[QUOTE=Chouan]
Of course the Iraqis are better off (and more free) than they were under Saddam. If you denounced Saddam during his rule, you were dead. Today, you can criticize the Iraqi government, and you won’t be killed.
[/quote]
Because the Iraqi “government” is a powerless joke, propped up by America. Try criticising the local faction instead. And there’s more to freedom than that, anyway.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
If he didn’t have the tools to make WMDs, then how did he kill all those Kurds with poison gas in Halabja? or chemical weapons against Kurds in Al-Anfal?
[/quote]
Because we gave them to him. And because he had the ability to make more such weapons, then.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
And if Saddam was so opposed to terrorists, then why did he provide financial aid to widows of Hamas and Islamic Jihad “martyrs”?
[/quote]
Because those weren’t anti-American terrorists.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Please show me a citation proving that these actions by Americans were part of our policy–as opposed to a few misguided soldiers acting without authorization. In contrast, such actions were Saddam’s official policy.
[/quote]
Oh, please. It wasn’t a few; it was standard practice to abuse the Iraqis. And we still have our CIA run torture prisons. My “citation” is the fact that we are doing such things, even now. And that Bush and company tried to redefine torture to defend such behavior.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
In the field of war, sure, the enemy can engage with American soldiers (and other members of the coalition)… but they typically take the route of unlawful combatants, rather than facing us openly in battle.
[/quote]
Because doing so is suicidal, and stupid tactics. And there’s no such thing as an “unlawful combatant”.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Nonsense. Al-Qaida wants to establish a caliphate; they have no desire to see a democracy in action. There’s no way they’d consider Iraqi elections as anything but a blow against their dreams.
[/quote]
The elections were a joke and they know it. And what makes you think that Islamic fundamentalists wouldn’t win an election ? What matters is that Iraqi secularism has been largely destroyed, just what they wanted.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Lt. Col. Dan Wilson said that Fallujah was “the bright ember in the ash pit of the insurgency, and we needed to douse it.” And douse it they did–violence is down and the local security forces have stabilized the entire region. I’d call that a victory.
[/quote]
Only for evil. If there’s less violence, it’s because there are fewer people there to be violent. Mass murder tends to do that.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Iraq saw an almost 80% turnout for the 2005 elections.
[/quote]
And I recall at the time hearing about how the populace was told, “vote or we cut your water rations off”. And any election held under American guns is automatically invalid, anyway.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
It could only have been construed as an Islamist victory if an Islamist party actually took power. the United Iraqi Alliance is the majority party, and although most of the coalition is Shia, it also includes secularists like Ahmed Chalabi in addition to Kurds and Sunnis.
[/quote]
So ? The government is illegitimate and an irrelevency. It will be destroyed the moment we leave, whenever we do.
An Chalabi is an Iranian agent; putting him in power is one of our failures, not a success.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
As for Bush being a monster, I’d like to know what you would do to secure America in the wake of 9/11.
[/QUOTE]
Concentrate on the people who actually attacked us for one. Bush has done nothing Bush strengthen and indulge the people who attacked us.
[QUOTE=jayjay]
How, exactly, does giving even MORE angry Muslims cause to JOIN Al-Qaida count as a victory, then? Or are you so delusional with fever-dreams of the Great Bush riding his golden war chariot in the triumphal parade that you don’t realize that he’s actually made world opinion and goodwill toward the US much worse than it’s ever been?
[/QUOTE]
Al-Qaida is a dying organization. Admittedly, some Muslims in Iraq (especially Sunni) have probably joined insurgent groups in the past. That’s because we didn’t handle the aftermath of the liberation all that well. Since the troop surge, things have improved vastly, suggesting that we should have left a stronger occupying presence in Iraq back in 2003.
Despite the left’s determination to close its eyes to good news from Iraq, real progress has been made in just this past year. Insurgent attacks are down, along with violent civilian deaths. Baghdad and Anbar province are virtually safe. The only area I’m worried about at all is the Kurdish north, and the border with Turkey. But the vast majority of Iraq is safe, and people all over the Middle East are seeing this every day. At first, a lot of people got angry at us, because we didn’t do a very good job explaining things. Abu Ghraib didn’t help, either. But those things are in the past, and the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
By removing a dictator in one state, and allowing his former subjects to taste a Western-style democracy, then there is the chance that other regions in the Middle East will realize their own potential, and will transform their own governments in a similar manner.
[/quote]
Garbage. They’ve tasted mass death and deprivation, suffering, occupation and tyranny at our hands. We’ve simply guarenteed that if a democracy ever does arise in Iraq, one of it’s goals will be to hurt America as much as possible.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
There were also a few possible links with Al-Qaida, mainly through people like Zarqawi, who I mentioned above.
[/quote]
Zarqawi was propped up by us, probably as an excuse to invade. We wouldn’t let Saddam get at him, and Bush wouldn’t let the Pentagon kill him off, despite knowing where he was.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
So, that’s what occupying Iraq has to do with 9/11: it’s one step in the journey towards transforming the Middle East and thereby eliminating both the terrorist groups themselves, and the injustice in the region which propels so many young men into the arms of Al-Qaida.
[/QUOTE]
It’s done the exact opposite; radicalized huge numbers of people who otherwise would never have been inclined to shoot at us.
And invading a country that was no threat to us, especially largely for the sake of it’s oil ( and everyone knows that was a central reason why, lie about it as they may ), slaughtering tens of thousands and laying waste to it IS NOT fighting injustice.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Whoever gets to office will have to deal with Iraq, and if it’s a Democrat (which I agree seems likely), they’re not going make any major changes until Iraq is completely stable.
[/QUOTE]
Iraq will never be stable as long as we are there.
By the way, why are all the Google ads at the bottom of the page advertising gay and bisexual dating sites?? Does anyone else see that, or is it just me?
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Al-Qaida is a dying organization. Admittedly, some Muslims in Iraq (especially Sunni) have probably joined insurgent groups in the past. That’s because we didn’t handle the aftermath of the liberation all that well.
[/QUOTE]
Bullcrap. Everyone on your side of the delusion wants to try to sell the massive fuckup that was the “reconstruction” of Iraq as something we kinda sorta messed up a little. It was deliberate. It was an attempt to put the neoliberal economic policies of the Chicago School (they of the Pinochet’s Chile and all of the juntas in the Southern Cone, they of Sukarno’s rise to power in Indonesia, they of Poland’s plunge into depression after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they of Russia’s collapse into chaos after the fall of the Communists) into practice on a country that they considered a blank slate, made blanker by deliberate malfeasance. The “liberation” of Iraq was a massive cash transfer to American corporations from the get-go.
If we’d been serious about punishing someone for 9/11, we’d have done Afghanistan the right way instead of doing a half-assed job and then running to Iraq. We’d have insisted that Saudi Arabia actually DO something about the Wahabbi extremists (you ARE aware that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, right?). We’d have been more serious about getting Musharraf to root out Al-Quaida in Pakistan.
Bush never did really care about Al-Qaida. Al-Qaida and 9/11 were excuses to play soldier for him. I’m definitely not a 9/11-conpiracist. I don’t think the US government had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks and I think they went down just like the official record says. But I seriously believe that where the majority of Americans saw 9/11 as a horrible tragedy, this administration and its ideological brethren saw a giant opportunity. And ran with it.
Forgive me for being flippant, but the Iraq debacle was such an abysmal hellhole that sustained major improvement, even if true, in no way makes up enough ground to put us back to where we were before we started that misadventure.
It would require huge, mind-boggling leaps of undeserved success – new diamond fields, an Iraqi medical student discovering the cure for cancer, the collapse of Putin’s kleptocracy, AND a pony – to in some way offset the international damage to our reputation as a fair, non-aggressive, nontorturing, constitutional nation of laws; the human suffering; the emboldenment of terrorists; and the enormous, intentional transfer of wealth from working Americans to Cheney’s trust fund.
Since we do not infact HAVE said pony, I’m going to contend that we have one metric long fucking way to go before we break even.
edit: oooh, I posted without reading Jayjay’s post above, and yet we have some opinions in common.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Let’s look back on the victories the coalition and Iraqi forces have achieved, on numerous fronts, over the past five years:
1.) Victory for human rights. We overthrew a vicious and dangerous dictator who threatened the safety of Middle East and America. Saddam Hussein was responsible for at least 500,000 civilian deaths, especially among the Kurds and Shi’ites (that number doesn’t include Iraqi deaths from the Iran-Iraq war, so the total number is probably much higher). Therefore, over his 24 years of rule, Saddam killed about 20,000 of his own people EVERY YEAR.
If he was still in power, and still murdering Iraqis at this rate, then at least 100,000 more Iraqis would have died since the liberation of Iraq in 2003. Even considering the undoubtedly inflated number of 87,683 on www.iraqbodycount.org, fewer Iraqi civilians have died because of our intervention.
[/quote]
Complete and utter bullshit.
The majority of the hundreds of thousands of deaths initiated by Hussein occurred in a limited number of events in which he perceived a real or imagined rebellion and stomped on it. In the eight years prior to our invasion, he and his sons were averaging about 1100 deaths a year. We killed more people in the first months of the invasion than he would have killed to date had we left him contained.
And in terms of human rights: Jews, Christians, and women had more freedom and greater rights under the brutal but secular Ba’athists than they have had under the resurgence of Islamist factions that now control the country, neighborhood by neighborhood.
.More nonsense. Despite some really weak feelers in the mid-90s, Hussein and al Qaida were never able to even initiate talks, much less plan joint action, He was actively keeping al Qaida out of Iraq up until the point we destroyed his defense forces. And he never once in his life ever attacked a foe he perceived as stronger than himself. Whatever he might have fantasized, the U.S. reaction to the WTC/Pentagon attacks demonstrated that there was no percentage in attacking the U.S.
There is no debate on either issue. The only al Qaida operatives in Iraq prior to the invasion were in a lonely training camp in the Kurdish north, protected from Iraqi security forces by the U.S./U.K. containment policy protecting the Kurds. After the invasion, the terrorists entered Iraq through the open borders the U.S. created by destroying the Iraqi army that had previously kept al Qaida and their buddies out of Iraq–borders that could not be manned by U.S. troops since Rumsfeld denied the troop requesrts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had sought an occupation force that the neo-cons idiotically assumed we would not need..
If you think that al Sadr has taken “refuge” in Iran, you are too uninformed to participate in a serious discussion. He moves back and forth between the two countries building political capital among the (fellow Shi’a) Iranian leadership so that when the inevitable civil war breaks out in Iraq, he will be the best supported Shi’a leader to claim control of the country.
I agree that this was the clear goal of the neo-cons for which they fabricated stories to rationalize an attack on Iraq. However, it is not working. The recently dismissed parliament was unable to addrerss a single issue of substance before they adjourned. al Malawi spends half his time playing nice with the U.S. to keep himself in power and the other half of the time declaring that he will do nothing that appears to be what the U.S. asks so as to continue to curry favor with the electorate (and keep enoughh votes to prevent al Sadr’s party from throwing him out at the next election). Not only is Iraq completely fragmented along the fault lines of Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurd, but there is an enormous civil war building as various Shi’a factions jockey to take over the government when the U.S. pulls back.
The U.S. had an opportunity to attempt to establish a successful representative government in Afghanistan, but we threw it away to go play in Iraq and now we are facing the prospect of seeing Iraq become the focal point of the complete dissolution of representative government in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the very limited reforms with which the Jordanians, Yemenis, Egyptians, and other had toyed in the 1990s have been abandoned as the U.S. supports increasing authoritarian regimes in those nations under the guise of “fighting terrorism.”
The “Cedar Revolution” has died.
The “multiparty” elections in Egypt were a joke.
Afgahnistan, (after five years of neglect by the Bush administration), is in serious danger of repeating the Russian experience with the majority of the people looking on the coalition forces as empire builders and colonizers. Karzai controls a few hectates of land surrounding Kabul and the U.S. continues to beg the rest of the coalition to send increasing numbers of troops simply to stave off the resurgence of the Taliban while little to no headway is ever made in bringing self rule to the country.
The Palestinians are violently separated between Gaza and the West Bank with each land held by rival military forces.
So you have one tiny nation, Kuwait, (that had been under U.S. sway for twelve years prior to the Iraqi invasion), finally letting their women vote. Big Middle East victory, there.
[Quote=Chouan]
Why isn’t anyone but John Mace taking my topic(s) seriously?
[/quote]
Because no one posting to this thread can believe that you take any of the silly claims you have made seriously?
[QUOTE=Chouan]
By the way, why are all the Google ads at the bottom of the page advertising gay and bisexual dating sites?? Does anyone else see that, or is it just me?
[/QUOTE]
I see ads for chewing gum, panic attack treatment, stress relief methods and biofeedback meditation. You’ll find they change every time a post is added to a thread. Some sort of search engine goes through all the words in all the posts and picks out ads suggested by them. Or something.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Close! Except that I’m not a federalist.
[/quote]
A term which, in American political discourse, can mean centralist or decentralist.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
While I agree with most of the Constitution Party’s platform, I consider myself an independent, and I usually vote Republican for lack any viable alternatives.
[/QUOTE]
The CP’s foreign policy is paleocon (isolationist), not neocon (interventionist). I doubt they approve of the Iraq War.
[QUOTE=Frostillicus]
I agree with the OP that Iraq is a magnificent success on all fronts. As a result, we can now bring the troops home!
[/QUOTE]
Be sure you Don’t Tell President Bush!
[QUOTE=Chouan]
We have to look at the bigger picture. When we were attacked on 9/11, we were determined to strike back against the enemy and deny them safe harbor. That was why we liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban. But we also had to consider the more far-reaching problem of why did Al-Qaida attack us in the first place? What was it that lead these young men to fly airplanes into our buildings?
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Chouan]
But the important point is that they’re still alive, and Iraq is restabilizing.
[/QUOTE]
The 2.2 million refugees are alive. There are/were another 655,000 Iraqis (through July 2006) who, because of the invasion, are not. That’s 2.5% of the pre-war population. That’s many times more than we might have expected Hussein at his worst to account for during the same period.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Lt. Col. Dan Wilson said that Fallujah was “the bright ember in the ash pit of the insurgency, and we needed to douse it.” And douse it they did–violence is down and the local security forces have stabilized the entire region. I’d call that a victory.
[/quote]
“[The Romans] make a desert, and they call it a peace.”
– Tacitus
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Iraq saw an almost 80% turnout for the 2005 elections. If that’s not a democracy, then what is the US with its 42.45% turnout in the 2004 presidenial elections?
[/QUOTE]
Elections alone do not constitute democracy unless they produce a government capable of governing, which Iraq still lacks.
OK. The minds of this MB have engaged with our OP. I’ll let you deal with these guys now. As I said in my first post, I expect you will get your ass handed to you. Keep an open mind on this issue. You seem like an intelligent enough fellow. Listen to what people are saying here, and try to learn, not preach. I hope you take something away from this thread other than the preconceived ideas you came here with.
The OP makes a fundamental mistake. He assumes the anti-imperial critique is based on each operation’s success or failure or how well reality can be molded and aligned with government propaganda. This is not so. If it were, the hundred year British occupation of India wouldn’t be seen by us as flagrantly immoral. Instead, the problem is conquering other nations.
Now, that’s not to say that a super majority of the American population formerly supported the war and only stopped waving their miniature flags once it became apparent that it was not us doing the ass kicking anymore. Suffice it is to say, the American people are not by any stretch of the imagination anti-imperialists. They are the premier example of a fair weather fan. Who knows, maybe the support for the occupation of Iraq will spike if things continue the way they are under the next POTUS.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Al-Qaida is a dying organization.
[/QUOTE]
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are strong and highly organized in the tribal regions of Pakistan because the U.S. pulled most of its resources out of Afghanistan to invade Iraq. President Bush decided to outsource the containment of militant groups, a minor nuisance, to Musharraf.
IOZ. His site is an elixir for the parched throats of Daily Kos and “progressive” Democratic partisan blog readers. I highly recommend him. Very quotable.
