The underlying truth about Iraq is that the ‘mission’ could never be ‘accomplished’ because the military ‘mission’ was to find and destroy chemical weapons stockpiles from the Baathist regime. It was an offensiven punitive military operation said to be required because Saddam Hussein was not cooperating with the UN inspectors and meeting the demands of UNSC Resolution 1441. Bush and Blair flat out lied to you and me when they stated they had intelligence ‘that left no doubt’ that Iraq was hiding those stockpiles of WMD from UN inspectors as late as March 17, 2003.
No military mission could ever be accomplished in Iraq because the reason for it was indeed false and turned out to be proven not to be true.
Must you enter every thread remotely on this topic and paste “I really really hate George Bush and he’s a really really bad guy?” It’s finally occurred to me that you don’t care for the guy. The poster asked an intelligent question and he deserves to not have that derailed.
I think the truthful answer was given unthread and was a combination of three things:
President Obama in his heart of hearts didn’t want to be in Iraq, campaigned on that point, and with significant support of the American people worked to get the U.S. out.
The President felt that the status of forces agreement would leave U.S. personnel in jeopardy, and didn’t want to subject them to that, and
He felt that things were as good as they could reasonably be, certainly on an upswing, and if Iraq was going to make it, now (2008) was as good a time as any to give it a go.
The false equivalence myth rears its ugly head. No, Democrats didn’t do it to Bush. We got upset at what he actually did, not things that didn’t exist at all or were done by someone else. Got a cite for Democrats unfairly blasting Bush for something?
The truth is the Iraqi government kicked the US out. According to John McCain and the network pinheads who put him on the air, that’s Obama’s fault. Now some of us will shake our heads and wag our fingers and solemnly pronounce “I hate it when both sides do it”.
tim314’s feelings that "the rationale for leaving Iraq was less “mission accomplished” and more “how many more lives and dollars should we lose trying to forestall the inevitable” should be discussed because that feeling presumed there was a ‘mission to be accomplished’ worthy of fighting for in the first place.
Can you discuss that?
As for the argument that calling out Bush’s lie on March 17 2003 can only come from hatred for the man is quite the bogus cop out.
For the record - I supported Bush’s decision to take military action into Afghanistan and I considered Bush’s calls to threaten war against Iraq in 2002 because Saddam Hussein was in violation of international law with respect to UN inspection in October 2002.
But by March 2003 Saddam Hussein was in a legal peaceful framework for the UN to disarm Iraq. At that point when Bush lied that he had intelligence that left no doubt that Iraq was concealing the most lethal weapons ever devised from UN inspectors, it should have been obvious to everyone paying attention that the man was lying us into war.
If hating that horrific lie is wrong I’d like
you to explain that there was no lie or if you agree that there was, explain why we should not hate it.
Why the US left Iraq is because Iraq is a soveriegn nation and the Shiite majority did not want foreign soldiers on their soil fighting supposedly for them.
And now that is being re-interated by the Shiite militias re-engaging to stop the advance of ISIS terrorists that have invaded Iraq.
Shiite militia seizes control of Iraqi town, slowing ISIS drive toward Baghdad
We’ve never cared about anyone’s sovereignty except our own, much less the desires of the people who live there. If that mattered to us we’d have never conquered Iraq in the first place.
Had we ‘conquered’ Iraq this ISIL story would likely not be being told. The US and UK invaded Iraq but did not conquer it. Iraq is by all definitions a sovereign state albeit a devastated and wrecked soveriegn state by the two main nations that invaded it in March 2003.
We can claim we left because we were disinvited, though we weren’t invited in the first place. But the truth is the imminent threat of unsecured WMD’s proved hyperbolic, the specious links to 9/11 got more and more shrill, and we discovered that democracy isn’t as easy to install as we wish it was. So we left because we had long since lost our will to be there.
Stop talking about “we.” “We” never did anything. The US is not a single monolithic entity that makes all decisions in unison. It is a highly fragmented and deeply divided system. More importantly, the people who started the war and the people who ended it were two diametrically opposed administrations with different philosophies, goals, and decision-making processes. Why you would even try to lump them together leaves me very, very confused.
Sovereignty is, was, and always has been a joke. It is a myth used by isolationists to justify inaction in the face of atrocity, and used by dictators to shield themselves from international justice. The idea that nations are independent and that the decisions of one do not impact the whole is a titanic farce. This has never been true at any point in history, and it is less true now than ever before.
One of the major goals of the Iraq War (poorly defined as they were) was to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam’s oppression (which was, objectively, horrible) and install a democratic government. It does not follow that we would advance this premise and then ignore the wishes of that same government that we attempted to install.
…and this speaks to several other posters who describe the US losing the will to continue in Iraq… If the US had achieved so many of its goals (Saddam out, new government in, violence at an all-time low), why would we want to stay in Iraq even one second longer than we had to? The idea that the US was going to permanently stay in Iraq and rule it like a colony was a myth perpetuated by the Iraqi insurgency, other enemy nations, and anti-war protestors.
But again, Obama didn’t technically “get us out.” He basically made an offer under which we would have stayed in a small role to help out with training and potential security work, and the government of Iraq wouldn’t sign it. Essentially he let Iraq ask us to leave.
I don’t think it’s fair/accurate to say Obama just pulled us out of Iraq, I think he actually looked at Iraq and came to the right decision, but Iraq didn’t want to play.
“The Day” before? They’ve been saying approximately forever that letting people depend on help from Washington makes them weak and lazy, and the only solution is to cut them off cold turkey and let them fend for themselves. It’s hardly Obama’s fault if they didn’t mention the “except for Iraq and defense contractors” caveat up front.
Hereis a good article about it from the time (2011). The summary is both the US and Iraq were expecting to sign another agreement that would have kept around 10,000 US troops in Iraq. However, the white house decided on a lower number, around 3,000. They then tried to negotiate with the Iraq government on the terms of the agreement and failed. Then the previous agreement expired and the troops left, which was not desired by either the administration or the Iraqi government.
It takes two to negotiate and it is impossible for anyone to know if there was an agreement that could have been acceptable to both sides. Maybe if Obama were a better negotiator he could have gotten a deal. Maybe the Iraqi government’s demands could not have been accepted by anyone. Foreign policy is hard, Obama tried, he failed, and now is getting criticized for the failure. That is just life in the big city.
You think the Republicans want to help the Iraqis out of the goodness of their hearts? That this is just “welfare” for foreigners? There is a legit concern that Iraq (or big parts of it) could become a failed state and be a launching ground for terror attacks against not only the US, but our allies as well.
Now, whether or not we are in a position to do any good is a matter of debate. Throwing nonsense like that into every thread on the subject doesn’t really lend itself to reasoned debate.
The Republicans hate Obama. OK. I think we’ve hear that about 10 billion times already. Can we get past that and debate what we think should be done?
Missed the edit window:
I think puddlegum’s summary is a good one. There were folks in the administration in favor of hard negotiations with the Iraqis to keep some troops there and folks against. Personally, I was against it. But Obama told us all that he was pulling everyone out and that he was leaving a stable and capable Iraqi Defense Force behind. So, he either lied to us or didn’t know what he was talking about. Now he’s getting criticized. Well, too bad. That comes with the territory.
So fast to jump on the (Obama either lied or didn’t know what he was talking about) bandwagon arent you.
Obama said he was ‘leaving a stable and capable Iraqi Defense Force behind’ so you focus on one week of being tested by some of Saddam Hussein’s fiercest fighters and killer alQaeda types to damn the entire 85,000 man army to be incapable of fighting off this threat.
Already you are being proven wrong but you don’t hear about the Iraqi Army that had regrouped and had launched a counter offensive;
The Pentagon was attacked by terrorists in September 2001. Would that be proper to declare the entire US military to be incapable in the days following the attack?
And this:
Few people expect ISIS to take over all of Iraq. I expect the Kurds will repel them. I expect the Shiite area will either repel them or at least hold onto the heavily populated areas. But ISIS has taken over about 1/5 of Iraq already. You’re comparing that to flying a jetliner into the Pentagon? How about if the 9/11 hijackers had taken over CA, OR, and WA? That would be more analogous.
And maybe you haven’t been paying attention to the news but it’s been a lot more than a week. This all started back in Dec 2013.
And I’m not on any bandwagon. I’m calling it as I see it.
Now, I expect Obama knew as well as most of us did that Iraq was not “stable”. Politically, he had to say they were. But if politics comes back and bites him, well that’s how the game is played. Don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen.