I think that this is a big reason for invading Iraq instead of Iran. Hell, a real coalition had gone in and kicked the hell out of the Iraqi army only a decade before. They had diminished, well, everything. Hard to sell easy victory to the folks back home if the country being invaded actually, y’know, fights back.
Just like BrainGlutton, I’m gonna ask for a cite. Iran hadn’t had their military decimated and lived under sanction for a decade.
When I first spotted the thread title, I had one of the “WTF?” spasms. “What the heck has MindMuncher been smoking, and where can I get some?”
But taken as an entirely theortical excercise, its like, “Hmmmm…”
Now, if I presume that I’m a dim-witted buttmunchkin with a throbbing, aching military hard-on that simply demands a sovereign nation to serve as an orifice, it becomes pretty obvious why I would prefer Iraq to Iran.
Iraq was (relatively) secular, as a people, as well as a government. And, presumably, the people of Iraq were not all that keen on Saddam as their leader (except for that pesky bunch of Baathist deadheads…). We have encountered a rather tiresome amount of resistance from the people at large.
But Iran is a whole 'nother kettle of piranha. Iran has a large segment of religious fanatics who closely identify with their government, there is no chance, none whatsoever, that these people would have regarded an invading force as anything remotely resembling “liberators”. They would have regarded such a force as the Spawn of Satan, come to lay a steaming turd in the Temple of Allah.
The factor of resistance would have been multiplied by …what, a hundredfold? At least? If a ticket to Paradise could be purchased by flinging oneself bodily on an American soldier to tear out his throat with one’s teeth, our troops would have been wading in blood until we either ran like hell or depopulated the country.
Next to that prospect, the invasion of Iraq looks pretty good, like a CarrotTop film festival seems a better prospect than nailing your pecker to a tree and setting the tree on fire.
We certainly have the largest navy in the world. Were you planning on transporting the troops on air craft carriers or using missile destroyers? How large do you suppose our current sea lift capability is with respect to moving troops and supplies? WHere would we stage those supplies out of (presumably Saudi)? Would the approach be contested? Mined? Suicide speedboats? Suicide SCUBA?
Once you established the beechead in Iran (at gods know the cost), and then slowly brought in more troops and supplies to expand your control, you’d still have logistics problems because you’d need to move everything in via sea or air from Saudi, then you’d need to dump it and re-distribute it into a country that is up in arms against you. You seem to think that this is going to be much easier than it would be…or perhaps you think we have the same sea lift capability we enjoyed during D-Day. We don’t. And if you think the Iraq war is expensive…at a guess Iran would have been more costly in terms of both money spent and men lost. Right now instead of a trickly of soldier deaths a week we’d have hundreds IMO. The Iranians actually COULD stage larger pitched type battles because they can fight in the mountains (something lacking in much of Iraq) and could establish secure bases. Plus the Iranians probably WOULD have fought a scortched earth type fight…Allah was on their side after all.
As to invading through Afghanistan…look at a map BG! THose bumpy things all along the border are mountains…not exactly best suited to a US offensive (which relies quite a bit on our armor) or to rolling supplies through (especially when you consider that Afghanistan is not exactly completely subdued yet, is it?). Hell, just look at the whole country…much of it is mountainous. Again, not well suited to our style of fighthing if we are going to actually invade.
Even if the president had a complete hard on to take Iran out its just not feasibe unless we are willing to take a lot more casualties and spend a lot more money…and be in it for a lot longer than Iraq. If we were going to go the Iranian route it would have taken the form of air attacks on their nuclear program, military targets (especially C&C and air defense), and perhaps their military logistics. THAT we could have done and can still do pretty much at will. But invasion, especially before our invasion of Iraq? No way.
-XT
And you and others been quite dishonestly characterizing that resolution many, many times as the Clinton administration mandating an Iraq war. Which is a load of baloney. That resolution was a feel-good act that started in the congress that mandated funding dissident elements in Iraq, with the hope that the Iraqis themselves would overthrow Saddam. It had jack-all to do with invading the country.
It would be remiss not to take a moment to praise The Leader: given a choice between a disastrously stupid military adventure and an Armageddon-level apocalypse, he chose the lesser catastrophe!
GW! Hey, It Could Have Been Worse!
Short of a case of genocide in progress, what do the conditions of life inside a given country have to do with justification of regime change by foreign military action? By that standard, the first country on our list to invade should have been North Korea; conditions are even worse there than they were in Hussein’s Iraq. But Bush had to make his case in terms of Iraq’s threat, immediate or potential, to other countries, and rightly so. The world is full of tyrannies; if that alone could give grounds for an invasion, just imagine the consequences.
Cite?
I know. But part of the “regime change” rethorics was/is based on a “look how evil Saddam Hussein is and what he does to the Irakis” statement. Which was a true statement.
And IMO the only valid jusification for the invasion of Irak.
From the text of the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998
But we had a pretty good idea of how a war against Iraq would go, and it turns out that we were correct…we rolled right over the regular Iraqi army just like we did in Gulf War I. The occupation obviously didn’t go according to plan, but the invasion itself was easy.
Contrast that with a hypothetical invasion of North Korea. The reality is that we don’t have a very good idea of how such an invasion would go. Would it be a cakewalk over poorly motivated conscripts with useless equipment? Would the North Koreans fight? How much North Korean equipment can function even on a minimal level? How much retaliation can they inflict on South Korea? And more importantly, how is South Korea going to view our invasion? Without South Korea’s cooperation there is no invasion. Period. And South Korea currently has no plans to invade the North, no matter how awful things are there. Iraq’s weakened military couldn’t threaten Kuwait or Saudi during the invasion, but can we say with certainty that North Korea couldn’t inflict unacceptable damage to South Korea or even Japan?
Iraq was a unique situation. Iraq was completely isolated diplomatically, it was isolated economically, we knew we could easily beat Iraq’s military, Saddam was a horrible dictator that Americans already knew and hated, we had forward bases to invade from, Saddam couldn’t retaliate against neighboring countries, we had UN cover (however weak), we had the plausible (although since revealed as false) threat of WMDs, we had the humanitarian disaster of the sanctions, we had large ethnic groups that we knew would support us (Kurds and to a much lesser extent Shia), postwar Iraq had oil wealth that could be used to rebuild and pacify the population, Iraq’s oil wealth would no longer go into Saddam’s pockets but rather into various other pockets, and on and on.
While other countries might have similar characteristics, no other country had so few barriers to war. If you were a cowboy president who was looking for a quick victorious war Iraq would be 10 times more attractive than any other potential victim.
Cite for what? That that resolution didn’t mandate an invasion of Iraq? See your own post.
I think Sam means a cite that “you and others been quite dishonestly characterizing that resolution many, many times as the Clinton administration mandating an Iraq war.” He originally said
Removal of government does not necessarily mean war. At least in this thread, Sam is not misinterpreting the resolution.
Perhaps not, but furt is. It was he who said “Regime change in Iraq was already a stated policy objective, dating from 1998” presumably in answer to the question “Why did Bush decide to invade Iraq instead of Iran?” and Mr. Stone seems to be defending furt’s using it as an excuse for invading Iraq. It’s explicity stated in the resolution that it does not represent an excuse to use military force. furt is wrong, and if Mr. Stone is defending furt’s assertion, then he’s wrong too.
How can “remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power” not mean the same as “regime change”? Tell us what you think it means-- remove his regime from power and not remove it from power at the same time? Or perhaps it means to remove it from power but make sure nothing takes it place so there isn’t a “change”?
Gah!!! I completely misread your post, Tooth. Sorry.
The 1998 act did not give the president the authority to invade Iraq, which is why he asked Congress to approve the Congressional Resolution on Iraq in Oct 02.
Again, sorry for my original screw-up.
Rereading furt’s post, his point
does not misstate the resolution. The resolution does advocate regime change (“the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government”) and goes on to specify how (not war). furt’s post is answering the question “Why did Bush decide to invade Iraq instead of Iran?”–this is distinct from “Why did Bush decide to invade Iraq?” The first asks for a comparison of reasons to invade of the two countries; the second for an independent justification of an invasion.
One may consider which country is better to invade separately from whether we should invade.
No worries.
That’s exactly what I meant. I don’t recall ever saying that the U.S. voted for war in 1998, or even hinting at that, yet I’ve been accused of it. What I have said is that ‘regime change’ became official government policy in 1998, indicating that even the Democratic White House recognized the need to get rid of Saddam, and was openly working towards having him removed from power.
By the way, back then a number of Democrats were even more hawkish towards Iraq, including John Kerry. I actually said on this board about a year before the election that I hoped that Kerry would win the nomination, because his record on Iraq was the most hawkish of the Democratic candidates.
But I would like to replay some of the comments of Democrats in that discussion back in 1998:
“If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow. Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.”
“We urge the President to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.”
“Look, we have exhausted virtually all our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law. Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so?”
“The U.S. should strike, strike hard and strike decisively. In this instance, the administration needs to act sooner rather than later,”
“I agree with using military force,”
“Iraq is a threat to the stability of the Middle East. It is a threat with respect to the potential activities on a global basis.”
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein still seeks to amass weapons of mass destruction. You know as well as I do: as long as Saddam Hussein stays in power, there can be no comprehensive peace for the people of Israel, or the people of the Middle East.
We have made it clear that it is our policy to see Saddam Hussein gone."
So while the resolution itself stopped far short of war and indeed only endorsed programs of destabilization by funding resistance groups, many prominent democrats were calling for a lot more than that. The same ones who suddenly became anti-war and skeptical when it was a Republican president in charge.
By the way, the ‘Regime Change’ policy passed the House with the support of 157 Democrats. Only 29 opposed it.
Read narrowly, it doesn’t.
However, the point as often stated – “In 1998 President Clinton made Regime Change in Iraq the Official Policy of the United States.” – is often used (and has repeatedly been used so on these boards) as the quintessential argument that the left “just hates Bush”, because Bush is just following Clinton’s policies. In other words, it’s a way to call the Iraq war’s opponents hypocrites. Which is the most deftly dishonest implication possible from that resolution, a resolution that came from the Congress, not Clinton, and did not authorize war.
You’re right. He didn’t say it was a good reason, just a reason.
