What's the point of attacking Iraq?

Great Debates
1

Lately in the news, I’ve heard the sound of the U.S. sharpening their knives in preparation for a coming attack on Iraq. And I wonder what that will accomplish.

First off, I don’t understand why the sudden urgency in needing to attack Iraq. There is no proof that Iraq was involved with Al Quieda or in the 9-11 attack. They haven’t been massing troops on the border of Kuwait. It just seems unnecessary.

I can only speculate on the U.S.'s reasons for wanting to attack Iraq:
– We need to continue the appearance of our “War on Terrorism”. The U.S. public reacted favorably towards our attack on Afghanistan, so maybe they’ll be behind this attack too.
– Bush wants to finish the job his father started. And most of his staff & advisors were on the Gulf War team, so Iraq is still unfinished business in their minds.

But this seems like an awful idea to me. And for many reasons: [ul][li] Our allies in Europe will probably denounce us. (Except for our lapdog–Great Britain) [/li][li] Any progress we’ve made in MidEast relations will be destroyed. Saudi Arabia & Egypt, our two biggest Arab allies will surely turn against us.[/li][li] A ground war in Iraq will be much more difficult than the one in Afghanistan. There’s no equivilent to the Northern Alliance in Iraq, so U.S. and British troops will have to do most of the fighting.[/li][li] After the war, we’ll have to install a new Iraqi gov’t. No doubt, it will be unpopular with the Iraqi people, who will see it as a U.S. controlled “puppet” gov’t.[/li][li]Which will lead to revolution, which will force the U.S. to step in militarily. Or perhaps we’ll just heavily arm the new gov’t. And we know how well that usually turns out. (The weapons will eventually be used against U.S. Troops, or Israel.)[/li][li] Saddam is pretty toothless right now. He’s not causing us or any of his neighbors much trouble. A gov’t that follows Hussein has a high chance of being a fundamentalist Islamic gov’t (think Taliban or worse!). Why open ourselves to the possiblity of that?[/li][li] It will cement our image as a bully on the world stage. We will become very unpopular. So what? Who Cares? Well, it will make it very difficult to enlist the aid of other nations in any future campaigns in our “War on Terrorism”. And international co-operation is probably the most important tool in the fight against terrorism.[/li][/ul]

I can see so many reasons why a war against Iraq would be a bad idea. Can some of my fellow Dopers enlighten me on why this would be a good road to take?

2

I am not so sure an attack on Iraq is that inevitable. Colin Powell for one is certainly not keen on the idea as Bush’s hawks are. Tony Blair may be receptive to the idea, but I am not so sure the British public will back him. And if an attack on Iraq coincides, or comes on the heels of, an Israeli-Arab war - it will just look too much like a concerted western war against the Arab world.

Iraq does potentially have a “northern alliance”, and a “southern alliance”. But when the Kurds and Shiites rebelled in '91, the older George W. Bush just sat on his hands and let the central government supress the minorities (who combined are the majority) in Iraq. Other than the shadowy Iraqi opposition, I don’t know who would help the USA there this time around. Even Iraqis who hate Hussein are not all that favorably disposed toward Bush.

3

the rationale seems like compensation for an ineffective decade-long chokehold, don’t it. I think mentioning attacking Iraq was a probe; and the response has been lukewarm - ain’t gonna happen, at least not right away.

Anyway, reasons to attack:

  1. They’ve got Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that’s just not right. Some reports coming out of Iraq are spooky and this actually does concern me.
  2. Iraq ends with a Q i.e. not team players.
  3. Saddam Hussein is a fascist who wears a beret. Unforgivable

OK, enough tongue in cheek. Iraq is unstable and the U S A wants to stabilize the region a bit. In order to do that, the regime must fall. The big reason is simply Frustration. Gotta crack an egg to make an omlette, but methinks this omlette may hold bitter fruit.

4

**

It is obvious to me that the United States needs to pay more attention to terrorism them we have in the past. We’ve already made it clear that we’re not limiting our future actions to 9-11 or Al-Queida. Furthermore we’ve said that we will treat any state that harbors or sponsers terrorist as if they were the terrorist themselves.

**

– We do need to continue the “War on Terrorism” no matter where it takes us.

– Bush Sr. “completed” the job he set out to do. It was never in the cards to overthrow Saddam. We were only there to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.

**

England is not our lapdog. And it would be unfortunate if some of our allies denounce the United States for taking action against Iraq. But I’m not going to lose much sleep over it.

**

Perhaps.

**

The American people are going to have to get used to long military campaigns that endanger our military personel.

**

He’s got a guy who’s in charge of terrorism. He’s already got access to biological/chemical weapons and one of these days he’ll get access to nuclear weapons.

**

There’s an expression in my neck of the woods. “If you’re not going to shit then get the hell off the pot.” If we’re viewed as bullies for going after countries like the Sudan or Iraq I’m not going to lose any sleep. Personally I think European nations will still be keen on tracking down terrorist no matter what happens.

Marc

5

MGibson

Uhh, why?

Because we have to protect ourselves from terrorists? Let’s not beat around the bush here. Do you think Iraq is a terrorist nation or harbors terrorists? Just because they have the means doesn’t mean they will be used. We’ve got a huge arsenal of non-conventional weapons (and who knows, maybe they’ve even been deployed). I don’t want to discuss whether the US is therefore a terrorist nation or not.

If’n you’re meaning campaigns other than in Afghanistan and Iraq, hmmm, I see your point. I’m surethe 7th fleet’s pretty busyy right now collecting intelligence in Singapore right now.

What is the, shall we call it “need-based” reason for attacking? The OP addresses why we shouldn’t. How about why we should (actually, that was what I sarcastically attempted in my previous post - sorry, it’s been so long, I’ve forgotten how to make a coherent argument).

6

Britain is already facing a high-level political split over Blair’s lapdog status:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1861000/1861971.stm

7

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by frinkboy *
[li] Any progress we’ve made in MidEast relations will be destroyed. Saudi Arabia & Egypt, our two biggest Arab allies will surely turn against us.[/li][/QUOTE]

Given that Iraq is a permanent threat for Saudi Arabia, I’m not convinced they will be unhappy. I would add that having Saudi Arabia as “the biggest allie” is a shame in itself. Concerning Egyptia, they would probably voice their disagrement. But would the Egyptian government really pissed off? I’m not convinced. The Egyptian population certainly will

[QUOTE]
[li] After the war, we’ll have to install a new Iraqi gov’t. No doubt, it will be unpopular with the Iraqi people, who will see it as a U.S. controlled “puppet” gov’t…**[/li][/QUOTE]

Will it be really unpopular? More unpopular than Hussein? What about the minorities opinion? IMO, any government able to restore a minimal level of prosperity will be popular.

[QUOTE]
[li] Saddam is pretty toothless right now. He’s not causing us or any of his neighbors much trouble. A gov’t that follows Hussein has a high chance of being a fundamentalist Islamic gov’t (think Taliban or worse!). Why open ourselves to the possiblity of that?[/li][/QUOTE]
[li] [/li]
Do you seriously believe that the US will allow a fundamentalist gov’t to take power in Irak? Also, if I remember correctly, Irak used to be a pretty secular country (by regional standarts). I’m convinced that the US gvt and int services would consider this possibility while planning their action, anyway.

I agree it will certainly “cement your image as a bully”. Concerning the cooperation in the fight against terrorism, I’m not convinced it will change anything. Most countries have a major interest in this fight, too.

8

IMO, the entire reason for Bush’s current posture of going after Iraq is to distract the electorate. Bush has serious problems on the homefront that he is not prepared to deal with (Dick Cheney, Enron, campaign finance, the economy) and is hoping that continued military activity will distract Americans from these issues long enough to get the Republican party through the 2002 (and possibly even 2004) elections. It’s much easier to stonewall during a war, so if there are secrets you do not want to tell, start a war and then use the war as an excuse not to talk about them. If necessary (the first one goes too well), start another war.

9

KellyM has a lot of truth in her statement.

Please remember that Iraq under good old Saddam does not have a track record of international terrorism. He’s a right bastard, but not a terrorist.

Please also remember that if Iraq is out of the picture, what happens to the balance of power in the region. Beware of unintended consequences.

10

I saw a couple of interviews with the former US ambassador to Iraq. Can’t recall the guys name. He expresses the same concerns as China Guy. His view of Iraq is definitely not in line with what is coming from D.C. Seems the likely candidates to follow Saddam are pretty bad and the balance of things in the region would be in question.

11

OK, I’m in favor of attacking Iraq. I’m by no means a hawk, but I think the worst blunder Bush, Sr. made was not continuing the march to Baghdad. I have some simple rules of thumb about international relations:

  1. You do not allow a leader who has used weapons of mass destruction to continue in power. Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction and, worse yet, used them on wholly civillian targets (he gassed a series of Kurdish villages as part of a campaign to depopulate rural Kurdish villages and thereby deprive Kurdish rebels a base of support);

  2. You do not allow a leader who has engaged in genocide to continue in power. See Saddam and the Kurds again.

Anyway, as for your particular objections:

  1. Diplomacy/public relations issues. Yes, these can absolutely be a problem here. The US should not go in unless we are able to build support. The most important first step is to give Saddam one more chance to allow intensive inspections to destroy his weapons of mass destruction. Saddam is under both signed agreement and UN mandate to allow such inspections and destruction.

First, there are Northern Alliance equivalents in Iraq, both the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in the swamps of southern Iraq.
Second, as for the US military itself, Iraq (at least up to and well past Baghdad) is ideal terrain for US heavy forces. A much better equipped Iraqi army was decimated by US forces in the Persian Gulf War, with almost unbelievably low casualties for US and allied forces.

Looking to history, there is no reason to think that is the logical result. There were no revolutions against US-installed (using the term broadly) governments in W. Germany, Japan, S. Korea, Chile, Dominican Republic, Grenada or Haiti. There were revolutions (eventually) against US-installed governments in S. Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but you get the idea. What matters is the care with which the US goes about installing a new government and pushing it towards democracy. Given the current administrations disdain for “nation building”, I have serious concerns here, but again nothing’s inevitable.
BTW, according to the information that gets out of Iraq, the Iraqi people despise Saddam. Your argument sounds very similar to the one made before the fall of Kabul - that the Afghani people would hate the people who tossed out the Taliban.

When has this happened in the past? The only US-equipped military whose weapons were used against the US that springs to mind is Iran. In case you are making a common mistake, the US did not support or equip the Taliban.

Any nation that has weapons of mass destruction is not “toothless”. And any nation who’s leader is irrational enough to have used them in the past is not a nation we can ignore.

Sua

12

Not really. The US will probably spend the next ten years tracking down Al-Qaedia so there’s plenty of distraction available for those cynical enough to believe the inane tales of “Wag the Dog.” A full scale conventional war has far more potential to undo the Bush presidency than it does to preserve it.

Your statement is essentially true. Although he was implicated in an assassination plot against Bush Sr. and he did have an agent meet with one of the Sept. 11th terrorist, though there’s no proof Iraq helped aid them. I think the larger concern is that Saddam, like many legendary arab leaders of the past, has ambitions of creating a united Arabia under his control. Conventionally he lacks the power to do so, but with a nuclear strike against Israel he could unite the Arab people behind him in a dramatic bid for power. Farfetched? I certainly hope so.

What we really need is reliable intelligence about Iraq’s current nuclear program. If it is nonexistant, than there really is no cause for invasion at this time.

13

I’d just like to throw in my $0.02 about the Kurds. At least part of the reason that we didn’t support them after the Gulf War is that the exact same Kurds that are “freedom fighters” in Northern Iraq are also “terrorists” in Southern Turkey. The Turks, being our allies and members of NATO and all, didn’t want us to supply their perpetual thorn in the side! Geopolitical realities are strange, but we didn’t just leave them hanging for no reason.

I would personally be against an attack on Iraq unless someone proposed a plan as to what they’d do after Hussein was out of power. There are many bad options, it seems, and few good ones. And I definately don’t think we should do it unless we can get substantial international backing – or it’s going to cost us dearly later.

(And incidentally, welcome back. I didn’t want to register on the other board, but I’ve been counting the hours!)

14

While I agree with you about a full-scale conventional war. I believe that Bush thinks that he can squish Saddam with as much ease as he just squished the Taliban in Afghanistan. He doesn’t anticipate a full-scale conventional war, merely another one of these video-game exercises.

I’m not normally one to accuse people of wagging the dog, but the Bush administration is wagging the dog so hard that the tail is going to break off sooner or later. Hell, they even created an entire “dog-wagging” agency in the Department of Defense.

I am quite convinced that the Bush administration is doomed; the only question is which of the many monsters chasing it will get to it first, and how many people Bush will get killed – and how much damage to the country he will do – before he goes down in flames himself.

15

Addressing the OP:

  1. Iraq surrender after the gulf war had specific conditions in it. One in particular was the destruction of weapons of mass destruction and the facilities to make them. Inspector know that the Iraqi gov’t was actively hiding things and impeding their progress while they were there. Bottom line is, if you don’t fulfill the obligations of a surrender, war is back on.
  2. The fact is that the Iraqi people for the most part are quite pro-western and do not like Saadam
  3. While Iraq may not be specifically tied to events of 9/11, it is doubtless that Iraq is a sponsor or and/or aides terrorism.

The wag the dog reasoning is absolutely rediculous in this situation. The fact is, going back to Iraq will almost certainly cause a net loss of support for the current administration.

16

Basis? I suspect you’ll find that a majority of Republican voters support blasting the living daylights out of Iraq. Even a lot of Democrats favor it. Sure, our allies in Europe don’t approve, and people with enough intelligence to begin to understand the fragile power dynamics of the Middle East realize that it would be sheer lunacy, but our allies in Europe don’t vote and the intelligentsia are not a politically significant element (at least, in the Bush mindset).

From the “wag the dog” situation, it’s not essential that the United States actually do anything in Iraq. All that is required is making a show about doing something about Iraq until after the 2002 elections. Bush can always whine about lack of support from our so-called allies as an excuse why we haven’t actually gone in and blown them to bits, even though we know the real reason is that his oil buddies won’t stand for him destabilizing the region that heavily.

I stand by my conclusion that the current sound and fury over Iraq is dog-wagging.

17

It is most likely that we will take some type of action in Iraq. I believe this, it appears the administration believes this, most of the world believes this, and certainly Iraq believes. This is why Iraq is back at the table with the UN over inspection. Iraq is trying to dodge the bullet here. Iraq believes we are serious. This is also why the backers of Iraq in the Security Council (China and Russia) are urging Iraq to quit screwing around and let the inspectors back in NOW.

The logical reason for the hoopla and explanation of the administration’s position on Iraq in the media is to prevent a large scale loss of support from the public, if/when they do something significant in Iraq.

Given the historical relationship between the Republican party and the media as compared to the Democratic party and the media it doesn’t make much sense to suggest a wag the dog type scenario. The only way it could really work today is with the complicity of the media and that is especially unlikely with a Republican executive.

18

I refer you to the 2000 edition of the Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism:

Although the “zero tolerance” position is part the previous administration’s policy, the sentiments obviously haven’t changed very much. All seven of those nations are on thin ice, but of them, only Iraq has a sophisticated, modern intelligence service that deals regularly and directly with the people for whom we are searching.

Iraq is a very dangerous player in the terrorist world for that reason alone, above and beyond their other questionable behaviors. The Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) is the closest thing to a pro-terrorist intelligence arm out there. Like the KGB, which rarely got its own hands dirty, IIS appears to perform its operations through other organizations–terrorist organizations. Publicly, they appear far more concerned with assassinating college student dissidents outside of their borders, but IIS is constantly being “associated” with Islamic terrorism.

We know the IIS tried to knock off the elder Bush when he visited Kuwait in April, 1993. We think that IIS agents met with al-Qaeda agents prior to the events of 9/11. And then there’s the curious case of Ramzi Yousef.

Yousef is accused of being tied to just about every asshole you’ve read about for the past ten years. He may have acted in some pro-Iraqi role within Kuwait prior to the Iraqi invasion, as evidenced by a very unusual file recovered after Kuwait was liberated. He briefly lived in a boarding house run by Osama bin Laden, although bin Laden claimed in an interview with Frontline that he did not know Yousef. Yousef is also accused of forming terrorist network ties between Pakistan and Moro separatists in the Philippines, who in turn are suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda. (And not coincidentally, American troops are operating in the Southern Philippines right now.)

Yousef was the orchestrator of the original World Trade Center bombing (and was posing as an Iraqi refugee here in the U.S. while he put it all together), and in 1995, his laptop was recovered and on it there were plans to destroy eleven American airliners in a simultaneously timed mission.

This should all sound very familiar, considering what happened six months ago. The thing is, Yousef didn’t have anything to do with 9/11. He’s been cooling his heels in federal prison since 1995, with only another 233 years left to serve on his sentence. But the coincidences are sure running thick.

Terrorism author Laurie Mylroie is the most vocal proponent of the theory that Yousef is an IIS agent, but whether he is or not (and The Man sure isn’t going to tell us if he knows), his ideas and his connections have all suddenly been recycled and put into practice while he was safely incarcerated. Who put the plan back together?

One possible explanation for America’s rumblings may be that our investigations six months after the fact are pointing to IIS complicity in the conceptualization and planning of the events of 9/11. This probably wasn’t a false-flag operation of the traditional type, but Iraqi participation already appears possible.

So what do you do about it if they were? Well, one classically American solution would be to wreck the whole damned country so that these guys don’t have a sophisticated base of operations to work from any longer, but that nets us very little information, which is what we need the most. I suspect that the United States has a slightly less direct approach in the offing, but it may still be one that will require public approval.

19

Well, let’s look at this particular aspect for a moment. The massacre of Iraqi Kurds using mustard and nerve gas at Halabja occurred on 17 Mar 1988 - a full three years before the Gulf War. What took the United States so long, if it was truly interested in the welfare of minorities in Iraq?

Did the US take any action against Iraq after the scale of Halabja became widely known? Geoff Simons, in his book Iraq from Sumer to Saddam, shows what happened:

So not only did the US let the Halabja massacre pretty much slide, they actually gave Iraq more ability to make the same stuff it used in the massacre. Additionally, Reagan apparently opposed slapping sanctions on Iraq once the news about Halabja broke. In fact, the US continued to issue export licenses to Iraq for fungal and bacterial cultures, including anthrax, until 1989.

Where was the US’ humanitarian concern then? Do you really think the son of the man who helped oversee the US’ continued cooperation with Iraq during the 80s, and who helped ram sanctions through the UN that have condemned millions of Iraqis to death, suddenly had an attack of morals? I don’t. There are reasons the US wants to take its war on the road to Baghdad, but humanitarian intervention isn’t among them.

sigh Damn, it’s good to be back. :smiley:

20

Olentzero, a few points in response.

  1. As you may have noticed, I posted my thoughts about international relations. The US government in 1988 obviously didn’t agree. If I had been President back then, I damn well would have attacked Iraq. But I wasn’t.

  2. You seem to take the position that, since the US (IMO) screwed up in 1988, it is barred from doing the right thing now. Why does that make sense?

  3. Did I say anything about morals or humanitarian intervention? I believe that the only leader of a country irrational enough to have used weapons of mass destruction since WWII (and who used them on civilians, no less) is irrational and likely psychotic. I think it is bloody stupid and dangerous to allow such a person to continue to have control of weapons of mass destruction. That humanitarian and moral goals would also be advanced in removing him is a very nice bonus.

Sua