totally agree
it would be all over Fox News
The US and its allies wanted to oust the Shia (whatever that means) by toppling the dictator who belonged to the Sunni minority that was keeping the Shia down? The US has been working with a Shia-led Iraqi government since 2004.
What was really evil was the US trying to convince the world that it was Iran who dropped the gas at Halabja on those women and children.
Good job we have independent inquiries.
I’m not talking about Saddam.
The US wanted the Sunni Bathists back in the RECENT election and it was the Shia who won. The Iraqi people themselves wanted no more Sunni bathists. So they voted for what they wanted.
Shia in Iraq are the majority, but they were run by Saddam’s Sunni Bathists, (the minority). Shia were tortured along with the Kurds under Saddam.
The insurgency now is caused because the Sunni’s want power back from the Shia and Kurdish coalition.
The US wants these minority Sunni’s back.
They don’t want Shia in the region because Saudi doesn’t want Shia Islam. Iran is Shia. See the connection?
The US are allies of Saudi. The country where Bin Laden came from and most of the 9/11 bombers except maybe one. You know the ones who behead the soldiers, who make their women wear burkha.
Want to try again? Being an exsoldier myself, I know nothing travels faster among soldiers than bullshit.
I don’t really think it’s unlikely at all that Iraq will will hold such a grudge beyond the 2nd prosperous generation. If the US occupation can be A factor which ends up creating a stable Iraq, those children who enjoy the prosperity would have no hostility for a war prior to their lives.
OK, now I know where you’re getting your nonsense. From you cite:
Ahmed Chalabi? If you’re not embarrassed by offering us that in support of your claim, then I’m embarrassed for you.
not spoken much to Arabs recently have you?
You do realize that this is one of the key guys who got us into the war in the first place, right? He’s a self-serving blow-hard, and I wouldn’t believe a word he says.
If you’ve got a credible source for your wild claims, I’m all ears.
The two no-fly zones over Iraq were imposed by the US, Britain and France after the Gulf War, in what was described as a humanitarian effort to protect Shi’a Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north. The justification was that an acute humanitarian crisis made it necessary to infringe the sovereignty of Iraq in this way.
However, unlike the military campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the no-fly zones were not authorised by the UN and they are not specifically sanctioned by any Security Council resolution…
But French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine has called on Washington to redefine its policy on Iraq and criticised the recent US-British airstrikes on Baghdad as having no legal basis in international law.
“We have believed for a long time that there is no basis in international law for this type of bombing,” Mr Vedrine has said.
While the enforcing powers had cited United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 as authorizing the operations, the resolution contains no explicit authorization. The Secretary-General of the UN at the time the resolution was passed, Boutros Boutros-Ghali called the no-fly zones “illegal” in a later interview with John Pilger[1][2].
It puzzles me why people stood up for Saddam Hussein too. For instance, the Reagan administration. Those guys loved Saddam, sending him guns and gas and endless military aid, making up intelligence reports that blamed the gassing of the Kurds on the Iranians, etc. etc. And then when we got our illegal oil war on by invading Iraq under the pretext of seeing whether he still had any of the weapons we sold him twenty years ago we made the whole country a lot better :
“Iraq is more free every day. The lives of the citizens are improving every day. And one thing is for certain; there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.” **
George W. Bush**
Remarks to Reporters
January 12, 2004
Daylight Tuesday brought the discovery of at least 86 shot or strangled men across the city, most of them with hands tied and many of them tortured, according to police. They included 27 corpses in one of the first mass graves to be found in the capital since the U.S. invasion three years ago.
Washington Post
March 12, 2006
“Iraq is more free every day. The lives of the citizens are improving every day. And one thing is for certain; there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.” **
George W. Bush**
Remarks to Reporters
January 12, 2004
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein’s former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government’s torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the “Black Room.”
NYT
March 19, 2006
Graphic photographs showing the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in a US-run prison outside Baghdad emerged yesterday from a military inquiry which has left six soldiers facing a possible court martial and a general under investigation. The scandal has also brought to light the growing and largely unregulated role of private contractors in the interrogation of detainees.
According to lawyers for some of the soldiers, they claimed to be acting in part under the instruction of mercenary interrogators hired by the Pentagon.
AP
April 30th, 2004
“Iraq is more free every day. The lives of the citizens are improving every day. And one thing is for certain; there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.” **
George W. Bush**
Remarks to Reporters
January 12, 2004
**AP **Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered “my deepest apology” Friday to Iraqi prisoners abused by sadistic military personnel and warned that videos and photos yet to come could further inflame worldwide outrage.
“It’s going to get a good deal more terrible, I’m afraid,” he said glumly in congressional testimony televised throughout the Arab world as well as in the United States.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters, “The American public needs to understand we’re talking about ** rape** and murder here. we’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience.” He did not elaborate.
AP
**May 7, 2004
"Lucky me–I hit the trifecta!"
**
George W. Bush
May 27th, 2002
But things are better today!
Two months ago, The Economist published a far more damning account of the Maliki government, detailing numerous government policies of torture, media attacks and other forms of censorship:
Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state. **Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again.** Torture is routine in government detention centres. "Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards," says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby.
Chalabi was convicted of embezzlement in Jordan before the war. He stole $300 million from his own bank. And this is the guy the brilliant US minds behind the invasion wanted to put in power.
Are you kidding me? Where has the the US EVER put forth the idea that IRAN committed the gas attack at Halabja?
CITE?
I suspect some historians will view it as one lump along with the 1991 war.
Ie some of the first grappling with how to oust an invader without being able to do regime change as well, and the mess that was occurring with the limbo situation preceding the war as well. Comparisons with Korea and decades long defenses as alternatives and the like will be used as comparisons and the fact that the US had got itself into a face saving hole where the alternative was letting Saddam ‘win’ by surviving and sanctions eventually being reduced (as in there was no ‘we dont want to take on the Chinese/USSR available as a brake face saving/pragmatism wise’.
Where the energy situation ends up in the long run will be factored in as well as the longer term outcome for Iraq, and the outcome for Afghanistan will also be considered, which is still very much in question in my view.
Given how ongoing battles still occur even with Vietnam about how to view it, I dont tihnk we’ll know in our lifetimes how its going to be viewed unless something hugely wrong happens soon ie a massive civil war or the like. There will be vying perspectives that will mostly divide along fairly predictable ideological lines.
Otara
The Iraq War will go down as an American victory. Iraq will be a stable democracy and the seeds of freedom planted there.
Enter the Black Knight.
Of course they would. Nations of people have held grudges towards each other for centuries, and for worse reasons. The huge number of dead, the immense suffering of this generation, the loss of freedoms and family members, the destruction of much of their cultural heritage, the national humiliation they have suffered at our hands all pretty much ensure that we have created hatreds that will last. We tormented them for decades, both through Saddam and later on our own; they aren’t likely to forget.
And there’s no reason to think that they’d give us the credit for them achieving stability and prosperity even in the wild eyed fantasy where that takes place. We devastated their country and slaughtered the people; why would or should they give us the slightest credit for anything good?
That would make it an American LOSS. We wanted to conquer and exploit them, not “free” them. Our motives were unadulterated evil, and anything good that happens in Iraq is an example of the failure of our greed and malice.
Germany and Japan haven’t.
Those two nations started the war with us and know it. We started the war with Iraq and THEY know THAT. The two situations aren’t remotely comparable.
And they will also know that in the long run they were better off for it-at least the more rational Iraqis not blinded by anti-American hatred.
Any “rational Iraqi” will hate us for what we have done. Along with the rest of the planet. The dead and the mutilated and the tortured certainly aren’t better off. Nor are their relatives. We have ruined Iraq, not helped it in any way. We laid waste to the nation, we slaughtered the people, we have done nothing there but evil.