# Will the history books say we won or lost the War in Iraq? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 6, 2010, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504 "2010-05-06T13:23:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/21 "2010-05-06T18:28:23Z")
> [@Ravenman](#): > > [Cite.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=12) Oh, yellow cake WAS found! See 1:20 in. It’s wrapped up in a special CIA napkin, you can see it for yourself. I didn’t understand your link. I just got the front page of the In My Humble Opinion subforum. The thing that made the report false was this quoted quote in the Snopes link: > [@](#): > > The yellowcake removed from Iraq was not the same yellowcake that President Bush claimed, in a now discarded section of his 2003 State of the Union Address, that Mr. Hussein was trying to purchase in Africa. ---
**Author:** ![Stuffy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f17d59/32.png) [@Stuffy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stuffy)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/22 "2010-05-06T18:31:29Z")
> [@Dick\_Dastardly](#): > > They found a few aircraft buried in the desert but so what? They’re not WMD and they’re not effective against the US airforce. There were several thousand pounds of uranium in Iraq but it was all under UN seal stored in a facility we knew all about. And yellowcake is just a raw material, it’s useless without massive refining which Iraq couldn’t do. And we had it under seal anyway so it’s irrelevant. Our no-fly zones were called “illegal” by the UN chief so Iraq had the right to shoot at us. I knew about the no-fly zones, and had forgotten the aircraft. My main objection was to the claim of finding yellowcake and to point is that there was no way we would not have heard about it. ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/23 "2010-05-06T18:38:47Z")
> [@mlees](#): > > I didn’t understand your link. I just got the front page of the In My Humble Opinion subforum. > > The thing that made the report false was this quoted quote in the Snopes link: Well, now the joke sucks, but here’s the link. [http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=11923&title=black-bush](http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=11923&title=black-bush) Sigh. Swing and a miss. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/24 "2010-05-06T18:41:54Z")
> [@Stuffy](#): > > I knew about the no-fly zones, and had forgotten the aircraft. My main objection was to the claim of finding yellowcake and to point is that there was no way we would not have heard about it. It actually made the news a few times. The first time the Bush administration spun it as finding nuclear material, the second time it made the headlines was when the US army didn’t secure the nuclear faclility and thousands of barrels of the stuff got looted. Then a while later they claimed they’d found it again even though in the meantime journalists had found barrels of it in various neighborhoods in Iraq, people using the empty barrels for other purposes etc. Then a couple of years later it made the headlines again with the Plame scandal and the Bush administration still trying to sell it as nuclear material they’d discovered. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/25 "2010-05-06T18:42:49Z")
> [@Ravenman](#): > > Well, now the joke sucks, but here’s the link. [http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=11923&title=black-bush](http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=11923&title=black-bush) > > Sigh. Swing and a miss. Actually, I find this clip funny. Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![LonghornDave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@LonghornDave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonghornDave)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/26 "2010-05-06T18:48:39Z")
When determining success versus failure, a person shouldn’t simply look at the end result. The end result must be weighed against the costs. The objectives should also be looked at. To draw on a simple analogy, look at the drilling of an oil well. Let’s say you drill a well and it produces 100 barrels a day. If you are only looking at the end result, you might call that a success. You didn’t drill a dry hole, and the well is producing hydrocarbons. However, what if you projected to spend $500 thousand and in order to break even you needed to drill that well at a cost of no more than $1 million; instead it cost you $2 million. Then, it’s not an economic success any more. Further, what if all of your geologic and other work caused you to believe that with 50% certainty you would drill a well that produces 500 barrels a day and that you expected the well to not produce less than 150 barrels a day. Then it is also not a success according to expectations. Of course some other variable may come into play though. What if you were expecting $70 oil and instead the price of oil skyrockets up to $150 a barrel? Now based on this development, the well is economically successful. Now at the end, what do you call this well if you are trying to limit your options to either success or failure? To bring it back to Iraq, I think it is clearly a failure based upon what we currently know and based on what we can reasonably project. Certainly some of the objections were met (ex: overthrow Sadaam) and others were not (ex: find WMDs). It came at a greater cost then you thought it would in terms of dollars, lives, time, political capital, and reputation. Probably the most important objective is still unknown being whether or not it becomes a stable, friendly democracy in the region that could help spread democracy to other nearby countries. All in all, I think you would have to call it a failure. The situation in Iraq right now is not that bad, and in fact it could be argued that it is better than it was before our actions. However, all other factors considered and reasonably projected lead me to say it is a failure. Of course, that could change if in twenty years it turns out that the actions we took in Iraq ultimately helped bring about peace in the Middle East. Then, all the cost would probably be worth it. I’d hold off on calling it a success until that (unlikely) event actually happens. ---
**Author:** ![Hold\_Fast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/58f4c7/32.png) [@Hold\_Fast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hold_Fast)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/27 "2010-05-06T19:16:17Z")
> [@Stuffy](#): > > CITE!!! This is complete bullshit! If that had happened John McCain would be president of the United States. [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/) There you go. I tend to trust the guys that have been fighting wars there for the past 20 years. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/28 "2010-05-06T19:33:56Z")
> [@Hold\_Fast](#): > > [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/) > > There you go. I tend to trust the guys that have been fighting wars there for the past 20 years. But we knew about this, and it was secured. From your cite: > [@](#): > > U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/29 "2010-05-06T19:36:10Z")
Yeah. That article is dated around the same time my link for the CBS article. Snopes claims that the gist of the story (that Hussein’s nuke weapons program stuff has been found) was not accurate, in that that stuff was already known to the UN’s weapons inspectors, canned into barrels, and apparently not able to be shipped out before the US invasion. This was not new yellowcake obtained from Niger. ---
**Author:** ![Hold\_Fast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/58f4c7/32.png) [@Hold\_Fast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hold_Fast)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/30 "2010-05-06T19:44:37Z")
> [@Dick\_Dastardly](#): > > They found a few aircraft buried in the desert but so what? They’re not WMD and they’re not effective against the US airforce. There were several thousand pounds of uranium in Iraq but it was all under UN seal stored in a facility we knew all about. And yellowcake is just a raw material, it’s useless without massive refining which Iraq couldn’t do. And we had it under seal anyway so it’s irrelevant. Our no-fly zones were called “illegal” by the UN chief so Iraq had the right to shoot at us. > > As far as Iraq goes, it depends on who’s writing the history books. But it’ll be hard for them to ignore the fact that Iran ate George Bush’s lunch over the whole thing. There’s no question that Iraq was a disaster for America, even the GOP don’t support having invaded anymore. I find it extraordinary that you claim that the no fly zones were declared illegal by the UN, when it was the UN–no doubt in partnership with the US–but the UN nonetheless, who established the no fly zones. These were resolutions established in the aftermath of the Gulf War, by the UN. Operation Desert Fox was launched in response to the massive military build-up of Iraq, implemented after the Gulf War. Saddam then tried to get back at this enforcnment of UN resolutions by shooting at US and UK pilots flying over Iraq. I really don’t understand sometimes why so many people feel the need to stand up for Saddam Hussien–a tyrant in the worst sort. He used the implementation of genocide, sensored almost all the freedoms we enjoy, had goverment funded torture and rape rooms all across the country…and the list goes on. If you guys feel the need to fight somthing so badly, fight for the **right** (no political party reference) side. ---
**Author:** ![Hold\_Fast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/58f4c7/32.png) [@Hold\_Fast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hold_Fast)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/31 "2010-05-06T19:47:10Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > But we knew about this, and it was secured. From your cite: …your joking right. Because an obvious tyrant is only trying to do good and peaceful things with yellow-cake uranium. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/32 "2010-05-06T20:00:14Z")
> [@](#): > > I really don’t understand sometimes why so many people feel the need to stand up for Saddam Hussien Who’s standing up for Hussein? we’re taking issue with the claims that the media is ignoring obvious WMDs. They aren’t. The yellowcake is material that we already knew was there and had been left there after the first Gulf War. you don’t refine it into fissile material without considerable expense and effort – which would be noted. Maybe you could pull it off in the way Frederick Forsyth described in his novel **Fist of God** , but i doubt it. The planes aren’t Weapons of Mass Destruction – nobody ever said Husein didn’t have weapons, after all. so when I saw a picture of the buried planes with a notice that Saddam did _too_ have Weapons of Mass Destruction, my response was “You don’t know what constitutes WMD, do you?” I don’t have to be defending Saddam Hussein to point out that someone is trying to pass off untruths as justifications for the war. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/33 "2010-05-06T20:01:20Z")
> [@Hold\_Fast](#): > > …your joking right. Because an obvious tyrant is only trying to do good and peaceful things with yellow-cake uranium. I agree it’s perplexing why, if the IAEA had known about this yellowcake, was so much of it still lying around to be found in 2008. I don’t know when the IAEA had secured this yellowcake, and why leaving it in Iraq (if it was so dangerous or essential for Saddam to have for his nuke program) constituted being secured, but thats still not the point, I don’t think: > **[Niger uranium forgeries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries)** > > The Niger uranium forgeries were forged documents initially released in 2001 by SISMI (the former military intelligence agency of Italy), which seem to depict an attempt made by Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq violated United Nations sanctions against Iraq by attempting to procure nuclear ... > [@wiki](#): > > **Removal of known yellowcake** > > In 2008, the United States facilitated shipping yellowcake (refined uranium ore) out of Iraq. This yellowcake had been stockpiled prior to the first Gulf War, and was declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency and under IAEA safeguards. More than 550 tons of yellowcake was removed from Iraq and eventually shipped to Canada. It turns out that this yellowcake was not the stuff that Bush accused Saddam of importing (or attempting to, anyway) from Africa (Niger). When Bush gave his State of the Union of '03, he asserted that Saddam had an active WMD (Nuclear) program, with the attempts to obtain yellowcake from Niger as an indicator of such a program. Bush did not state that Saddam had old yellowcake lying around unaccounted for since 1981. He definately made the assertion that the attempts to obtain (new) sources of yellowcake to be more recent (for 2002). ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/34 "2010-05-06T20:12:38Z")
> [@Hold\_Fast](#): > > …your joking right. Because an obvious tyrant is only trying to do good and peaceful things with yellow-cake uranium. Oh, I hadn’t noticed your join date until now. I’m not going to re-debate the Iraq War with you. The fact of the matter is, this was not some hidden cache of WMDs that SH had. It’s not easy to get yellow-cake out of the country-- note that we, ourselves, didn’t do so for 5 years. We knew this existed, we knew it was contained, and we didn’t need to invade Iraq in order to prevent SH from doing anything nefarious with it. The WMD charge was made about undisclosed WMDs, not this well known and well document stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/35 "2010-05-06T20:41:19Z")
> [@Hold\_Fast](#): > > I really don’t understand sometimes why so many people feel the need to stand up for Saddam Hussien–a tyrant in the worst sort. He used the implementation of genocide, sensored almost all the freedoms we enjoy, had goverment funded torture and rape rooms all across the country…and the list goes on. And we propped him up for many years until he became inconvenient, handed him the gas he used to commit mass slaughter with, we have if anything made the Iraqis less free (especially the female half of the population), and we enthusiastically engaged in torture and slaughter of our own. I fail to see how we are in any position to pretend to moral superiority over Saddam in Iraq; and if anything we’ve run the country worse than he did. Replacing an evil regime by Saddam with an evil American occupation isn’t an improvement. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/36 "2010-05-06T21:15:44Z")
Another western colonial misadventure (think Easter Rising, or Battle of Algiers), which while a “win” in the strict military sense, did more far damage to us in the long term than any benefit gained. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/37 "2010-05-06T21:52:11Z")
Recent history is luckily littered with endless examples of domestic people rising up against tyranny and installing their own democratic governments. This has happened dozens of times in South America, Eastern Europe & Asia in the last 30 years. So the fact that we replaced a dictatorship with a democracy is not IMO going to be seen as successful since that happens all the time anyway w/o warfare. I think the war in Afghanistan will go over fairly well. We tried to reform the political system, we had a good reason for invading, and it hasn’t destroyed us the way it destroyed the USSR. But the war in Iraq will probably go down bad. ---
**Author:** ![magnusblitz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b4bc9f/32.png) [@magnusblitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magnusblitz)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/38 "2010-05-06T21:58:15Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Of course you won the war - you won it in under a week. > > The question is, did you win the occupation? This. Wars are easier to define in terms of “winning” or “losing” - forces fight, and usually one is supreme at the day. An occupation? Not so easy to define the goals, and those that are defined are usually more vague and difficult to prove if they’ve been reached or not. ---
**Author:** ![Marmite\_Lover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Marmite\_Lover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marmite_Lover)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/39 "2010-05-06T22:22:52Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Hardly. We didn’t invade because we wanted them to be a stable nation, we wanted to grab control of their oil and use them for a military base in a general conquest of the region. We’ve already lost at our original neocon objectives. And even ignoring that, “stable” doesn’t mean "friendly to the US; a stable nation that funds or is even just hospitable to anti-American terrorists isn’t a win either; and its highly unlikely that Iraq will ever again be anything but murderously hostile to us. And that’s before you get to all the damage we did to ourselves and our interests. There aren’t any realistic scenarios where the entire affair is anything but a massive net loss for us. Great observation and one the Iraqi’s themselves would agree with. In trying to oust the Shia from Iraq, (Iran is Shia too) the US failed miserably. I think that was the original intention all along with the oil of course. You can’t get Saudi oil without doing them some favours in return. Now with Nouri Al Maliki and his Shia majority and the Kurd’s now joining the coalition government, this is causing a major headache for the US. That was why just recently they tried to get the Bathists ( Saddam’s Party ) back in power, but they failed. Clinton is no lover of Al Maliki. What they actually done is make Iraq and Iran closer than they ever were before. You will see ties between Iraq and Iran increase even more. The Shia in Syria will over the next year be making even closer ties with them too and Saudi and it’s US partner is in for a rough ride. Iran, Iraq and Syria will be formidable alone but then the rest will join in like Turkey and Egypt. The Arab League will become much stronger. The US and UK are out of their depth. You will see a rise in attacks on US soil soon. The American Government do not seem at all able to understand the people of this region. How they think. What they think. History will say it was a catastrophe. Another Nakba. Same will be said about Afghanistan. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2010, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504/40 "2010-05-06T22:24:52Z")
> [@Marmite\_Lover](#): > > In trying to oust the Shia from Iraq, (Iran is Shia too) the US failed miserably… Where are you getting this nonsense from? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-the-history-books-say-we-won-or-lost-the-war-in-iraq/538504.md?page=3)