Zarqawi Killed - Will It Make A Difference?

[XT]

@Diogenes the Cynic

The story that Clinton had a chance to get bin Laden is bullshit, by the way. The 9/11 commmission debunked that whole Sudanese offer thing. It never happened.

This wasn’t the only chance Clinton had to wack Bin Laden DtC. I’m refering more to the assassination attempt that was cancelled due to (IIRC) the presence of someone from the Saudi royal family who it was feared might be killed as well. Clinton had as much of a chance to kill Bin Laden as Bush did for Zarqawi…its just hindsight that makes it seem so stupid that they didn’t take the chance and take them out. At the time Clinton had to weigh the pro’s and cons of taking out Bin Laden…who, recall, while prominent and definitely identified as a terrorist wasn’t exactly public enemy number one. Same goes for Zarqawi…in 2002 he wasn’t even on the radar of most Americans and if the administration was trying to show restraint for the benifit of our Euro buddies in the run up to war by not attacking targets in Iraq before formal hostilities started then its certainly understandable. In hindsight of course we should have dropped the hammer on both guys and damned the consequences…but of course hindsight is 20/20. And politicians are at heart weasles, reguardless of what party they belong too…they think of their image and whats best for them.

-XT

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

What we have established beyond all doubt is that:

1. Bush passed on three separate chances to kill Zarqawi
2. Some Penatgon officials thought it was because the WH wanted to keep Zarqawi’s operation alive for its PR value in making the case for war.
3. A CIA guy says the WH told him they were sucking up to France at the time and didn’t want to look like “gunslingers.”

Can we agree on all this?

I have no problem believing that the CIA guy was repeating the line that was actually given to him by the WH. I also find that line extremely disingenuous and unconvincing.

So what about the credibility of the Penatagon guys? Are they liars? Are they stupid? Are they conspiracy nuts? Are they raving liberals? Is their speculation at all out of line with the character and usual MO of this administration?

If you buy the line given to the CIA guy, do you think it was a valid reason not to smoke Zarqawi? Remember, he was actively engaged in terrorist activity at the time.

[Squink]

@John Mace

I think the added context takes a lot of the sting out of it.

This line however; “I’m more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied” added a different sting in 2004:

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?”

[RTFirefly]

@Birdmonster

The problem is, that bastard happens to hate a large portion of his population (Shiites) and has no problem exterminating them for whatever reason he sees fit. Basically, as it’s been explained to me, Shiites rightly feared for their lives and the government actively sought them out for questioning, torture, or extermination. So, actually, it sounds pretty similar to the current situation, in a sad way: your average Iraqi is simply not safe, whether at the hands of a dictator or sectarian violence or stray bombing or any other number of hazards.

Saddam is reputed to have killed 300-400K people during his 30+ years of tyranny, roughly half of them in response to the 1991 uprisings.

Taking the higher figure, that means that aside from his response to those uprisings, he’d been killing about 7000 Iraqis a year, or ~20 a day.

That’s nothing to sneeze at, but Baghdad alone is leaving those numbers in the dust, these days.

So: similar, yes, but it sure looks like even Shi’ites were safer before than they are now. Especially now that different Shi’ite factions are warring with each other in Basra.

Again, I just have to stress that I don’t believe life under Saddam was safe. The violence I think was certainly less random, but it wasn’t necessarily safe to do anything, especially if you’d vocally oppossed the government.

Well, no - it was safe to do lots of things. It was safe to walk around Baghdad, for instance. Women could wear ordinary Western clothes without fearing for their lives.

Sure, if you opposed the government, you were taking your life in your hands - but that’s always been true under dictatorships. One can choose to do or not do those things. Yes, there was an element of randomness to the violence of Saddam and Sons, but there’s no reason to believe it was at anything like the scale of the violence in Iraq today.

As for the point about Sharia law, well, can’t argue. I’m also a bit ignorant on if that’s an innevitability (the ennacting of Sharia law, that is) or if that can presumably be avoided in favor of treating women like human beings. I’m not holding my breath though.

From what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re in Shi’ite Basra or Sunni Fallujah; the fundies think alike, and they’re in the driver’s seat. The other day, Riverbend (of the blog Baghdad Burning) wrote about a shopkeeper she knows in Baghdad who got visited by al-Sadr’s thugs because he put up a Brazilian flag as a sign of his soccer loyalties, what with the World Cup and all. Seems the flag was a problem on two levels: first, it was a flag of an infidel nation, and second, even soccer was a distraction from worshipping and thinking about Allah. Fundies everywhere are alike, and they’re Iraq’s future. There’s no center to hold.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I submitted my last post before I caught up with xtisme’s last couple of posts. I think that he has pretty much come around to a reasonable position on this and I feel like he’s pretty much already answered my questions (If I gather corretcly, x, you’re saying that even though it’s not exactly proven or anything, it at least looks bad and the speculation is not completely unfounded [or original to me]?) so I have no more quarrel with him.

I would still like John Mace’s answers, though.

[XT]

I fear hijacking this thread so I’ll limit myself to a last response on this.

@Diogenes the Cynic

What we have established beyond all doubt is that:

1. Bush passed on three separate chances to kill Zarqawi
2. Some Penatgon officials thought it was because the WH wanted to keep Zarqawi’s operation alive for its PR value in making the case for war.
3. A CIA guy says the WH told him they were sucking up to France at the time and didn’t want to look like “gunslingers.”

Well, the first one at least is beyond doubt…it seems well established that Bush et al had at least 3 chances to take out Zarqawi. Granted. The others are more speculative, since they are at least 3rd hand (unnamed administration flunky speaks to unnamed Pentagon spear carrier who speaks to reporter…and they all filter the story through their own preconceptions, perceptions and other internal filters. To say nothing of axes to grind or possible agendas…).

@Diogenes the Cynic

I have no problem believing that the CIA guy was repeating the line that was actually given to him by the WH. I also find that line extremely disingenuous and unconvincing.

Of course DtC…it goes along with your own preconceptions and how you WANT things to turn out. From my perspective it seems reasonable that the administration was trying to woo some of the more recalcitrant Euro’s (like, say, France and Germany) by showing restraint. After all, if it helps, that great, and if it doesn’t they probably figured they could get him after hostilities started.

Perhaps this says more about our respective bias on this issue than it does on the facts so far presented?

@Diogenes the Cynic

So what about the credibility of the Penatagon guys? Are they liars? Are they stupid? Are they conspiracy nuts? Are they raving liberals? Is their speculation at all out of line with the character and usual MO of this administration?

They though Iraq had WMD too DtC. :smack: Why pick and choose when to believe them based on politics?

@Diogenes the Cynic

If you buy the line given to the CIA guy, do you think it was a valid reason not to smoke Zarqawi? Remember, he was actively engaged in terrorist activity at the time.

Well, I don’t ‘buy’ the CIA guys line either…I’m equally skeptical. However, it does make sense to me. More sense (to me) than leaving Zarquawi alive to have a supposed tie to AQ in Northern Iraq. After all, had they wacked him in the run up the administration could have simply said something like ‘We engaged and destroyed an AQ training camp in Northern Iraq today and killed the notorious (well, WE know who he is) AQ terrorist Zarqawi. Zarqawi, a notorious AQ terrorist (have to keep repeating this) was training terrorist fanatics in Northern Iraq with the concent of the arch-demon Saddam. They are even good buddies and go out on weekends to shoot guns at crowds, boil children and push puppies into ponds full of alligators. HUNGRY alligators!..’

After all, dead men tell no tales and having engaged ‘terrorists’ in Iraq its a kind of proof that the administration was right all along…

As I said, YMMV. To me it just shows our opposing bias as to whats easier to swallow between the two points cited…and the lack of any kind of solid data to back either up.

-XT

[John_Mace]

@Squink

This line however; “I’m more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied” added a different sting in 2004:

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?”

Let me clarify. Bush is an idiot. I’m not saying that what he said was good or that there aren’t all kind of dumb things in there. I’m just saying that wrt ObL, the full context has less sting in it than the **rjung **quote. That’s my perception. YMMV. Frankly, though, if most people reading the full text would find it more damning, I doubt that rjung’s favorite left-wing blogs wouldn’t have cut it down like that.

[John_Mace]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I would still like John Mace’s answers, though.

Answer my question from post #114 first. I think that proves my point.

[XT]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I submitted my last post before I caught up with xtisme’s last couple of posts. I think that he has pretty much come around to a reasonable position on this and I feel like he’s pretty much already answered my questions (If I gather corretcly, x, you’re saying that even though it’s not exactly proven or anything, it at least looks bad and the speculation is not completely unfounded [or original to me]?) so I have no more quarrel with him.

We do seem to be talking passed each other here. If it makes you feel better, wrt the actual OP we seem to be essentially in agreement (not something that happens every day, ehe? )…it won’t make much difference in Iraq that Zarqawi is dead now from the tactical, day to day perspective.
-XT

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I think the “gunslinger” line is hard to believe not because of a bias against Bush but because he was simultaneously taking such a belligerant stance towards the UN, stating that US would go alone if it had to, etc. It’s line in direct contradiction to his public behavor and cowboy demeanor at the time.

I also know that the administration tried as hard as it could to draw connections between Iraq and and AQ at the time. If they had destroyed the strongest AQ presence in the country they would have undermined one of their most publicly effective justifications for an invasion.

I don’t think the Penatgon is staffed with idiots or with guys who can’t read the boss, so I think their suspicions are not all irrational even if they were wrong (a possibility, I admit, although I think it’s a small one).

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Squink

This line however; “I’m more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied” added a different sting in 2004:

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?”

Well, I believe he’s being honest. He wasn’t at all worried about bin Laden, and only a hair more worried about making sure our soldiers were well-supplied.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@John Mace

Answer my question from post #114 first. I think that proves my point.

“Speculation.” But it was very informed speculation and it wasn’t my own.

Will you answer my own qusetions now?

[Birdmonster]

@RTFirefly

Saddam is reputed to have killed 300-400K people during his 30+ years of tyranny, roughly half of them in response to the 1991 uprisings.

Taking the higher figure, that means that aside from his response to those uprisings, he’d been killing about 7000 Iraqis a year, or ~20 a day.

That’s nothing to sneeze at, but Baghdad alone is leaving those numbers in the dust, these days.

Here’s to hoping this is the high-water mark, I suppose. Thanks for the post----found it informative. I’m not going to hijack this thread too much more nor am I one of those folks who’re incapable of conceding several points on which they were partially wrong or at least partially ignorant. That said, I checked www.iraqbodycount.org, and, the civilian (the higher figure again) death toll there is at 42,646 since January '03 (roughly 34 a day). Checking your math, I found some…problems.

400,000 divided by 30 years = 13,333, which stageringly enough is a nearly identical average per day (36).

So I wouldn’t necessarily say, using this criteria, that the country is better off.

The only thing I can say is that 400,000 versus 42,000

[Birdmonster]

Sorry about that last line----mispost.

[Ryan_Liam]

@Sevastopol

Clearly I was mistaken in confusing our Ryan Liam with the one that opened a pit thread regarding Riverbend you know, the young woman critical of the war, who lives in Iraq.

Yes I did, because alot of people were taking her blog as the only source of truth to the situation regarding Iraq, so when I introduced ‘Iraq the Model’ and ‘Mesopotamian’ blogs, they were shouted down as not worthy of being in the same league of a Sunni Arab woman who enjoyed that status to live higher than her other Iraqi compatriots, and yet let’s forget about the Shias and Kurds, they don’t count.

[John_Mace]

@Diogenes the Cynic

“Speculation.” But it was very informed speculation and it wasn’t my own.

Will you answer my own qusetions now?

First, let me say that I’m glad you agree with me that “speculation” is an appropriate way to characterize your post about why Bush didn’t go after Zarqawi. Plus, I never said the speculation was yours. I actually didn’t intend it that way because I was certain you had read it somewhere else.

As for your questions… I assume you mean this:

So what about the credibility of the Penatagon guys? Are they liars? Are they stupid? Are they conspiracy nuts? Are they raving liberals? Is their speculation at all out of line with the character and usual MO of this administration?

Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. No-- has Bush ever delayed the capture of a terrorist/enemy in order to maximize PR value? Did he purposely delay the capture of Saddam? Did lots of people speculate that he would? Yes. This seems along those lines, and is more like MO of people who simply want to make Bush look bad (if I had to choose). However consider this:

Suppose Bush were able to produce a real live al Qaeda operative captured or killed in Iraq in 2002, along with laptops, plans, and other documents related to terrorism. Would that have made his case against Saddam more or less ccompelling?

[Ryan_Liam]

RTFirefly
Sorry, I don’t do “there’s a rebuttal to you somewhere at this link, why don’t you go look for it?”

If you want to make an argument, make it, and dig up your own support. It’s not my job to find the support for your argument and for my own, thanks.

That blog is the argument, this is an actual Iraqi person, someone who at one time has actually lived in Iraq, and has refuted Juans ‘logic’ repeatedly, that’s what I was getting at.

Cite? I haven’t seen this in the news reports I’ve read.

Well I have, and here it is.

*Following this strike Iraqi security forces, specifically Iraqi police, responded to that location, they were the first ones to arrive on the scene," Gen Caldwell said. *

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5060468.stm

If they had him surrounded, though, they should have been able to capture him on their own if they were any good. Obviously we didn’t have much faith in them, if it happened this way.

Of course not, wasn’t it Zarqawi himself who said he would rather die in a suicide attack or bombing or attacking US troops than be taken alive? For the situation, which was that if they didn’t kill him there and then, then the possibility of him leaving yet again (remember he’d been nearly captured/killed numerous times before) was not an option. So hence his death was swift.

The one essential function of government is to hold a monopoly on major violence. Absent that, all of a government’s other successes are undermined. Now that I’ve reminded you of that, I think you can see that the Iraqi government is nowhere close to governing.

The Iraqi government has been operating for 3 years, suggesting that all levels of violence, from militias to insurgent groups will be solved overnight is naive, but to then say the Iraqi government is ineffective and is unable to govern is also in crude terms B.S.

Given the fact that after the Shrine bombing Jaafaris government was able to bring about calm in Baghdad by declaring martial law, suggests that the Iraqi government is capable of exerting it’s power.

All of which would be more understandable if, by most metrics, Iraq was gradually becoming more peaceful and more secure over that period. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite has been happening.

But the political void has finally been solved, which makes it more likely that in the future a more peaceful and successful Iraq will come about. Which I believe it will.

It’s one thing to say, “they haven’t come far enough yet, but be patient” if they’re going in the right direction. If they’re not, it makes no sense at all.

Only if you ignore the objective, which is to have Iraq a self sustaining democratic state ruled by the rule of law, which all Iraqis want.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@John Mace

As for your questions… I assume you mean this:
Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know.

Interesting. So you think it’s possible that the Pentagon officials might be liars or idiots or conspiracy nuts or raving liberals? Are those possibilities just as likely, less likely or more likely to be true than the alternatives, in your opinion?

No-- has Bush ever delayed the capture of a terrorist/enemy in order to maximize PR value?

I don’t believe so, no.

Did he purposely delay the capture of Saddam?

I don’t believe so, no. I think the faster he got Saddam, the better the PR value would have been.

Did lots of people speculate that he would? Yes.

Were any of those people highly placed officials at the Pentagon?

This seems along those lines, and is more like MO of people who simply want to make Bush look bad (if I had to choose).

I disagree. I think this is far more believeable and it also has the added gravitas of coming from the Penatgon rather than internet bloggers. Do you believe that Pentagon officials at the time had a reason to make Bush look bad? Do you think they’re comparable to left-wing internet bloggers?

However consider this:

Suppose Bush were able to produce a real live al Qaeda operative captured or killed in Iraq in 2002, along with laptops, plans, and other documents related to terrorism. Would that have made his case against Saddam more or less ccompelling?

Less, for the obvious reason that the AQ presence would no longer have existed. You can’t make a case for war based on a threat which has already been destroyed.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

To the above, I want to add that the White House already knew that Zarqawi was hostile to Hussein and that any recovered computer files or documents would have failed to show any collaborative relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda – just the opposite in fact. They would have eliminated their ability to claim an AQ presence in Iraq without being able to show any evidence of anything but a hostile relationship with Saddam. It would have been lose-lose with regards to their casus belli.

[John_Mace]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Interesting. So you think it’s possible that the Pentagon officials might be liars or idiots or conspiracy nuts or raving liberals? Are those possibilities just as likely, less likely or more likely to be true than the alternatives, in your opinion?

I have absolutely no information to make a judgement either way. I would say that I have no more (or less) reason to believe them to be any of those things than any other government person. Would you like me to find some cites from goverment people who dispute that speculation? Which group do we believe?

I disagree. I think this is far more believeable and it also has the added gravitas of coming from the Penatgon rather than internet bloggers. Do you believe that Pentagon officials at the time had a reason to make Bush look bad? Do you think they’re comparable to left-wing internet bloggers?

I think lots of government officials often exagerate the level of their knowledge because they are flattered to be called upon the press to give their exaulted opinions, and they want to continue to do so.

Less, for the obvious reason that the AQ presence would no longer have existed. You can’t make a case for war based on a threat which has already been destroyed.

Sure you can. First, you needn’t assume that those were the only al Qaeda operatives. Second, if al Qaeda got into Iraq once, they probably would get into there again. This was a pre-emptive war remember. It was supposed to stop Iraq from becoming another Afghanistan instead of waiting until it had already become one. (n.b.: I don’t now nor have I ever bought into that line of thinking. But Bush did, and so did most of the members of Congress as well as Tony Blaire and a few other European leaders.)