s right: nada, zip. A veritable profile of intellectual cowardice. Last month they asked whether the US was kowtowing to Iran in nuclear talks. So colorful sabre-rattling is still popular at WAPO and we have confirmed that they feel unconstrained by any sense of accountability or even basic respect for the fallen.
This is some spin here. Don’t you mean the Republican administration and Fox News? In some circles, “the government and major media outlets” is code for “liberals”.
Kids, don’t let those damn Democrats get away with what the Republicans just got away with.
I was for the war in 2002. My excuse was I was 17, and very very stupid at the time and didn’t have a clue that our country was NOT always the good guys.
I don’t know what conservative adults in their 50’s excuse could’ve possibly been. They either have blood on their hands because them and their buddies profited from the war, or they’re incredibly stupid.
You are excused. The others you speak of, not so much. 
It’s impractical to keep up with all the irrelevant requests for Cites, but to stifle your snark, Here’s something I found just now with Google. (This was not my now-forgotten original source for the widely-repeated claim.)
I’ve emphasized the relevant sentence. Yes, this was arguably a minor aspect to the larger picture … as was my tangential comment about Saddam in my post.
Does this help?
Yup. We heard it all at the start of the war and it makes just as little sense now as it did then.
It’s especially stupid when one considers just how cosy Rumsfeld and company were with Hussein previously when he was just as brutal, and the stupidity expands exponentially if you notice that while we were busy striking a blow against tyranny in Iraq that same Donald Rumsfeld and Bush Jr were happily doing business with other brutal dictators in Central Asia including Turkmenbashi and this guy who boiled his opponents alive.
If we were worried about WMDs we should have focused on North Korea. If we were worried about dictators subverting the democratic process we should have focused on Burma/Myanmar. But the PNAC wanted their own little oil-filled playground, so we invaded Iraq instead.
Frankly, there’s a far better argument for saying that “Whenever you find a brutal mass murderer, you’ll find a conservative doing business with him.”
After 9/11 the war in Afghanistan was unavoidable. Probably Iraq as well. But in retro-perspective the whole nation building things was a big mistake. Perhaps the USA had been seduced by its success in nation building in Europe and Japan after WW-II.
The lesson from Afghanistan and Iraq must be: 1) when you need to go to war, do it to destroy your enemies, not to build a better state. Nukes would have been a reasonable response after 9/11, but conventional arms could also have done it. 2) the whole world is not your responsibility. Taliban stoning women in Kabul. That’s awful, but not your responsibility. If Iraq invades Kuwait. Let the Saudis handle their own problems. Kurds being genocided in Iraq. Too bad, but not your problem. Ergo, stay they hell out of Syria, Libya, etc. – not your problem. 3) do not start a war on credit. Raise taxes to pay for it.
As for Denmark. Denmark has been in from the start both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and suffered more casualties per capita than any other ally of the USA. But in fact Denmark never really made itself believe it was done to help the Afghans or Iraqis or whatever. It was felt that we owned the USA and Britain from all the way back to WW-II. I think the consensus now is that the debt has been repaid.
Oh dear. **Red **has quite some scraping to do again…
Oh dear. A Red fanboy…