First off, cite.
Second off, Iraq would never have balkanized had you geniuses not blown it to smithereens in the first place.
And ?
Ah, yes, the dreaded flip-flop. That shameful thing where your Wednesday opinion differs from your Monday opinion, based on what happened on Tuesday.
Ask the locals how they felt about it. Hell, ask yourself how you’d feel about, say, China coming around; destroying the power structure you’re used to; implementing their own and telling you to fucking like it because it maintains the kind of stability they like.
Considering the current status of Iraq, I’d say that was a spectacular botch, then. You should get a military that rolls 20s.
Either one or the other, since they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Oh well, good then. As long as an anti-American dictator is gone, I guess hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and an entire country flung back 50+ years are just meaningless collateral.
Nonsense. The primary goals were to permanently conquer Iraq for use as a military base, to control their oil, and to turn iraq into a free market libertarian paradise. All have failed. Killing Saddam, destroying Iraqi secularism and murdering tens of thousands of random Iraqis as revenge for 9-11 (who cares that they had nothing to do with it) were secondary goals; those succeeded but the first was not very important the other two are evil.
Our goal was never to make Iraq a free country; we wanted them subjugated to us. And we’ve replaced a dictator that was a minor irritant with millions of mortal enemies of the US. Millions of people who have perfectly good reasons to want to see America in ruins, and have nothing left to lose. It is nearly inevitable that we’ll see legions of Iraqi terrorists and anti-American activists for generations thanks to this.
Of course; they aren’t American or even Christian so they don’t count as human. They are either cattle to be exploited by us or vermin to be exterminated.
No, as I’ve said many times with hindsight I wouldn’t have supported invading Iraq in the first place.
Cite what exaclty?
No but it would be a dictatorship
I’m not condemning it, I’m just saying that Kerry as President would have withdrawn from Iraq.
A lot of Iraqis did support the invasion-in the particular the Kurds who are said to be the only people in the world who would vote for George W Bush now
Considering the current status of Iraq, I’d say that was a spectacular botch, then. You should get a military that rolls 20s.
Our missions goals changed, since it would have absurd to withdraw and not clean up the mess after it was found there were no WMDs. And anyways even if WMDs were found, the US would still have had to stabilize Iraq.
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Certainly not.
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Which is why the US is withdrawing from Iraq at the end of this year which was a deal negotiated by President Bush. :rolleyes:
So Saddam was insignificant? And why would the US want to destroy Iraqi secularism considering America’s current boogeyman so to speak is Islamistm?
I suppose invading Kuwait was a minor irritant.
Would you like to bet?
Nonsense. Why else did we stay to reconstruct Iraq.
No, he would not have. The Realpolitik of the situation would have forced Kerry to stay in Iraq just as it forced Obama to leave Gitmo open for as long as he did.
The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with Kuwait. Hussein was a minor irritant who required a single war of a couple of weeks and a neglible deployment of aircraft for a few years to restrain.
The U.S. did not want to destroy the secular nature of Iraq any more than it wanted over 100,000 Iraqis to die, but those were the known, (by anyone not seduced by Neo-Con silliness), outcomes when we went in. The major resistance to Hussein was organized by religious factions and he was from the minority religious group, pretty much guaranteeing that the majority group would seek retaliation once he was removed. And by ignoring the religious reality of the country while simultaneously ignoring the calls from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to use a lot more troops, we guaranteed the civil wars that have taken so many lives.
Because letting a nation that large fester in a condition even worse than its current one would have been an even worse mistake. (Which is why Kerry would not have abruptly pulled out.)
This is really not relevant to Qin’s post.
I suppose that those CT enthusiasts who really believe that we went to war simply to enrich Halliburton can embrace the idea that we stayed there for the sole purpose of feeding them more graft. I doubt that there is any substance to the claim. Halliburton was more than willing to take all the money their Neo-Con friends in government were willing to hand them, but the notion that we conducted the war simply to make them rich is a bit far fetched outside of people who like those sort of conspiracies. (That logic reminds me of all the folks who insisted that we were in Vietnam simply to take all the off-shore oil, at some point. Given that Vietnam is ranked 35th in oil production with less than half of even the 29th ranked producer, I am pretty sure that that rumor was as false as any claims that we stayed in Iraq for the purpose of enriching Halliburton.)
Missed that somehow. “Vietnam syndrome” was a good thing. Americans not running about the world mass murdering and conquering is better for everyone, including themselves.
Not the same-Gitmo stayed open because of popular opposition to closing it and brining prisoners over to the US but the Iraq was highly unpopular by 2006.
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I agree with this analysis, but I was responding to Der Trihs who has some different views.
In contributed in general to an air of pessimism, lack of moral certainty, and lack of firmness in the face of the Cold War.
Please; we were extremely self righteous during (and after) the Cold War, absolutely certain of our God Given moral superiority. And what do you mean a lack of “firmness”? We were (and again, still are) ruthless, sadistic and brutal. As for military pessimism; well that was accurate. These stupid wars of conquest consistently turn out to be disasters.