Would the U.S., Iraq, and the world be better off if we'd never invaded?

Great Debates
1

Yes. Of course.

Iraq would be better off because only a few of the very nastiest dictators are more dangerous for your average male citizen than the sort of civil disorder that Iraq is slipping into.

And given that whatever happens with Iraq over the next coupla decades, the religious extremists will have tremendous influence, women will look back on Saddam’s reign as a paradise where they could walk the streets in safety, get an education, and not have to be chaperoned by a male relative anytime they stepped out of the house.

So the people of Iraq will be worse off in the years to come than they would have been, were Saddam still running things.

The U.S. would be better off. It would have had 1000 fewer citizens killed in a war zone, hundreds (thousands? who knows?) fewer amputees, it would still have a military free to respond to diverse threats, rather than a military that’s exhausted, stressed out, and stuck in a geopolitical quagmire that makes Vietnam look trivial. It might (let me stress, might) have focused more intently on combatting al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers; it might have focused more intently on preventing the slide towards nuclear proliferation (North Korea, Iran, Brazil???) into, or to the threshold of, being nuclear powers; it might have secured its ports, its air cargo, its chemical plants, and the like, rather than simply hassling airline passengers, preventing the last attack.

Chances are it would have done at least one of these things, and been better off as a result.

And if the U.S. had organized a more effective global war on al-Qaeda, or led an international movement to control nuclear access, the world would have been better off. But even without that, absent Iraq, there’d be no chaos in the heart of the world’s oil wealth, in that incredibly volatile region. And third-world powers wouldn’t be seeking nukes simply as a poison pill to make sure we don’t invade them when we get the urge.

So the world would be better off.

OK, where’s the rewind button on this here space-time continuum? I wanna go back and do it all over, but I can’t go back, I know…

2

I don’t think even the hawks expected things to be better RIGHT NOW, than they were before, despite what they might say in campaign speeches. Maybe they did, but that would have been naive in the extreme.

And one might argue that some countries, like Kuwiat, Iran and (possibly) Israel are better off…

The real question is: Will Iraq, the US, and the world be better off 5 years from now; 10 years from now? Who the hell knows. It’s a crap shoot to a large extent. Personally, I wouldn’t have rolled the dice on this one, but that doesn’t mean things won’t end up better-- just that it’s less likely to end up better than it is to end up worse.

Still, there are likely to be some winners, while for most of the world it won’t make much difference either way.

How’s that for a definitive answer!

3

Would The US, Iraq and The World™ be better off today if we never invaded? Well, certainly the US would be better off from the perspective that we would be $120 Billion richer (perhaps), our army wouldn’t be tied down in a hot insurgency, etc…though we’d still be fighting in Afghanistan, and that might have drawn in more troops and resources if they had of done it ‘right’ (IMO).

Iraq would certainly be better off today, as you pointed out no matter how bad things were under Saddam (and they were pretty bad), they are better than whats happening today. Children would still be dieing from malnutrition, random people would still be murdered and tortured by Saddam, etc…but it would be better than being blown up by terrorist insurgents, or kidnapped and beheaded.

The World™ would be better off too…at least PARTS of it. Those nations/organizations involved with the Oil for Food scam would still be fat and happy, those nations involved in selling arms and such to Iraq would still be making their profits. The rest of the world would essentially be unchanged. Afghanistan would have been enough to trigger the rash of terrorist attacks throughout the world…and in fact, as more countries supported the US in Afghanistan you might have actually seen terrorist attacks in more countries than we’ve see.

Unless you have some kind of crystal ball, you can’t know this…and looking at the situation today doesn’t give us much insight into how it will be ‘years from now’. Basically you are just guessing. My own guess would be, Iraq WILL be better off years from now than they would have been under Saddam, the US will be worse off or essentially the same, and so will The World™.

Why? Well, Iraq will be better off by being out from under Saddams thumb. Eventually SOME kind of stability will come to Iraq, and whether it is a democracy or some other government of the Iraqi’s choosing it can’t be TOO much worse than Saddam. And my guess was, if we’d have left Saddam in power (which was my choice) eventually his government would have fallen anyway…and I think chaos would have reigned with his son’s scrambling for power, the Sunni scrambling to hold onto power, the Kurds and Shi’ite rebelling and generally going nuts. We’ll never know now of course.

The US will be worse off for the debt we’ve incurred, and the tieing down of our combat power, but we may be better off strategically if Iraq becomes a stable power who is in our sphere of influence…if not exactly friendly to the US. We will have gained a major strategic advantage in the region…possibly. Not only that, but depending on HOW the war/peace goes in Iraq, we might have dealt AQ and other terrorist organizations currently opperating in Iraq a crippling blow just through attrition…we can sustain a thousand casualties a year much more readily than they can sustain the 10’s of thousands dead per year (my rough guestimate of current insurgent casualties). I think the costs of such opperations is also more easily born by the US than these organizations…remember, no nation state will be stupid enough to come out in the open and support these guys (and covering your tracks means you are giving a lot less to the cause). Thats the real difference between this conflict and Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, etc…the insurgents not only don’t have a superpower to back them, they don’t even have any open support of any other nation state.

-XT

4

That’s one possibility. Another possibility is that our current faceoff with Iran could touch off an all-out regional war of Shi’ites vs. Sunnis, encompassing Iran, Iraq, and the Shi’ites of the Northeastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Complicated by the presence of Arab Shi’ites in southwestern Iran who have, at times, been discontented with Tehran’s rule, and Balochis in southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan who have also, at times, made noise about wanting their own independent Balochistan. And then there are the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria . . . need I go on?

5

Yea, just one more step. you need to explain why Sadaam would never have fought Iran. :wink:

6

Way too early to tell.

One thing has definately damaged the US is the tissue thin justification for the war in the face of informed opinion, whose alternative view has turned out to be depressingly right.

Who knows how this damage will manifest itself, its more than just a simple distrust across a whole swathe of the world, and a very mild reaction to that was the election results in Spain following the Madrid bomobings.
It influenced voters who were already none too convinced about the reasons for war, it might not have been the main deciding factor, but in very close elections it may make the differance.

Repeat this worldwide and slowly, world opinion and eventually cooperation will drift away from the US.

It might not be too important to the US at the moment due to the US burgeoning influence in many arenas, but somehow things change, and old certainties become less certain.

It may well turn out to damage the US in ways not yet fully understood, we might look back in thirty years time and see this as the start of the long decline of US power, who knows.

As for Iraq, the US can be incredibly grateful that the Kurdish areas are reasonably stable, but that is a double edged sword, for the Kurds are in the business of demonstrating their suitability for self nationhood, which makes Turkey extremely uncomfortable, and parts of Russia.

Not just the Kurdish parts of Russia either, as other cross border populations might well be observing, and the extreme cases would be either Chechnya, or maybe Armenia and Azerbaijan, there are no doubt other populations that could be rabble roused by terrorist groups, in fact its pretty near a certainty that this is already happening on some level.

We are seeing several issues here, people becoming involved in regional disputes that are being hijacked for other purposes, much as the cold war did when both sides backed nasty little dictators as part of their own argument.
Ages old disputes are being resurrected in differant forms, Shi’ite, Sunni, tribal and familial disputes and this ‘war on terrorism’ is just another hook for them to hang it all on.

If this war had not been started by Bush, would things have possibly been worse, how much worse could they have become ? and would we have had to step in anyway ?

What we can say is that so far the very worst scenarios have not yet been realised, but it certainly does not look like being settled anytime soon, and it could well spiral out of control, right now in the UK, having seen major terrorist attacks in Spain, US and in Bali against mostly Australian tourists, we are expecting a very large terrorist incident, its almost like waiting for the other boot to fall.

When or if Bush wins his election, I would be expecting a major terrorist event in the US on the day of his inaugeration, it would have massive symbolic significance to the ME region, expect to see the usual suspects celebrating the carnage.

It is hard to be optimistic at the moment.

7

When he did, it was a stalemate, each side being too well-armed and well-organized to be defeated by the other, and each government having a strong enough hold on its own territory to hold down rebellion. Our invasion of Iraq has rendered that situation assymetrical: Iran is still intact and armed . . . but it will be a long time before Iraq has a government (of its own) strong enough to hold off an Iranian invasion or crush domestic rebellion.

8

Those ten thousand or so Iraqi civilians that were killed would likely be better off.

9

Nitpick: There is no significant Kurdish population in Russia. There are Kurdish communities in the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Georgia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds

10

Ok, but they won’t need one that strong for quite a while.

And I thought the discussion was about better off. Are you suggesting that the Iran Iraq war represents a better off state of some sort?

Also, since when did the absence of rebellion become the measure of better off?

11

I was making the point that we have torn the lid off a very high-pressure container. At least while Hussein was in power, there was some regional stability of a very ugly kind. Any secessionist or autonomic aspirations the Shi’ites of Iraq, or the Shi’ites of northeastern SA, or the Arabs of southeastern Iran, or the Kurds, etc., might have had were on hold indefinitely. Now . . . everything’s possible and very few of the possibilities don’t involve war.

12

Maybe, but that is only the possibilities by number. There are more parties which could go to war so there are more possible wars. But it is also true that America is there on the ground with the express purpose of building a better country for the Iraqis. Ok, Iran, or some other country might to decide to attack American troops, but I really think that is unlikely. I also don’t buy your pessimism regarding a pending war with Iran via an American invasion. Iran certainly poses a threat, but not the same kind which was posed by Sadaam.

Again, I have to ask when did the measure of better off become unable to rebel?

13

But how much longer can we afford to stay there?

The point is that removing Hussein, and creating the possibility of rebellion, also raises the prospect of a multi-sided war involving several different governments and several different ethnic and religious groups and no clear end in sight.

The Communist regime in Yugoslavia was a dictatorship, but it kept the lid on ethnic and religious hatreds. When the regime lost power, all those destructive forces bubbled to the surface, with results the whole world knows. Was the fall of Communism good for Yugoslavia? In the long run, perhaps. But we all have to live in the short run. Or not.

14

I think the comparison to Yugoslavia is entirely apt. It brings to mind one of the least discussed foundations of the admin’s Iraq: the continuation of the federal Iraqi state. Note today, The Leader’s soundbite festival: he makes specific reference to Iraq as free, democratic, and federal. In the Yugoslavian analogy, it would be a determination to maintain that forced unity, without the force. Or at least, not the previous force.

One nation, under God, with liberty and justice, more or less. And if God should prove unavailable, a substitution may be required.

15

“Continuation”? Iraq was never a federal state under the Ba’athist government, nor under the Hashemite monarchy – nor under the Ottoman Empire.

16

Iraq was divided into 18 provinces; I am sure you will recall they tried to make Kuwait “the 19th province.” So it was nominally a federal state, anyway.

17

No, no. Practically every country has internal administrative divisions. It’s only a “federal” system if the divisions – either in practice (U.S., Germany) or in theory (Soviet Union) – have some political autonomy and internal self-government. Otherwise it’s a unitary system (France).

Also, the prewar provinces of Iraq didn’t (and still don’t) follow the ethnic/religious dividing lines. What the Kurds want is one state of Kurdistan-within-Iraq, not two or three.

18

Well, not entirely. In fact, hardly at all, for 50% of Iraq’s population. Women, that is. Is there any realistic possibility that women will come out of this in the near-to-middle-term future (the next 20 years, say, since that was the timeframe I gave in the OP) with anything like the everyday freedoms they enjoyed under Saddam? Feel free to make your case.

The thing is, men have to come out a lot better over that time period for one to be able to balance out what essentially amounts to the imprisonment/captivity of women, and thus be able to say the Iraqis as a whole are doing better than they were under Saddam.

The problem is, we can’t say what would happen under anyalternative past 20-30 years. As you point out, it’s hard to say that things wouldn’t have gotten better in the long haul if we hadn’t invaded. So let’s stick with a short-to-medium, 20-25 year timeframe.

The thing is, ‘eventually’ could take awhile. How long did it take in Lebanon, and how did that end? How many years of stability does it take to make up for ten or fifteen years of war of all against all?

These people have longer memories than Confederates; they’re still re-fighting battles from the first century after their Prophet died. They’re not going to forgive the abuses of our occupation very soon.

Please, please tell me you’re not serious. While AQ operates in Iraq, most of our opposition is homegrown. What we do vis-a-vis al-Qaeda, in combatting the insurgents, is recruit for them.

Say we kill 10,000 Iraqis, including 500 AQ (mostly local recruits) at a cost of 1000 Americans. What happens? We turn 50,000 Iraqis from merely pissed at us, to pissed at us enough to take up arms against us. A small fraction of them join AQ. The insurgency as a whole wins, AQ wins, we lose.

Eventually we get tired of getting killed for no apparent reason, and go home.

They don’t really seem to need that support, do they? But certainly Iran is willing to support the Shi’ite factions if they become desperate enough to accept that help.

19

True Believers usually are. I think Perle and Wolfie and those guys really did believe their own rhetoric. Who knows what Bush believed.

True.

True. There’s no guarantee that things will end up worse, but do we have in place the ingredients of things becoming better, or have we set things up to become worse? Things are bad right now, but are they bad in a way that somehow increases the likelihood of things working out?

Nah, they’re just stinkin’ rotten bad.

I’d agree with you if we were talking about Zaire or Burma. But unfortunately, we’re talking about a country smack in the middle of the world’s biggest oil patch. Hopefully, the chaos in Iraq won’t slop across borders, but even then, oil supplies would stay tight, and prices would stay high. That would be bad not only for us, but for China and India as well. And if things in Iraq slop over to Saudi Arabia, we’re in trouble.

20

All I can tell you is, while it’s great to have God on your team, if you lose Him somehow, it’s one hell of a drop to whoever’s #2 on your depth chart. :smiley: