Correct.
So what does this tell you about the actual goal of this invasion?
Was it really just simply to get rid of an eeevil tyrant?
Ah, you mean do what Saddam did when the Shi’ites rebelled?
Do what we use to accuse Saddam of being an eeevil tyrant, in the first place.
pervert
Cite?
I assume you are not referring to the increased US military presence during Feb 2003. Rather you refer to the ongoing, no fly zone troops. See General Zinni’s recent speech for the comparitive costs of enforcing sanctions against the costs of invasion.
You are referring to the invasion forces. Your claim of superlative certainty is built on mere assertion and contradicts the facts.
The preferable view is mine, being as it cogently reflects the facts. The success of sanctions was prior to and independent of the invading army’s presence. The US threat helped with the inspections. However, with or without the inspections, the fact remains that there was nothing there to find. And there hadn’t been for at least a decade.
The unlikely case is that you have misunderstood the discussion and refer to the earlier US/UK military presence, merely and solely deployed to enforce sanctions.
furt and I were discussing the pre-war invasion deployment. ** furt** argued those troops would remain indefinitely for the region to be secure. I showed the contrary.
However if you in honest error do refer to the lesser and earlier contingent, then yes I agree. That small military presence may have been needed. I never intended to argue otherwise.
Latro
Hmmm, I thought the stories were notorious? Well seeing as you ask:
my emphases
Others can do what they want, but I’m personally not going to stack the deck in favor of my thesis by claiming these iffy last-minute overtures were genuinely viable options.
Also, while I respect the argument (Kerry’s, and allegedly Bush’s at the time) that nothing less than an invasion force on Saddam’s doorstep would gain us real inspections and a viable peace, I personally consider the entire buildup - starting with Bush’s “Axis of Evil” saber-rattling in January 2002 - to have been detrimental to the war on al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers, in terms of military and intel resources, and in terms of the time, attention, and focus of our leadership.
So I personally can’t use the possibility of any extraordinary last-minute pre-invasion deals to bolster my position, even if I believed those deals could have been realized - and I’m pretty skeptical about that anyway. My underlying position doesn’t really leave any room for it.
I strongly disagree here. One of the scary things that’s happened in the Sunni triangle and western Iraq is that the secular Ba’athists - the one group in Arab Iraq not likely to oppress women - have lost out to the religious fanatics.
Who, exactly, is going to stand up for women’s rights in Iraq? There is nobody.
It’s an assumption that seems to be agreed to by pretty much everyone I’ve read. The Shi’ites observe Shari’a law, as do the Sunni fundamentalists who have won out in western Iraq - in Fallujah and nearby cities. They’re not going to spontaneously change. Women’s rights, to the extent practiced under Saddam, were something that stood largely due to his edict. Now Saddam is gone, and the chance that an enlightened secular ruler will arise in Iraq, if and when anyone asserts control over the country, is pretty slim. Saddam’s failure has been perceived on the ground as the failure of secularism, and so the fundamentalists’ hand has been strengthening - ever since the wake of Gulf War I.
You assume that the sanctions in place would remain effective; and while that might have been probable, it would be by no means assured. Again, it would boil down to “He didn’t have them the last time we checked, and so far as we know he hasn’t made any progress since.” It’s not like you’re locking a prisoner in a cell with no windows, after all. It’s a big country, and he had money. If he still had the intention, there would always be the possibility he’d acquire the capacity. Whether that possibilty was enough to justify invasion, of course, is the question.
Just enforcing the sanctions as they existed in the 90s would still entail an indefinite US military presence based in the region.
Recall that the sanctions were no cup of tea; they were responsible for Iraq’s deteriorated infrastructure, as well as shortages of essential goods.
Keeping the sanctions in place wouldn’t have been the worst possible scenario, to be sure; but neither were they an optimal long-term solution, especially given the large probability SH would pass rule to one of his sons.
On re-reading, I see you already addressed and conceded #2; apologies.
Fair enough. Then we agree on this. We disagree on the cost, or effectiveness, perhaps, but I thought for sure you were saying that we could have withdrawn from the region. My mistake.
You did not, however, quote this paragraph. “A senior U.S. intelligence official said: “During the run up to the war there were a wide variety of people sending signals that some Iraqis might have an interest in negotiation. These signals came via a broad range of foreign intelligence services, other governments, third parties, charlatans and independent actors. Every lead that was at all plausible—and some that weren’t—were followed up. In the end, we were aware of no one in a position to make any deal anywhere near acceptable to the United States.””
You asked for a cite on the costs and effectiveness of the sanctions. I had one yesterday but cannot now find it. I will look it up and post it later today.
Here it is. (PDF Warning) It is not so much about the success of the sanctions as it is about comparing the cost. As I said before, I am not sure who these guys are so I can’t vouch for them, but they make a pretty deniable claim about the size of the sanction force. To wit
“Prior to the recent buildup, the U.S. devoted roughly 30,000 troops, 30 ships (including a carrier battle group), and about 200 aircraft and other equipment to containment efforts.4 These resources proved insufficient to enforce U.N. mandates or, evidently, to prevent Saddam Hussein from continued investments in weapons of mass destruction.”
Maybe the United States just needs a “ten year” rule. If an international situation hasn’t resolved itself within ten years, we send in the troops. We could have attacked the Soviet Union in 1955, Red China in 1959, North Korea in 1962, and Cuba in 1971.
I agree with you halfway - I think that the odds favor some sort of stabilized situation within the next 20 years.
The problem is, I don’t see any grounds for believing it’ll come relatively soon - and if they spend the next 17 years fighting tooth and nail, then finally coming to some sort of armistice, it’s hard to see how Iraq will be better in 2024 than it was in 2002.
Update from Basra for those who think everything’s hunky-dory in the south.
I wish I could see some evidence that our presence is helping in some way - or even that it could help. But our propping up Allawi simply makes him illegitimate in the eyes of Iraqis.
We’ve been trying to stabilize the situation for the past year and a half, sending in troops and pouring in money. And things are clearly far worse this summer than they were last summer. Remember when Admin spokesmen were saying the violence in Iraqi cities was no worse than in American cities? It wasn’t true then, of course, but at least a year ago, you could get people to believe it for a day or two. Now that wouldn’t fly even for a millisecond.
Oh yeah, today is the first anniversary of the day Richard Perle said this:
Wonder if anyone’s called Perle up and asked him if he’s surprised.
OK, let’s take the guess of Juan Cole, who’s a Middle East expert, tenured prof, reads the Arabic papers, and so forth:
Obviously there’s no way to get the ‘facts’, since nobody’s holding still to be interviewed, and it’s too dangerous for reporters to go wandering about anyway. So expert analysis seems to be the best thing going.
At any rate, there’s 25 million Iraqis. It’s their country. We aren’t going to increase our troop levels much beyond the ~150K we’ve got there. They can sustain a hell of a lot more deaths than we can, because each of their deaths brings new recruits. The same isn’t true for us: instead, our troops are watching F911.
furt, pervert. You make sound arguments that the options I presented are not optimal. I’m not inclined to disagree.
However that was never the point. The point was that these were better options than invasion, as per the OP. In particular the invasion aggressively squandered opportunities that it would have been worth exploring.
A directly negotiated settlement and continued, perhaps diminished, sanctions are 2 of those.
RTfirefly. The back channel negotiations may not have been viable as first drafted, but surely amending initial ideas is what negotiation is about. Was it not worth even contemplating?
pervert quoted:
The quote is redundant, as follows: What then was acceptable to the US? This merely takes us back to the opening question: Given what we now know, was the US position a sensible one? The US did not distinguish itself as a good faith party in its pre-war positions. Rather, what was “near acceptable” to the US is an outrageous standard to assess action by. Being as “acceptable” involved a large scale military victory and occupation in the ME.
Pervert
Evidently? Continued investment? I need read no further to spot a low credibility source. Regrettably no-one appears to have followed up on General Zinni, as per my earlier suggestion. So…
(italics are my gloss)
Actually that Link isn’t a great one. To get to the full Zinni speech follow The Better Link
And you present options which clearly would have been better than war. The disagreement between us is perhaps the likelyhood of those options.
Fair enough. But opportunities were only “squandered” if they were real opportunities. The options were only better if they were real. For instance it would have been better if aliens had come down and turned the MENA into a flowing garden of milk nad honey. Obviously your scenario is not nearly so fantastic. But I think you see my point.
The US position was made public back then. Saddam had to go. the problem with the back door offer was not that it did not meet American demands. The problem was that it was not credible. You or I could have gone to an administration official with the same offer and would have been more quickly discounted. And rightly so. Do you have more information on this person that his offer may have been real?
No, the US made specific demands. Ture it was not interested in negotiating those demands, but Bush felt that 12 years had been enough time to come clean and adhere to UN resolutions as well as the cease fire agreement.
Perhaps, but the numbers of troops are born out by your Zinni source. He says 23,000 they said 30,000. I’ll take Zinni’s number if you like. I was not trying to say that they proved the sanctions unsuccessful. I was using their figure for the sanction troop strength.
Zinni make some good points about the sanction regime. It was effective in what it was designed to do, to a point. It certainly kept Saddam from attacking any other country conventionally. It did not prevent him from attempting to assasinate Bush senior, apperently, but that seemed like a minor flaw before 9-11. After that, the measure of acceptable risk from a despot willing to endorse international terrorism became much lower.
I appreciate you links to Zinni’s speach. I had a time finding them.