Fair point though not the most significant one. But if we are to follow the logic, the US may as well attacked Iceland. Just as good a target. And easier.
I’ve actually seen at least one RW Doper a while back, Shodan I think it was – yes, here, in 2006 – stoutly insist that Hussein did so have WMDs, based on a Drudge Report page about some 1991-vintage degraded shells that were found in Iraq. So it goes.
:mad: Those blue-eyed bastards are stockpiling volcanoes! Talk about mass destruction!
The Office of Special Plans. Forged yellowcake documents. Downing street memo. Curveball. CIA dissension. Shinseki. Scott Ritter. Joseph Wilson. "This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about regime change.”
Mmm, it’s all coming back. Maybe we can talk about Swiftboats and how gay marriage will destroy the nation’s foundations next.
Not sure why you would say that. We can argue all day about whether people thought SH did or did not have WMDs. I say it doesn’t matter. It’s a red herring. He’s not a danger to the US with or without WMDs. Getting into the argument about does he doesn’t he, at the time, was to concede half the debate to the Bush administration. SH was not a threat to the US, plain and simple.
In 2002 I lived in a remote part of Asia, with essentially no news except that famous left-wing newspaper: The New York Times. From that vantage, my recollection is completely opposite to yours. Reading Times news and editorials, it seemed almost obvious to me that invading Iraq was a very bad idea because of likely bad outcomes during the aftermath.
Especially convincing were Op-eds by hard-line Israeli intelligence officers who described Israel’s poor results in Lebanon. I tried to find these by Googling, but couldn’t. I did find many op-eds opposing the war:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/01/opinion/01iht-edyous_ed3_.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/news/06iht-piraq.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/27/opinion/wimps-on-iraq.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/opinion/iraq-belongs-on-the-back-burner.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/30/international/middleeast/30JORD.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/06/opinion/we-still-have-a-choice-on-iraq.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/what-i-didn-t-find-in-africa.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/10/opinion/congress-must-resist-the-rush-to-war.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/us/pakistani-wants-no-part-in-an-attack-on-iraq.html
During this Googling I was pleased to discover three letters to the editor about Iraq from myself and published in the Times ! 
I won’t link or quote them: they weren’t signed Septimus G. Stevens, but with my secret name!
If this was true then people would have no trouble finding examples or cites proving it.
Two things: 1. Who’s James Webb?
- His concerns seem to primarily be about the potential difficulty in reconstructing Iraqi society and the potential for rifts between various groups in Iraq. He mentions our troops being terrorist targets and also mentions a potential increase in worldwide terrorism in response to the invasion. But there is no mention of a widespread insurgency costing thousands of American lives. None. He didn’t predict that.
Feel free to keep Googling. If you did predict the insurgency, good for you. You should know that you were in a vanishing minority of people who did.
I’d rather not read a dozen NY Times articles this morning. Can you quote any of those predicting the insurgency?
Debaser, you just really are the bad-guys in this story.
I understand that that concept is hard to come to grips with for you but you can’t just keep denying it.
You will have to accept it, maybe feel some dose of appropriate shame for supporting the evil done, but you can’t keep pretending it didn’t happen.
Because if you keep denying, then you leave yourself open for falling for the same thing all over again next time.
You can’t learn from your mistakes if you won’t admit you made a mistake.
Now, just accept that the “Eeeevil dictator” was telling the truth and that the “Leader of the free world” lied to your face.
Only then can you move on to the next questions.
Why did the US really go to war?
Whose idea was this?
What did they hope to achieve?
Maybe they did achieve it?
Don’t you think those are more important things to find out than trying to establish the % of people who predicted the “insurgency” ( by that exact word)?
OK, but if everyone is an idiot then no one is an idiot, idiot being a relative term.
People also thought Haiti’s troubles would be over once Baby Doc Duvalier was overthrown, and any number of similar examples.
Dogma dies hard.
There is no proof that Bush lied. He did want the war, and had blinders on to things that he and his administration should have been paying attention to. But he believed the WMDs existed.
I’m not hung up on just a word. Call it whatever you want, but no one predicted that we’d be seeing thousands of casualties piling up for years after we defeated the army in Iraq. If that unforeseen thing hadn’t occurred the war would be considered a success. This is true despite the lack of WMDs.
That’s that the American people consider a failure.
The lack of WMDs and various failures of the occupation aren’t nearly as much of a big deal to public opinion in the US that the casualties are. Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds can all fight and break the country apart and it would still have been considered a success by most if not for the insurgency and what it cost US troops.
People knew there were no WMDs in 2004, yet Bush was still re-elected. It wasn’t until the insurgency proved so difficult to put down that his approval ratings plummeted.
This is getting a bit ridiculous.
Of course if the insurgency hadn’t occurred and we had been greeted as liberators and Iraq were now a stable, thriving democracy the war would be considered a success. And if my Aunt had balls she’d be my Uncle.
It’s also utterly irrelevant (if true) that only a few people predicted a widespread insurgency campaign - although I’ve pointed out that at least one group making that prediction submitted just such a report to the Administration prior to the war.
What matters to the history books is what actually happened. That the intelligence leading up to the war was wrong, sure. But more importantly that the underlying theory of foreign-power liberation was completely exploded, at least wrt the Middle East. Neoconservative foreign policy should be dead, at this point. But the fact that many of the same people are now pontificating about, for example, the uprising in Syria or bitching that the US isn’t doing more to undermine the Iranian regime underlines just how unaccountable those responsible have been. And how unwilling most people are to actually learn from history.
That’s not what he seems to be saying in that article. He says:
He repeats this several times. IOW he seems to assume that the US had two options, either to overthrow Saddam and quickly withdraw or to stay long-term and try to mold Iraqi society, and the latter option was the one he was criticizing.
That’s a lot of cites, but only the first and fourth raise the possibility of insurgency. The rest oppose the war for other reasons. (Ironically, in the case of the “bear-left.com” petition they opposed it in part because they assumed that Saddam had WMD which he could use on US troops.)
At any rate, I couldn’t swear to it. That’s my recollection. I could be wrong.
What’s irrelevant (though not “utterly”) is that one group making the prediction submitted a report. At any given time there are any number of groups making any number of conflicting predictions. Only some will turn out to be right, but you can’t always tell in advance which one it is.
FTR I myself don’t share the “underlying theory of foreign-power liberation” (or the liberal love and understanding counterpart) and incline strongly towards the isolationist approach. But I don’t think you can refute an approach from one case. Every situation is different. The fact that one war turned out badly is not a proof that you should thereafter avoid all wars in all circumstances (especially since, if you try it, others eventually bring the war to you).
If anyone is advocating invading Iraq and imposing regime change, then you have a point. But that doesn’t seem to be on the table at this time, AFAICT.
If you think this is what I’m saying you haven’t been paying attention.
My point is that the insurgency, much more than anything else is what makes the Iraqi war a failure. It wouldn’t be viewed nearly as poorly by most people if not for the insurgency and the success it had. This is true even if Iraq didn’t become a stable thriving democracy and even if it violently split apart, as many predicted it would. I’ve explicitly stated that.
Many people predicted it would be tough making Iraq into a stable country. Many people predicted the factions within Iraq might split the country apart. There was debate at the time of the invasion about whether that was actually a preferred course of action: Split the country into a Kurdish north and Sunni and Shiite regions in the south.
What no one predicted was the insurgency and how costly it would be to US troops.
No, what makes Iraq a failure is that it was a stable country and you destroyed it.
And we still don’t know why.
First you say:
Then you say:
Did you think that the people in the first group were predicting that it would happen through debate? I certainly wasn’t. If not, what did you think people like myself thought would happen to the U.S. troops who were in the middle of a country being torn apart?
No, of course not. And he was not any threat to the U.S. when he invaded Kuwait in 1991, either. But the Bush I Administration nevertheless was able to sell the Gulf War, on general principles of maintaining an international order that does not tolerate or reward naked agression of that kind – and because at that point he did appear to be an immediate threat to Saudi Arabia and to Israel. (Hussein’s apparent ambition was to be the Sheik of Araby, all of Araby, he made that clear enough when he made war on Iran under the pretext of, among other things, liberating the Arabs of Khuzestan from Persian rule. He represented the last gasp ever, probably, of pan-Arab nationalism, which always was part of Ba’athist ideology – though the Ba’athist Assad regime in Syria never seems to have made an issue of it since they seceded in 1961 from the United Arab Republic of Egypt-Syria.)
Of course, in 2003 Hussein was throughly contained and no threat to anyone but his own people – but his track record, above, made it that much easier for the W Admin to make him out to be some kind of threat. If he had had WMDs, he still would have been no threat to America – but to Israel, maybe. Which still would not have made the war worth fighting, IMO, but I’m sure some Israeli and Israel-sympathetic Dopers would differ on that point.
I don’t think you could call pre-2003 (or pre-1991) Iraq a stable country. It was a one-man regime and as such had no institutional stability. Iraq was almost inevitably going to collapse into chaos at some point.
But Iraq wasn’t a threat to international stability after 1991. After that, the only people who were really threatened by Iraq were the Iraqis.