Iraq: What Might Have Been

 

290165818_4058f117ce_bIn a previous thread, Ricochet member Majestyk expressed a major complaint that he has about libertarians, liberals and even conservatives who gripe about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: What is your alternate scenario?

If we could unwind the clock of history and place you inside George W. Bush’s head (a la Being John Malkovich) what is your preferred policy prescription for U.S. foreign policy in the days following 9/11?

I never hear that question answered and I barely hear it asked.

So, okay, I’ll give you my answer, and then see what you all think:

I am going to assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that we all agree Saddam Hussein was an outstandingly brutal dictator in a region that pretty much specializes in brutal dictators. He was a problem for his people, for his neighbors, and for the United States and our allies that would, eventually, need to be solved.

The key word there is ‘eventually.’ Since Saddam was not, in fact, responsible for 9/11, and did not present an immediate threat to us thanks to containment and sanctions, he need not have been anywhere near the top of the list of the nation’s priorities in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Had I been inside George W. Bush’s head, I would have been chanting “Afghanistan….Afghanistan… Afghanistan…”

Once the echo of my chanting died away (‘…ghanistan….istan….nnn”), I’d have recommended a swift, violent, targeted, and punitive attack on Afghanistan, with the goal of taking out Osama bin Laden and/or as many members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban as possible while making it look easy.

When we were finished, if whomever remained in the way of Afghan leadership expressed a desire for help build a reasonable, decent country, we would join a broad coalition of other nations ready to help them do it. If they preferred to be a crummy, impoverished, savage backwater, so be it. Just don’t screw with us again.

What about Iraq?

For all their undoubted sufferings, there were advantages for the Iraqi people in being oppressed by Saddam Hussein.

First, he wasn’t an Islamist. He was barely a Muslim, one of several reasons why Osama bin Laden loathed him. (After the invasion of Kuwait, Osama proposed having his people push the Iraqis out, and was furious when the Saudis allowed the U.S. to do it instead, especially since this meant placing U.S. bases on sacred Saudi soil).

Saddam was a secular butcher. His heroes were Hitler and Stalin, so women in Iraq not only did not have to wear a hijab or hide in their homes, they were educated and employed. If they were targeted by the regime, it was for their politics, not their gender.

Second, Saddam was big on education. When he came to power, the vast majority of Iraqis were illiterate. When he left office (so to speak) the situation was reversed: the majority could read and write. Saddam wanted his country to be modern the way Hitler wanted Germany to be modern, so he invested in training and technology in a way that an Islamist state never would.

By educating his people and neglecting to oppress women, Saddam was creating the very class of people most likely to identify with Western, secular democracies, to increasingly resent being terrorized and oppressed, and to have the ability to organize his overthrow and manage the aftermath. I think it likely that, within a few years, Iraqis might well have created for themselves the very system that George W. Bush tried to impose by the worst of all possible means: an ineffectual bloodbath.

Tragically (in retrospect), we  invaded. We trashed the infrastructure and sacked the police and army without providing alternative sources of law and order. The chaos inspired a massive, panicked brain-drain of the elites, and created a baleful association between the words “democracy” and “imperialism” in the minds of the Arab masses. Had we postponed dealing aggressively with Saddam, not only might we have spared thousands of American and Iraqi lives, but the Arab Spring might have bloomed a decade earlier in cleaner, richer soil.

The United States would have emerged from the post-9/11 period with undiminished moral capital, as well as the energy and will for further and more crucial armed interventions, both of which would give the president — any president —-a far stronger position from which to negotiate with other potentially problematic or threatening countries.

 

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  1. user_653084 Inactive
    user_653084
    @SalvatorePadula

    Misthiocracy: “The US has had forces in Germany, Japan, and South Korean for over six decades.

    Maintaining a military presence over the long-term is a prerequisite for successful regime change.

    If a country isn’t willing to invest the resources then do not pretend that regime change is the goal.”

    1) The US occupations following the Second World War faced no resistance. Constabulary troopers were not blown up walking the streets of Frankfurt in 1946.

    2) Regime change does not require a long term military presence. It is effectuated when the existing regime is replaced by something else. Whether or not the replacement is an improvement may require continued occupation, but that is a separate question.

    3) In any case, I don’t think that occupation is as generally essential to the replacement of the existing regime with a better one as you’ve claimed. We effected successful regime change in Serbia without any ground presence.

    4) Despite the previous points, I agree with you that a sustained occupation of Iraq was necessary (though not sufficient) to effect a successful replacement of the Baathist regime with one superior to it.

    • #61
  2. Majestyk Member
    Majestyk
    @Majestyk

    Ed G.:

    Majestyk:

    …..

    ….Then, ironically, after we had actually done the hard work of trying to un-break the Pottery Barn… we abandon the place. That is the most contemptible, evil and stupid thing that we did – and that gets little or no attention, other than the ancillary fact that we get to watch heads get hacked off at the hands of ISIS on the evening news every night.

    Majestyk, I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with you more than I agree with this above. The bitch of all this is that we had already done the hard work and then we simply discarded the whole thing because it wasn’t blooming as quickly as we would have liked or because some of us wanted to vindicate our original opposition despite the costs being unrecoverable and the potential benefits about to come due.

    That’s saying something!  I’m right a lot… ;)

    Explaining the concept of a “Sunk Cost” to some people is basically impossible because they labor under the delusion that you can wish them back somehow, rather than act as you should: in recognition of the fact that those resources are gone.

    You’re absolutely correct.  Our costs on the Iraq war from 2003 forward were sunk and unrecoverable.  Then, in order to vindicate foolish promises made by a certain, teleprompter-speechifying empty suit, we and the Iraqi people get to reap the whirlwind once again.

    • #62
  3. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Kate Braestrup:

    James Of England:

    A few notes: In my attempt to keep my OP short, I was trying to telegraph a lot into short sentences… hence the “advantages to being oppressed by Saddam” which I hoped would be understood as heavily ironic.

    I apologize for my uncertainty about the tone, and for using too strong language in response.

    Again, he was known to be a particularly brutal dictator in a region where the bar was set high (or low) for brutality.

    Sometimes people say we should go back to the Ottomans. The Ottomans ruled for almost three years of the last century. During those three years, they committed more than half the murder in that century of Middle Eastern history; even with 32 times as long to rack up the numbers, the various dictators haven’t been able to match the Turks.

    Over the 97 years, Saddam racked up more kills during his decades of rule than all the other dictators combined. He started off with the most educated population and vastly superior infrastructure and left his country a wreck. This is even before you consider his pre-eminent efforts in the field of antisemitism and terrorist funding abroad. There are bad guys running countries in the Middle East, but none to compare. You can carry on down the line; After Saddam and Mehmed V, Assad has no rivals, including his father.

    If I had been the president, (I think, anyway—he presumably knew things I don’t!) 9/11 would have pushed “do something about Saddam” farther down on the to-do list, but not off the list. Saddam’s evil intentions toward the outside world were probably (?) held at bay for the time being by containment and sanctions, and Al Qaeda and the Taliban were a more immediate problem for the US at that moment.

    That was a vanishing “stability”, though. Sanctions were set to scale down in 2003. The 18 month countdown to Saddam’s nuke wouldn’t have completed within Bush’s first term (Sanctions would have continued in lesser form for a while longer), but they would have within his second.

    That does not mean that we would not, eventually, have had to do something about Saddam, possibly including an invasion.

    Invading a nuclear Iraq would have given Saddam a little more justification for his mother of all battles thing. Waiting until sanctions had fallen would mean that Saddam had more support from the Iraqi people and the fight would have been harder in many ways. Backing down in 2003 would have made coalition building harder the next time (unless you’re saying that even pushing for inspections and retained sanctions was a mistake).

    And because Saddam wasn’t abiding by the terms agreed to at the end of Desert Storm, I think we had a legitimate casus belli without trying to link him to 9/11. Even if containment and sanctions were working, Saddam was making the innocent bear the deprivations the sanctions imposed, and using the result as propaganda. (Before the war, the fringe left in the west were furiously opposed to the sanctions on humanitarian grounds.)

    I’m not generally fond of the 9/11 justification, but I think Bush’s formulation (after 9/11, it became clear that the US had to treat these issues in general seriously) and your formulation both work well.

    I knew I’d get into trouble as soon as I brought gender into this. You, J-of-E may be old enough to remember that Ms. Magazine published an article during the build up to Desert Storm about how things were better for women in Iraq, and therefore we shouldn’t judge him so harshly? That was when I lost interest in (capital F) Feminism.

    The Gulf War was the first political debate I remember. I don’t remember Ms. Magazine from then, but I’ve had people cite it to me since, yes. As with Vogue praising the Assads, feminists are often extremely cheap dates for dictators.

    So let me try to be clearer: Saddam’s (relative) disinterest in excluding women-as-women from public life does not even begin to mitigate his guilt for appalling crimes against everybody. The “advantage” was not to the individual woman unfortunate enough to live under his rule but to—potentially—the country that might have emerged should he have been overthrown. And —am I wrong?—you might have confirmed this when you said Iraq without Saddam has better gender equality than most of the Arab world. That’s a good thing, right?

    Saddam ruled over Iraq, which has traditionally been far more egalitarian and cosmopolitan than the rest of the Arab world (when I say “traditionally” I mean in the millennia sense of “tradition”). They’re good to black people, have an easy relationship between Persians, Arabs, and others, and they have a pretty good degree of gender equality (how much coincidence is it that Esther, the Bible’s most powerful female protagonist, lived on the Iraqi border?)

    Before the Iran-Iraq War, experts argued that Shia Iraqis wouldn’t fight Shia Iran for Sunni Saddam. They were unbelievably wrong about this; Iraqis felt a tremendous pride in being Iraqi, and the sectarian divides in Iraq were not strong. By murdering the Shia in vast numbers during the 1990s (and by oppressing them during the 1980s), Saddam created a sectarian identity, so the religious comfort is no longer so present, but Iraq has very deep cosmopolitan roots indeed, and Saddam did not extinguish them all.

    Given time, though, I think he would have undone the gender equality that marked parts of Iraq (obviously, the Marsh Arabs etc. never had gender equality, a struggle that only really started to show fruit quite recently).

    I think I will stand by the “Saddam wasn’t an Islamist.” He was, as someone in this thread has pointed out, a trickster and opportunist: when it suited his book he would play the devout muslim, and of course he supported the Islamists in Palestine and probably would have donated to any group inclined to make trouble for the US, but the difference between Saddam’s gang and a true Islamic fundamentalist regime is pretty clear.

    I don’t have a window into Saddam’s soul, so I’ll defer to your judgment about whether he was opportunistically pretending to be an Islamist or genuinely believing. My problem with Islamists is not really theological, though. It’s their oppression and terrorism. Saddam’s policies became increasingly Islamist, particularly in the last few years. He’d always supported Islamist terror groups, and during the 1990s he started to fund extremist groups domestically to a greater extent, but 9/11 kicked his use of the Quran into overdrive.

    If the Arab Spring had started a decade earlier, it would have taken place in December 2000, before Bush took office.

    “A decade” was sloppy math. Sorry.

    It’s math that matters, though. The absolute maximum that can be used is 7 years, since the Iraq invasion cannot have had retroactive effect and there wasn’t real talk of protests and revolution then. A more plausible figure would have to be 3 years or so earlier, such that there would be time for these things for build up.

    I take it we’re agreed that the theoretical possibility of a 3 year earlier start wouldn’t have been a huge advance. More importantly, though, if Saddam was still in office when these events took place, he’d have been one of the primary sponsors of the revolutionary governments. As the victor over America (he didn’t get to keep Kuwait, but America’s multi-decade efforts to topple him and apply sanctions would have been defeated), he would have had tremendous moral authority and inspirational power, being a genuinely different figure to the corrupt and spineless regimes that covered the rest of the Middle East (you still got some of that rhetoric in the actual revolts (it used to send my Iraqi colleagues nuts), but there was less of it that there would have been if he’d survived). Having Saddam partly choose the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, and then helping to bloodily protect them, would not have yielded the happy results we see today, with Tunisia deselecting their Islamists and picking a relatively pleasant government, Sisi being arguably the most pro-Christian leader in a thousand years, the American allied Jordanian government surviving etc. etc. Even the unhappy results (Libya) could have been worse. I felt ambiguous about the Libyan intervention, but a Gaddafi supported by Saddam who survived by massacring many more of his people would not have been, going forward, the relatively non-awful Gaddaffi of his last few years.

    Even before the Arab Spring, throughout Bush’s time in office, Arab governments were democratizing, signing up for free trade agreements with the US, and otherwise cooperating more closely with America than before. The same fringe leftists who look back fondly on Saddam may claim that US MENA relations soured during that time, but the data all points the other way. Arabs across the Middle East soured on AQ, traded more with the US, became more democratically empowered, shared intelligence more, and generally did as they were asked.

    Do you think this was because of the war (as it was waged) or in spite of it? I’m actually hoping against hope you’ll be able to tell us that historians will look back and conclude that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a complete success.

    I only have correlation, and it’s not perfect. The Jordanian FTA was negotiated by Clinton and was ratified by the House in July 2001. The rest, though, (FTAs with Bahrain, Morocco, and Oman, TIFAs with Georgia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi, the Emirates, and Yemen) all came after Bush kicked his MEFTA efforts into high gear in 2003. Tunisia’s TIFA came shortly before that, but when Bush was already focused on the war.

    Similarly, democratization picked up pace after 2003, but again it’s hard to know what part Iraq played in that (the increased attention Bush paid to the issue was certainly important, but maybe he would have done that without the war). It’s certainly not the case, as was widely reported, that relationships became worse over the course of the war, or that they improved after Obama took over (Saudi cancelled its second round of elections, then finally held them in Obama’s second term, trade agreements ceased being issued, etc. etc.)

    In terms of AQ’s approval plummeting, though, that’s all about the Iraq War. One of the key differences between AQ and ISIS is that AQ really didn’t focus much on minorities. If you were a Christian, Yazidi, etc. in Iraq from 2003 to 2013, you were far less likely to be killed than if you were a Muslim. In the West, that received passing attention, but it got a whole lot of attention in the region. When terrorism was about killing evil Jews, most Arabs were behind it. When it was about killing fellow Muslims and deliberately inspiring counter-atrocities against the terrorists’ fellow Sunnis, that ceased to be so true. Those charts showing the world becoming more peaceful until 2013 (when US failure to intervene finally started to yield results) are in large part showing the benefits of the Iraq War, a war that brought peace even while it was being fought.

    • #63
  4. user_82762 Inactive
    user_82762
    @JamesGawron

    Kate Braestrup:

    Hey, Jim! Which point of view?

    If we’re talking about what happened after the decision was made to invade, then you and I are probably in agreement:”shock and awe followed by surge” probably sums it up as well as anything.

    Humbly, I offer couple of extra thoughts along the lines of “lessons learned”:

    if you are going to take control of a country, take control of it. Order and safety are the prerequisite if anything good is going to follow. If you don’t impose order and safety on the ground ASAP, fear will drive the ordinary person to turn to any group, gang or militia who offers to keep them and their children safe. Once people start killing each other and revenge becomes a dominant motivation for action, it will be very difficult to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.

    For odd reasons I won’t bore you with, most of my study of this subject has centered on Abu Ghraib. Detainee operations is not considered the sexiest MOS, and running prisons is among the many unglamorous jobs Big Army tends to devolve onto the National Guard. (Remember the hapless Janet Karpinski?) Knowing what I know now, I would advise the president to make it clear he expects the military to be able to detain, interview and house prisoners under impeccable, state-of-the-art sanitary and humane conditions.

    Why? Because the United States was not invading Switzerland. Indeed, for the foreseeable future will be always be invading countries that are disgusting, brutal dictatorships. These tend to be known for the horrors of their prisons. Any war results in prisoners, some of them innocent sweep-ups. How the U.S. treats the people it takes into custody will naturally be closely observed, and will have tremendous propaganda value that, if we don’t make it work for us will definitely work against us.

    Kate,

    I find these statements simply naive. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait on his way to invading Saudi Arabia and destabilizing the middle east. He was grotesquely violent and tyrannical, internally and externally.

    Unfortunately, Bush senior used a phrase that I think was a mistake. He said “New World Order” as if some magical world order could control the world. He should have said “Enough Order in the World”. Chaos is the result of not enough order in the world and a loose Saddam was chaos.

    As for Abu Ghraib you must be joking. Of course, we don’t want abuse of enemy prisoners. We followed up and stopped it. However, you are now watching ISIS torture, rape, behead non-combatants! They aren’t stopping it they’re filming it, editing it like a music video, and posting it on YouTube proud of their work!

    Foreign policy, as is the History of the World, is not for the faint of heart. War is hell but only the first first few levels of hell. Genocide happens much lower down. The History of the 20th century should tell you that when you become too sensitive to all war and become a blind pacifist then you are setting the stage for the real genocidal monsters to take over.

    Newt: My mommy always said there were no monsters – no real ones – but there are.

    Ripley: Yes, there are, aren’t there?

    Newt: Why do they tell little kids that?

    Ripley: Most of the time it’s true.

    If you aren’t involved in the Supreme Executive Authority which controls the foreign policy of the United States, like most academics and media, then you can afford to tell the children (of whatever age) that there are no monsters.

    – but there are.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #64
  5. EThompson Member
    EThompson
    @

    I would argue that toppling Hussein’s regime and I loosely quote Condi Rice here, was a “pro-active decision.”

    What the MSM failed to mention but the 9/11 Commission Report documented is that laboratories, formulas, and scientists on the payroll were still in place in Iraq before the invasion. Gruesomely, there were prisoners held in jails at these labs who had been experimented upon to determine the true toxicity of certain chemical weapons.

    In other words, as soon as the UN sanctions were lifted and cash flow had been restored, SH had every intention of renewing his programs of mass destruction.

    • #65
  6. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Our costs on the Iraq war from 2003 forward were sunk and unrecoverable.  Then, in order to vindicate foolish promises made by a certain, teleprompter-speechifying empty suit, we and the Iraqi people get to reap the whirlwind once again

    How do you continue a war if the American people are fed up with what they see (rightly or wrongly)  as a bloody mess, and further investment of blood and treasure will simply be throwing good money after bad?

    Whether its intellectual laziness or just a natural human tendency to think in parables, we evaluate present threats by analogy to previous conflicts. The Bush administration (especially Wolfowitz) convinced us that Saddam =Hitler, anyone who opposed the war=Neville Chamberlain, and failure to attack=appeasement.    After awhile, people begin to think “Iraq=Vietnam.”

    When we are considering (from our armchairs!) what to do about ISIS and Syria, are there lessons to be learned from Iraq, or lessons from Iraq that should not be applied to Syria (or any other war you can think of?).

    • #66
  7. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Salvatore Padula:Misthiocracy: “The US has had forces in Germany, Japan, and South Korean for over six decades.

    Maintaining a military presence over the long-term is a prerequisite for successful regime change.

    If a country isn’t willing to invest the resources then do not pretend that regime change is the goal.”

    1) The US occupations following the Second World War faced no resistance. Constabulary troopers were not blown up walking the streets of Frankfurt in 1946.

    2) Regime change does not require a long term military presence. It is effectuated when the existing regime is replaced by something else. Whether or not the replacement is an improvement may require continued occupation, but that is a separate question.

    3) In any case, I don’t think that occupation is as generally essential to the replacement of the existing regime with a better one as you’ve claimed. We effected successful regime change in Serbia without any ground presence.

    4) Despite the previous points, I agree with you that a sustained occupation of Iraq was necessary (though not sufficient) to effect a successful replacement of the Baathist regime with one superior to it.

    I don’t think a continued occupation of Iraq was necessary after 2012. A commitment to help with air power, drones, etc. if needed, and intervention in Syria would have been more than enough (either would have been sufficient, although both would have been better) . What Iraq needs is less a EUCOM than a Marshall Plan. It needs accountants who can make it easier to defeat corruption (all Iraqi accountants are trained in the intentionally terrible Saddamite accounting system). It needs more fields desalinated after Saddam literally salted the earth so that people can get jobs picking dates. It needs an America with the leverage to push back on behalf of minorities when the government caves to Iranian or Sadrist pressure to be jerks to them.

    In 20 years time, if Iraq is as free and prosperous as it was in 2013, the Iraq War will look as manifestly positive as the Korean War does today. That will be a powerful disincentive for the dictators of the 2030s to test America when confrontations arise. Iraq particularly needs the money now, as its costs have rocketed (ISIS is not cheap to fight, and the human and structural repair bill will be extensive) and oil prices have plummeted.

    An allied Iraq that we didn’t force into Iranian hands by failing to support them when they needed it would be a wonderful thing. We probably can’t turn Afghanistan into a South Korea (it’s so poor that even if we doubled its GDP, and doubled it again, it would still be terrible, and doubling it once doesn’t seem on the cards). A successful Iraq, though, would be ideal for, for instance, providing peacekeepers in multi-ethnic parts of Syria. If it could return to its pre-Saddam industries of finance, insurance, and farming, it could easily be a model for the rest of the region to emulate. Today, most of Iraq is so peaceful that even State Department officials might feel safe travelling there. Once ISIS is mostly out (July? August?), businessmen will return, but Iraq is going to go through some horrible times if we can’t find a way to fund them through this patch. Reconciliation is a lot harder during times of falling incomes.

    • #67
  8. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Kate Braestrup:

    How do you continue a war if the American people are fed up with what they see (rightly or wrongly) as a bloody mess, and further investment of blood and treasure will simply be throwing good money after bad?

    …..

    That’s the fruit of mishandling it from the beginning. Success and order would have made the anti-war attacks ineffective. Otherwise it’s difficult to combat disingenuousness, naivete, and misinformation.

    But by the time President Obama was pulling out, the blood wasn’t flowing so much anymore and the spent treasure may have been able to provide some returns in the near future. As it is, we have more blood and instability. Not American blood, to be sure, but wasted and unnecessary blood considering the state of affairs prior to pullout.

    • #68
  9. Majestyk Member
    Majestyk
    @Majestyk

    Kate Braestrup:

    How do you continue a war if the American people are fed up with what they see (rightly or wrongly) as a bloody mess, and further investment of blood and treasure will simply be throwing good money after bad?

    Your first sentence is where I place the blame squarely at the feet of the Bush Administration.  War is not merely about killing people and breaking stuff – you have to win hearts and minds in the field and at home.

    The Bush Administration simply ceded the home battlefield to morons and demagogues both rhetorically and through their actions such that by the time they’d gotten their arms around the problem to the extent that relative stability was returning to Iraq after the Surge and the Anbar awakening this narrative had irrevocably taken hold.

    I place the blame for ISIS’s very existence in the region (and their hugely successful territorial ambitions) squarely on Barack Obama’s head for his mulish insistence that American forces be withdrawn from Iraq post haste, and the fact that in doing so he created a hostile working environment with the Iraqi Civil Authorities in order to justify such withdrawal.

    The notion that the marginal cost of having our soldiers (already in uniform and under arms) inhabit infrastructure that we had already built in a foreign country was some sort of limiting factor simply can’t be taken seriously.  The Obama Administration’s budget deficits during those years were above $1 trillion, the majority of that deficit being additional domestic spending.  That goes to show you that the only deficit Democrats hate is $1 spent on defense.

    • #69
  10. Sandy Member
    Sandy
    @Sandy

    James Of England:

    Salvatore Padula:Misthiocracy: “The US has had forces in Germany, Japan, and South Korean for over six decades.

    Maintaining a military presence over the long-term is a prerequisite for successful regime change.

    If a country isn’t willing to invest the resources then do not pretend that regime change is the goal.”

    1) The US occupations following the Second World War faced no resistance. Constabulary troopers were not blown up walking the streets of Frankfurt in 1946.

    2) Regime change does not require a long term military presence. It is effectuated when the existing regime is replaced by something else. Whether or not the replacement is an improvement may require continued occupation, but that is a separate question.

    3) In any case, I don’t think that occupation is as generally essential to the replacement of the existing regime with a better one as you’ve claimed. We effected successful regime change in Serbia without any ground presence.

    4) Despite the previous points, I agree with you that a sustained occupation of Iraq was necessary (though not sufficient) to effect a successful replacement of the Baathist regime with one superior to it.

    I don’t think a continued occupation of Iraq was necessary after 2012. A commitment to help with air power, drones, etc. if needed, and intervention in Syria would have been more than enough (either would have been sufficient, although both would have been better) . What Iraq needs is less a EUCOM than a Marshall Plan. It needs accountants who can make it easier to defeat corruption (all Iraqi accountants are trained in the intentionally terrible Saddamite accounting system). It needs more fields desalinated after Saddam literally salted the earth so that people can get jobs picking dates. It needs an America with the leverage to push back on behalf of minorities when the government caves to Iranian or Sadrist pressure to be jerks to them.

    In 20 years time, if Iraq is as free and prosperous as it was in 2013, the Iraq War will look as manifestly positive as the Korean War does today. That will be a powerful disincentive for the dictators of the 2030s to test America when confrontations arise. Iraq particularly needs the money now, as its costs have rocketed (ISIS is not cheap to fight, and the human and structural repair bill will be extensive) and oil prices have plummeted.

    An allied Iraq that we didn’t force into Iranian hands by failing to support them when they needed it would be a wonderful thing. We probably can’t turn Afghanistan into a South Korea (it’s so poor that even if we doubled its GDP, and doubled it again, it would still be terrible, and doubling it once doesn’t seem on the cards). A successful Iraq, though, would be ideal for, for instance, providing peacekeepers in multi-ethnic parts of Syria. If it could return to its pre-Saddam industries of finance, insurance, and farming, it could easily be a model for the rest of the region to emulate. Today, most of Iraq is so peaceful that even State Department officials might feel safe travelling there. Once ISIS is mostly out (July? August?), businessmen will return, but Iraq is going to go through some horrible times if we can’t find a way to fund them through this patch. Reconciliation is a lot harder during times of falling incomes.

    James, it’s wonderful to have the benefit of your experience here.  This has been enlightening.

    • #70
  11. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    James Of England:

    Salvatore Padula:Misthiocracy: “The US has had forces in Germany, Japan, and South Korean for over six decades.

    Maintaining a military presence over the long-term is a prerequisite for successful regime change.

    If a country isn’t willing to invest the resources then do not pretend that regime change is the goal.”

    1) The US occupations following the Second World War faced no resistance. Constabulary troopers were not blown up walking the streets of Frankfurt in 1946.

    2) Regime change does not require a long term military presence. It is effectuated when the existing regime is replaced by something else. Whether or not the replacement is an improvement may require continued occupation, but that is a separate question.

    3) In any case, I don’t think that occupation is as generally essential to the replacement of the existing regime with a better one as you’ve claimed. We effected successful regime change in Serbia without any ground presence.

    4) Despite the previous points, I agree with you that a sustained occupation of Iraq was necessary (though not sufficient) to effect a successful replacement of the Baathist regime with one superior to it.

    I don’t think a continued occupation of Iraq was necessary after 2012. A commitment to help with air power, drones, etc. if needed, and intervention in Syria would have been more than enough (either would have been sufficient, although both would have been better) . What Iraq needs is less a EUCOM than a Marshall Plan. It needs accountants who can make it easier to defeat corruption (all Iraqi accountants are trained in the intentionally terrible Saddamite accounting system). It needs more fields desalinated after Saddam literally salted the earth so that people can get jobs picking dates. It needs an America with the leverage to push back on behalf of minorities when the government caves to Iranian or Sadrist pressure to be jerks to them.

    ….

    James that is an important distinction to make. There is much substantive ground between occupation and complete pullout. I agree that full occupation doesn’t need to be long term and shouldn’t be.

    • #71
  12. user_82762 Inactive
    user_82762
    @JamesGawron

    Kate Braestrup:

    How do you continue a war if the American people are fed up with what they see (rightly or wrongly) as a bloody mess, and further investment of blood and treasure will simply be throwing good money after bad?

    Whether its intellectual laziness or just a natural human tendency to think in parables, we evaluate present threats by analogy to previous conflicts. The Bush administration (especially Wolfowitz) convinced us that Saddam =Hitler, anyone who opposed the war=Neville Chamberlain, and failure to attack=appeasement. After awhile, people begin to think “Iraq=Vietnam.”

    When we are considering (from our armchairs!) what to do about ISIS and Syria, are there lessons to be learned from Iraq, or lessons from Iraq that should not be applied to Syria (or any other war you can think of?).

    Kate,

    If dollars are all you are concerned about then the giant lie of Man Made Global Warming has cost Western Civilization fabulously more. Literally Trillions of GNP have been forever lost entirely, not just spent in a sector of the economy you don’t find exciting. The dollars spent on defense eventually wind up back in the American economy some way. The GNP destroyed by the false Man Made Global Warming hypothesis will never exist anywhere, lost forever.

    In my generation 55,000 died in Vietnam. They were mostly draftees they didn’t have any choice. In Iraq about 5,000. They were entirely part of an all volunteer army. Many of them had seen the Iraq war covered by multiple media sources many of whom were blatantly anti-war before they signed up. Bergdahl was in his late 20s when he signed up and had an anti-war set of parents. How was he coerced or lied to? Many of the men and women who went to Iraq for 2 years signed up for another tour of duty. Why didn’t they recoil in horror and come home? Amazing what a Svengali Wolfowitz was. Once he hypnotized everyone with the force of his fabulous personality (I can barely remember what he looks like) they really stayed hypnotized. Oh, please.

    After Nam, for those who were still watching, came the Cambodian Genocide. Those of us who were honest realized that for want of a better phrase “the Vietnam war was justified”.

    It’s not about blood and treasure. It’s about the mission.  Our focus was distorted a little in both Vietnam and Iraq. If we learn the right lessons we won’t make the mistake again. If just try to put our heads in the sand and cry pacifism then we are guaranteed a third opportunity to learn.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #72
  13. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Kate Braestrup:

    How do you continue a war if the American people are fed up with what they see (rightly or wrongly) as a bloody mess, and further investment of blood and treasure will simply be throwing good money after bad?

    Whether its intellectual laziness or just a natural human tendency to think in parables, we evaluate present threats by analogy to previous conflicts. The Bush administration (especially Wolfowitz) convinced us that Saddam =Hitler, anyone who opposed the war=Neville Chamberlain, and failure to attack=appeasement. After awhile, people begin to think “Iraq=Vietnam.”

    When we are considering (from our armchairs!) what to do about ISIS and Syria, are there lessons to be learned from Iraq, or lessons from Iraq that should not be applied to Syria (or any other war you can think of?).

    I think Vietnam wasn’t necessarily a mistake. It showed people around the world that the US was willing to fight hard to defeat Communism. People mock the domino theory today, but it’s easy to forget how many regimes struggled in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. If the Communists had been allowed to easily topple the South, it seems likely to me they would have toppled more, and the world would have become a bloodier place. Obviously, that argument would have been still easier to make if the Congress under Ford hadn’t acted so shamefully.

    Still, Vietnam was not cheap. Almost 60,000 Americans died. African Americans comprised up to a quarter of the deaths with deeply unhelpful impacts on race relations. Some 9 million people served in the Vietnam era military, from a population of 191 million, and many of them were unwilling conscripts. Many more people made terrible choices in order to avoid conscription.

    People complain about the cost of Iraq, but it’s not on the same scale. 4.8k deaths is terrible, but it’s less than a tenth of the Vietnam number. The army is massively smaller, and is composed of volunteers who are not victims; the army employs mentally healthier and more impressive men than you find in the population at large. The Kerry crack about education has become entirely without factual basis.

    And it won. The violent death rate in Iraq in 2010 was lower than in St. Louis or in Mexico. I’m not saying I want to live in St. Louis, but that’s as low a death rate as you can expect to bring to a violent area (the peacekeeping forces/ police in St. Louis are numerous, and have been there a long time, but there appears to be an irreducible minimum level of violence.)

    • #73
  14. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    James Gawron:

    Kate Braestrup:

    How do you continue a war if the American people are fed up with what they see (rightly or wrongly) as a bloody mess, and further investment of blood and treasure will simply be throwing good money after bad?

    Whether its intellectual laziness or just a natural human tendency to think in parables, we evaluate present threats by analogy to previous conflicts. The Bush administration (especially Wolfowitz) convinced us that Saddam =Hitler, anyone who opposed the war=Neville Chamberlain, and failure to attack=appeasement. After awhile, people begin to think “Iraq=Vietnam.”

    When we are considering (from our armchairs!) what to do about ISIS and Syria, are there lessons to be learned from Iraq, or lessons from Iraq that should not be applied to Syria (or any other war you can think of?).

    Kate,

    If dollars are all you are concerned about then the giant lie of Man Made Global Warming has cost Western Civilization fabulously more. Literally Trillions of GNP have been forever lost entirely, not just spent in a sector of the economy you don’t find exciting. The dollars spent on defense eventually wind up back in the American economy some way. The GNP destroyed by the false Man Made Global Warming hypothesis will never exist anywhere, lost forever.

    In my generation 55,000 died in Vietnam. They were mostly draftees they didn’t have any choice. In Iraq about 5,000. They were entirely part of an all volunteer army. Many of them had seen the Iraq war covered by multiple media sources many of whom were blatantly anti-war before they signed up. Bergdahl was in his late 20s when he signed up and had an anti-war set of parents. How was he coerced or lied to? Many of the men and women who went to Iraq for 2 years signed up for another tour of duty. Why didn’t they recoil in horror and come home? Amazing what a Svengali Wolfowitz was. Once he hypnotized everyone with the force of his fabulous personality (I can barely remember what he looks like) they really stayed hypnotized. Oh, please.

    After Nam, for those who were still watching, came the Cambodian Genocide. Those of us who were honest realized that for want of a better phrase “the Vietnam war was justified”.

    It’s not about blood and treasure. It’s about the mission. Our focus was distorted a little in both Vietnam and Iraq. If we learn the right lessons we won’t make the mistake again. If just try to put our heads in the sand and cry pacifism then we are guaranteed a third opportunity to learn.

    Regards,

    Jim

    I would like to be noted that although I posted 40 seconds after Jim and could have retyped his comment in that time, I probably could not have reworded it as extensively as I appear to have done. Still, I think that Jim’s is the superior version and replies to this argument should be to his comment.

    • #74
  15. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    No Iraq war. That simple. We had no reason, and no benefit, in overthrowing Saddam.

    1) Thousand of US soldier’s lives spared.

    2) Trillions of dollars not wasted on a fool’s errand.

    3) No Iranian domination over Iraq.

    4) No Jihadi presence in Syria to spark up the civil war there, which resulted in ISIS.

    5) No massive increase in oil prices which gave Russia money to become aggressive

    6) No massive increases in oil prices to hurt the US economy

    7) No massive mis-allocation of funds from the US military which took money that would have gone for more needed equipment and training, and dumped into a big hole in the ground to be burned on silly “counter-insurgency” equipment and training.

    8) No massive increases in military budgets, and subsequently massive increases in US government spending. All wasted money.

    9) No…obviously…made up propaganda from the US government which diminished our reputation and trustworthiness in the world.

    Nothing good came out of that war. Too many bad things came out of it, which are still haunting us, and will haunt us for decades more.

    PS: I suspect most “conservatives” know this to be true. But they can’t get themselves to admit it. Not only can’t they admit that it was a bad idea in hindsight, but that it was a bad idea even before the idea came up.

    • #75
  16. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Ed G.:

    James Of England:

    Salvatore Padula:

    James that is an important distinction to make. There is much substantive ground between occupation and complete pullout. I agree that full occupation doesn’t need to be long term and shouldn’t be.

    I don’t think that an “occupation” without meaningful numbers of ground troops is an occupation. I’m happy to begrudgingly accept the term being used of Germany but I don’t think that Britain is currently occupied. I am kind of amused by the idea that FDR ended the empire through pressure, which is sort of a regime change, and that this is thus an example of a multi-decade occupation successfully making regime change stick.

    • #76
  17. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    AIG:No Iraq war. That simple. We had no reason, and no benefit, in overthrowing Saddam.

    1) Thousand of US soldier’s lives spared.

    2) Trillions of dollars not wasted on a fool’s errand.

    3) No Iranian domination over Iraq.

    4) No Jihadi presence in Syria to spark up the civil war there, which resulted in ISIS.

    5) No massive increase in oil prices which gave Russia money to become aggressive

    6) No massive increases in oil prices to hurt the US economy

    7) No massive mis-allocation of funds from the US military which took money that would have gone for more needed equipment and training, and dumped into a big hole in the ground to be burned on silly “counter-insurgency” equipment and training.

    8) No massive increases in military budgets, and subsequently massive increases in US government spending. All wasted money.

    9) No…obviously…made up propaganda from the US government which diminished our reputation and trustworthiness in the world.

    Nothing good came out of that war. Too many bad things came out of it, which are still haunting us, and will haunt us for decades more.

    PS: I suspect most “conservatives” know this to be true. But they can’t get themselves to admit it. Not only can’t they admit that it was a bad idea in hindsight, but that it was a bad idea even before the idea came up.

    AIG, it’s a difference of opinion and not an inability to be honest with ourselves. We can discuss the matter, but let’s at least do each other the honor of assuming intellectual honesty and intellectual maturity. Being wrong doesn’t make you disingenuous.

    • #77
  18. user_1030767 Inactive
    user_1030767
    @TheQuestion

    I can’t find who said it, but someone made the point that Saddam Hussein (or one of his sons) in charge of Iraq with Obama as president of the US would have been a catastrophe.  That’s an important point I had not thought of.  Saddam with Obama would be at least as bad as ISIS with Obama.  I think there were clearly great benefits to toppling Saddam, and my gut feeling is it was worth it, but that’s just a guess.

    • #78
  19. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    Ed G.:

    Mark:

    Ed G.:

    …..

    …..The Japan analogy (and Germany, for that matter) does not apply here. In those cases (1) we destroyed those societies and their infrastructures completely with disregard for the distinction between civilian and military, (2) those devastated societies were left isolated and no one was going to continue to supply them with moral, religious or material support – were the Japanese going to get aid from sympathizers in Korea and China? If they didn’t like us, what were their alternatives – the Russians?

    Right, I agree they’re not analogous examples. It would have been far more difficult, costly, and time consuming to achieve complete destruction and then rebuild them. That’s not what we did in either Afghanistan or Iraq. In both cases it seems that we had a society being unwillingly ruled. I would think it a reasonable proposition that restoring these societies to their own will would have had teh potential for much more benefit than merely eliminating whatever factions we detested and then leaving these other groups to clean up.

    Restore these societies to what?  No matter how long we were there when we leave they will revert.  The longer we stay the more we become emmeshed in the intercine sectarian and tribal strife that dominates these cultures – ther is no “one” united society to restore.  Yes, if everything went exactly as we gamed it out in our minds beforehand then yes, everything would be hunky-dory.  But that is not the real world.  We have the evidence right in front of us both domestically and in the Middle East.

    I’m with Victor Davis Hanson on this.  Americans unite behind Jacksonian military action.  Go in, do the job, go home.

    • #79
  20. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    Michael Sanregret:I can’t find who said it, but someone made the point that Saddam Hussein (or one of his sons) in charge of Iraq with Obama as president of the US would have been a catastrophe. That’s an important point I had not thought of. Saddam with Obama would be at least as bad as ISIS with Obama. I think there were clearly great benefits to toppling Saddam, and my gut feeling is it was worth it, but that’s just a guess.

    Since we’re spinning hypotheticals do you think Obama gets elected, or even nominated, if there is not an Iraq war in 2003 and its aftermath?

    • #80
  21. user_1029039 Inactive
    user_1029039
    @JasonRudert

    Mark:

    Michael Sanregret:I can’t find who said it, but someone made the point that Saddam Hussein (or one of his sons) in charge of Iraq with Obama as president of the US would have been a catastrophe. That’s an important point I had not thought of. Saddam with Obama would be at least as bad as ISIS with Obama. I think there were clearly great benefits to toppling Saddam, and my gut feeling is it was worth it, but that’s just a guess.

    Since we’re spinning hypotheticals do you think Obama gets elected, or even nominated, if there is not an Iraq war in 2003 and its aftermath?

    No. NOOOOO. The GWOT made Obama.

    • #81
  22. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    As for Abu Ghraib you must be joking. Of course, we don’t want abuse of enemy prisoners. We followed up and stopped it. However, you are now watching ISIS torture, rape, behead non-combatants! They aren’t stopping it they’re filming it, editing it like a music video, and posting it on YouTube proud of their work!

    Jim—really—I’m not saying we wanted to abuse enemy prisoners! I’m not saying we deliberately set out to abuse enemy prisoners, or even that we did abuse enemy prisoners as a general rule! I’m saying that there are  lessos to be learned from Abu Ghraib—-not the scandal, but the actual place.

    I’d better repeat that, because otherwise it won’t get through: I’m not talking about the “Abu Ghraib Scandal” or the behavior that provoked the scandal. Not at all.

    I have friends who served at Abu Ghraib, and they did honorable, sometimes downright miraculously humane and effective work under appalling conditions. They came home to find that they couldn’t even say the name of the place where they’d served without being accused of “water boarding” people.

    Originally build by the British during the time of the Mandate, Abu Ghraib prison became a notorious torture facility under Saddam. “They’ll take you to Abu Ghraib” was a terrifying threat in Saddam’s Iraq. In the looting that followed our invasion, the hated prison received enthusiastic destructive attention.

    Nonetheless, enough of the original structures remained that , when the US belatedly realized it was going to need a place to put prisoners we hurriedly resurrected Abu Ghraib in August of ’03 and started stuffing prisoners into it. (Locals tried to persuade us that the place had seriously bad juju, but we were in a rush, so we ignored them.)

    The population of the prison quickly skyrocketed far beyond its modest capacity. By October (when the NG unit that included Charles Graner, Lyndiee England et al) arrived,  the place was grossly overcrowded and  undermanned, it was unsanitary and had completely inadequate medical care, the food was so bad it was making people sick (the riot that led to the presence of those twelve guys in the Hard Site  was begun over the quality of the food) and  there weren’t enough interrogators or translators to interview prisoners. Thus, Iraqi men (breadwinners and protectors of their families) could languish for months before anyone got around to finding out if they were actually dangerous or not. There were children as young as eight in our prison, along with the elderly and infirm and mentally ill,  all mixed in with bona fide terrorists of various, sometimes mutually antagonistic persuasions. Oh,  and women (who had their own quarters in the Hard Site).

    Abu Ghraib was a mess, and it became a mess because, as I said, Detainee Ops tends to be one of the uninteresting activities that the “real” soldiers hand off to the National Guard. All detention facilities in Iraq had been placed in the hands of Janice Karpinski, a National Guard part-time commander with no experience in detainee operations and not much else to recommend her either—what does that tell you?

    As long as you’re asking, (I know, you didn’t…!) the real scandal wasn’t what seven bored, ignorant bullies did that night at the Hard Site. It was the embarrassingly poor condition of the whole place. The international press corps really dropped the ball  on this, IMHOP, probably because they don’t think detainee ops are sexy either.

    In cynical moments, I’m convinced that the only reason they paid attention to the Graner-England photo shoot was that there were those icky pictures of naked people. (Porn, in other words.)

    Oh—and the place was inadequately defended, too, so that when the scandal broke, and Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib, or FOBAG, came under daily rocket and mortar fire in 2004, our prisoners had no shelter. At least one child, held in our custody and therefore under our care and protection,  died in one of the mas-cas attacks in April. It was unconscionable—America is better than that.

    Once FOBAG was under the command of someone who actually knew what he was doing, it improved tremendously. But by then, the damage was done.

    And so—-Lesson Learned, anyone?— in the next great nation-building adventure, we need to do a much better job on detainee ops. It matters.

    • #82
  23. Sandy Member
    Sandy
    @Sandy

    Mark:

    Michael Sanregret:I can’t find who said it, but someone made the point that Saddam Hussein (or one of his sons) in charge of Iraq with Obama as president of the US would have been a catastrophe. That’s an important point I had not thought of. Saddam with Obama would be at least as bad as ISIS with Obama. I think there were clearly great benefits to toppling Saddam, and my gut feeling is it was worth it, but that’s just a guess.

    Since we’re spinning hypotheticals do you think Obama gets elected, or even nominated, if there is not an Iraq war in 2003 and its aftermath?

    Was there a crash in 2008?  Was he the man who was going to cleanse us of our racist sins?  Was John McCain the GOP candidate?

    • #83
  24. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Jim: In my generation 55,000 died in Vietnam. They were mostly draftees they didn’t have any choice. In Iraq about 5,000. They were entirely part of an all volunteer army. Many of them had seen the Iraq war covered by multiple media sources many of whom were blatantly anti-war before they signed up. Bergdahl was in his late 20s when he signed up and had an anti-war set of parents. How was he coerced or lied to? Many of the men and women who went to Iraq for 2 years signed up for another tour of duty. 

    My son joined the Marines in 2004 and served 8 years.

    (Why do you persist in thinking I’m a pacifist?)

    • #84
  25. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    I think Vietnam wasn’t necessarily a mistake. It showed people around the world that the US was willing to fight hard to defeat Communism. People mock the domino theory today, but it’s easy to forget how many regimes struggled in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. If the Communists had been allowed to easily topple the South, it seems likely to me they would have toppled more, and the world would have become a bloodier place.

    I agree.

    I’m very encouraged by what you’ve had to say about Iraq, James. From the way you talk about the country, it’s obvious you really like the people you met there,  and want the best for them. It reminds me of the affection my father, who was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, developed for the Vietnamese. I’d just about managed to persuade him to take a trip to Vietnam with me about a month before he died—maybe my Iraq vet buddy and I will live long enough to travel to a peaceful Iraq together after all!

    • #85
  26. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Mark:

    Ed G.:

    Mark:

    Ed G.:

    …..

    …..The Japan analogy (and Germany, for that matter) does not apply here. In those cases (1) we destroyed those societies and their infrastructures completely with disregard for the distinction between civilian and military, (2) those devastated societies were left isolated and no one was going to continue to supply them with moral, religious or material support – were the Japanese going to get aid from sympathizers in Korea and China? If they didn’t like us, what were their alternatives – the Russians?

    Right, I agree they’re not analogous examples. It would have been far more difficult, costly, and time consuming to achieve complete destruction and then rebuild them. That’s not what we did in either Afghanistan or Iraq. In both cases it seems that we had a society being unwillingly ruled. I would think it a reasonable proposition that restoring these societies to their own will would have had teh potential for much more benefit than merely eliminating whatever factions we detested and then leaving these other groups to clean up.

    Restore these societies to what? No matter how long we were there when we leave they will revert. The longer we stay the more we become emmeshed in the intercine sectarian and tribal strife that dominates these cultures – ther is no “one” united society to restore. Yes, if everything went exactly as we gamed it out in our minds beforehand then yes, everything would be hunky-dory. But that is not the real world. We have the evidence right in front of us both domestically and in the Middle East.

    I’m with Victor Davis Hanson on this. Americans unite behind Jacksonian military action. Go in, do the job, go home.

    I didn’t argue that the societies to be restored were or must be one unified mass. Just like our own society, I believe in federalism and subsidiarity. I also believe that “No matter how long we were there when we leave they will revert” is a guess. It’s not an unreasonable guess, but neither is it unreasonable to attempt more than Jacksonian military action you favor. I think Americans would also unite behind: go in, do the job, restore order,  reduce quantity of forces gradually, reap benefits of a stable perhaps friendly state or group of states.

    • #86
  27. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Jason Rudert:

    Mark:

    Since we’re spinning hypotheticals do you think Obama gets elected, or even nominated, if there is not an Iraq war in 2003 and its aftermath?

    No. NOOOOO. The GWOT made Obama.

    Do you blame Iraq for the Afghan War and 9/11? Compared to Afghanistan, Iraq’s pretty relentlessly cheerful. The Surge is one of the most positive stories of US military success in history. Afghanistan alone (and backing down at Iraq) would have meant the same stories of death and defeat, but without the victories and without the support of the Muslim world (when I say Muslims mostly stopped supporting terror, it was mostly because they saw people who were ethnically as well as religiously similar to themselves being killed by terrorism).

    The images of Iraqis voting, the capture of Saddam, and other highlights were genuinely helpful. It’s possible that we would have captured Osama sooner, but I’m not sure how much help that would have been (great short term, but after that the fighting in Afghanistan would have seemed even more pointless). We’d have had no flypaper effect shifting militants into Iraq from around the world, so regimes would have been less stable everywhere.

    If the hypothetical is about Hillary’s vote for the war being key to the Democratic nomination then, well, maybe that would have tipped the balance. If the hypothetical is about McCain being electable if the debate was about Afghanistan rather than the Surge, then no, Obama would have won by a greater margin. Franken would have won by more, too, which would have meant that Obama had much longer with a working supermajority and could have passed a lot more laws.

    • #87
  28. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Kate Braestrup:

    I agree.

    I’m very encouraged by what you’ve had to say about Iraq, James. From the way you talk about the country, it’s obvious you really like the people you met there, and want the best for them. It reminds me of the affection my father, who was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, developed for the Vietnamese. I’d just about managed to persuade him to take a trip to Vietnam with me about a month before he died—maybe my Iraq vet buddy and I will live long enough to travel to a peaceful Iraq together after all!

    My mother went to Kurdistan last year on a tourism trip (she lectures on Islamic art, but this was mostly for fun). You could probably take a safe trip to Kurdistan and some of the East this Fall if you wanted. Baghdad might take a little longer, but you probably don’t have to wait too long. You can already get comfortable regular airline flights with Emirates and Turkish Airlines (sadly, Austrian put Baghdad flights on hold last month, but they’re likely to return before the Fall).

    There were adventurous people who were visiting Baghdad on a tourist basis in 2010 and 2011 (when I was out there), but it’ll hopefully be cheaper and easier in, say, late 2016.  The really cool biblical and secular history is mostly around Baghdad, but if you’re into Alexander the Great, nature tourism, and such, you could probably fly today and have some good times. It’ll be cheaper in the Fall, though. Cheaper still if your buddy knows anyone out there who’d be happy to drive around with you (the tour  groups tend to be pretty pricey, but if you’re happy with shabby Eastern European quality hotels, you can book flights and stuff yourself for not too much).

    • #88
  29. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Kate Braestrup:And so—-Lesson Learned, anyone?— in the next great nation-building adventure, we need to do a much better job on detainee ops. It matters.

    I feel bad for snipping an excellent and informative comment; people should read #82.

    Anyway, I wanted to note that Bush’s and particularly Rumsfeld’s autobiographies, and the testimony of the decision makers I’ve spoken to about this make it clear that this was definitely a lesson that was learned.

    Kate Braestrup:In cynical moments, I’m convinced that the only reason they paid attention to the Graner-England photo shoot was that there were those icky pictures of naked people. (Porn, in other words.)

    I think the problem went the other way. I agree with you about what the scandal should have been, but it wasn’t about that. It was about allegations of torture, and they arrived at those by making the pornography being produced less porny, by suppressing the guard on guard pornography and by focusing on the less traditionally porny of the images. Thus photography that was intended to be pornography became something that a dishonest media could claim was an attempt to get information and tie to the CIA program.

    • #89
  30. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    I feel bad for snipping an excellent and informative comment; people should read #82.

    Full disclosure: my son (the former Marine) has written a terrific book about FOBAG which just got accepted by Skyhorse publishers. I’ll let you know when it’s going to be out—this is my very first maternal brag about it!

    • #90
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