It wasn’t just any group and I find it odd that you and Debaser are dismissing it, particularly since Debaser asked for proof of the predictions then is saying the proof isn’t good enough.
The group was the National Intelligence Council and the article clearly states the two reports were prepared for President Bush. Not only that, the administration refutes the reports in the article which shows that they knew the contents of the reports.
Apparently we have different definitions of “insurgency” and “aftermath.” Since you stipulate to #1 and #4, I reclicked on other links:
Excerpts from linked articles I posted:
[ul]
[li] #2. “A U.S. war with Iraq would further fuel already considerable anti-American sentiment”[/li][li] #3. “Instead [Saddam] may keep them in the cities, surrounded by civilians, where the U.S. cannot easily bomb them.[/li]… Do we have a plan for a post-Saddam Iraq? We must not simply hand the country over to another general who comes from the 20 percent Sunni minority. Yet is the Bush administration really prepared, given its concerns about Shiite Iran, to hand power democratically to the 60 percent Shiite majority?”
[li] #5. “Even if the optimistic predictions of quick victory prove to be accurate, we would then find ourselves absorbed with the occupation of Iraq and efforts to impose democracy on the fractious elements of that country.”[/li][li] #6. “[King Abdullah] said that if those in Washington who are adamant about attacking Iraq got their way, it would ‘destabilize American strategic interest even more in the Middle East.’”[/li][/ul]
I stopped clicking after #6, since our definitions seem inconsistent.
Is it your opinion that the US troop casualties are primarily caused by them being caught in the crossfire of sectarian violence?
If so, I disagree. If anything the sectarian violence probably helped draw attention of various factions away from making IEDs and otherwise trying to kill US troops.
Exactly. The comment you are responding to reminds me of the beginning of Michael Moore’s silly movie where he shows the Iraqi children playing, implying that everything was sunshine and roses before we showed up.
The few cites that have been provided so far either don’t refute my contention or are from very random, unknown individuals or groups. It predictions of an insurgency were as widespread as people here are claiming you’d have no trouble finding many examples. But you can’t.
National Intelligence Council? Who are they? Did anyone important predict it? The CIA? The NSA? The Pentagon?
The fact that one obscure source is all my multiple opponents can find bolsters my argument.
Can you explain what your definition of “insurgency” is? I’ve admitted that many people accurately predicted the sectarian splitting of the country, as you quote above in cites 3 and 5. But none of those are talking about an insurgency. Cite 2 talks about anti-American sentiment. That could be talking about the attitude of people in France. It certainly doesn’t imply a ruthless, violent and adaptive insurgency that killed thousands of American troops over many years and proved very difficult to quell. Cite 6 is so vague it’s meaningless.
Is that all you’ve got? If so, it’s proving my point.
You’re arguing with someone else, or a strawman. What I wrote was:
If “bad outcomes during the aftermath” translates only to “a specific type of insurgency within Iraq”, then it’s no wonder the Ignorati had trouble imagining what a bad idea the invasion was.
So? There’s not much there that wasn’t in the earlier cite about them.
The Wikipedia page actually has better information on them.
I repeat my question: Is that all you’ve got? One obscure report from a group that reports up to the Director of National Intelligence? What about the CIA? The NSA? the Pentagon?
If “everyone knew” about the likelihood of an insurgency why can’t you get a bunch of cites from agencies that people have actually heard of talking about it prior to the invasion? Or even the media?
You should just give up. You’ve got nothing.
Thank you for reminding me as to just why “the reality based community” was a phrase in common use around this time.
Well, OK, I guess. But that’s some pretty serious goalpost moving.
When you said “bad outcomes during the aftermath” you were responding to a post talking about “the aftermath of an invasion could be bloody”, which is the topic of discussion: Was it widely predicted in advance that there would be an insurgency that would be as bad as what we ended up facing.
If you want to claim that the NY Times and others predicted “bad outcomes” I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. It’s so vague as to be meaningless. You can post a laundry list of things the NY Times predicted and some of them turned out correct and some didn’t. But they certainly didn’t think that an insurgency was the problem we were going to face.
Like basically everyone else they thought:
Some of those ended up correct (2 and 3). Some didn’t (1). But like everyone else they didn’t predict the real danger: A violent and ruthless insurgency killing a large numbers of US troops over a period of many years.
I responded to
“Even in LW circles, opposition to the war was primarily driven by the notions that 1) the sanctions need to be given more time to work and 2) that the war was “illegal” without adequate UN authorization.”
with my
“bad outcomes during the aftermath”
I moved no goalposts. You chose to interpolate my comment into some other subthread with which I was not involved. But to address two points in your latest post:
There certainly were analysts worried about insurgency, at least in the broad sense of the term. My Google search was to look for the Israeli analysts who compared likely outcome with their experience in Lebanon.
The N.Y. Times publishes a variety of opinions on its op-ed pages. Most of my links were to op-eds by non-staff contributors. Your “they [the NY Times] thought …” implies you think of that newspaper as some monolith, allowing only a single opinion. Perhaps you’re more familiar with FauxNews?
Fair enough. I don’t think any sane person would disagree that there was a lot of anti-war opinions out there for various reasons.
I disagree that this was widespread or common at the very least. A lot of people are stating that it was, but the lack of cites backing up these claims is very telling. It’s one thing to find a random report or one analyst who got it right now that you’re looking back with 20-20 hindsight. But at the time it wasn’t the primary or even a secondary reason people were against the war.
Of course the NY Times has various people with various opinions, just like FoxNews does. However, the NY Times is overwhelmingly liberal and was very anti-GWBush and was against the war. Is any of these even in dispute?
A lot of NY Times articles on the war were cited in this thread. None of them were for it. All of them had various reasons to be against it but most of those were wrong in the sense that the biggest thing we should have been afraid of was the insurgency and that was barely mentioned as a possibility by them in most of the articles.*
*Based on the few snippets I’ve read and the stuff that’s been posted so far. I admit I have no interest in reading a hundred old NY Times articles in the interest of proving this point.
To be clear, I, like Debaser, was referring to an insurgency specifically. (The reference to the “aftermath” was to the possibility of it being bloody, which was another reference to an insurgency.)
I don’t know (or care) what “LW circles” refers to. I am astounded that when I mention the N.Y. Times – one of the best newspapers in the world – I’m met with the equivalent of “Pffft. Who pays attention to that left-wing rag?”
Much political debate isn’t about left-vs-right, or pacifist-vs-militarist, but about smart-vs-stupid. GWB’s 2003 war was astoundingly stupid and many of us did not need hindsight to know that. I supported Gulf War I, and indeed thought a better outcome then was possible: I wanted Bush-41 to keep up military pressure for a few more days, asking the Baathists to replace Saddam with a less heinous dictator.
Clarifications:
I actually read, not the N.Y. Times, but the International Herald Tribune. The N.Y. Times acquired the remaining 50% of that newspaper it didn’t already own at the end of 2002. Looking for my own name, I see that my Letters in the NY Times archive were only those published after 2002. I don’t know if there’s an IHT archive online for 2002 and earlier.
There were at least two op-eds published in the 2002 IHT as I described: Letters from hard-line Israeli analysts warning of uncertain outcomes. Lack of a cite does not make me a liar.
Here’s a pdf from 2002 which makes many of the correct points:
http://www.amacad.org/publications/monographs/war_with_iraq.pdf
Note that it agrees with many of the war’s whereases, but goes on to explain why the war is unwise anyway.
Right-wing gibberish about this collosally stupid misadventure really annoys me. Right-wingers pretend that only they knew how brutal Saddam was. In fact, rationalists knew this in the 1980’s when right-wingers knew only that Saddam was an ally of their idols: Cheney and Rumsfeld.
The lies told by the Cheney-Rove Administration in support of their crazy war would astound even Joseph Goebbels.
“No, there won’t be any casualties.”
“The war will pay for itself.”
After ten years, we still see the ignorant gibberish as in this thread. Anyone still ignorant is probably wilfully ignorant, but I’ll ask anyway: What books about the misadventure have you (who mischaracterize the war and its opposition) read?
Oh, we know why, all right!
Bullshit. North Korea ain’t about to.
:rolleyes: No, that movie was Parker and Stone’s Team America. Moore’s movie merely portrayed a more-or-less stable and peaceful society, which Husseins’ Iraq was. You could have a decent life, so long as you kept your mouth shut about politics and (if female and attractive) escaped the notice of Uday and Qusay. And when the Coalition of the Willing* overthrew Hussein, it all went to shit – it ripped the lid off of decades of simmering ethnocultural hatreds, just like when Tito’s regime fell in Yugoslavia, and “ethnic cleansing” ensued. One of the lessons we should have learned from Iraq is that, sometimes, a brutal dictatorship is better than any reasonably plausible alternative.
*That’s not a name for a military alliance! That’s a name for a curiously highbrow porn film!
And let us keep that in mind, in all dealings with Iran.
Oh I gave up when he said this:
just after quoting “Here is an excerpt from an article that James Webb, a Democrat who was Secretary of the Navy under Reagan.” That’s just pure willful ignorance. Ever hear of the 600 ship Navy plan under Reagan? Webb was such a strong proponent of it that he resigned rather than endorse cuts in the numbers.