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.

 

Published in Foreign Policy, General
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  1. Majestyk Member
    Majestyk
    @Majestyk

    FloppyDisk90:

    Majestyk:

    FloppyDisk90:

    Much of this reads as if you’re OK with murderous thuggery as long as it’s pro-US murderous thuggery. Remember that Saddam was our friend prior to becoming our enemy.

    So was Josef Stalin. He was our enemy before he was our ally before he was our enemy again. Unreal. How could we do such a thing?

    You misunderstand: Nations have permanent interests, not permanent allies.

    So all the shirt rending I read about gassing Kurds and rape rooms is really just a smokescreen for Realpolitik calculus?

    When we have allied ourselves with unsavory characters in the past I think that it’s been a matter of necessity and not a matter of preference.  I mean, could you ever entirely divorce Realpolitik from the actions of nations?

    I think that the complaints were legitimate – and you could extend them further to the depredations which Iraq committed in the Iran/Iraq war, but obviously, that would carry with it the whiff of our tolerance of it from that time – but for ultimately justifiable reasons.

    When we funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan (people who later became… the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden!) we were funding what boiled down to essentially terrorism.

    It was better than the alternative: allowing the Soviets to dominate Afghanistan and to use a genuinely ruthless hand in doing so.

    • #121
  2. FloppyDisk90 Member
    FloppyDisk90
    @FloppyDisk90

    Majestyk:

    FloppyDisk90:

    Majestyk:

    FloppyDisk90:

    Much of this reads as if you’re OK with murderous thuggery as long as it’s pro-US murderous thuggery. Remember that Saddam was our friend prior to becoming our enemy.

    So was Josef Stalin. He was our enemy before he was our ally before he was our enemy again. Unreal. How could we do such a thing?

    You misunderstand: Nations have permanent interests, not permanent allies.

    So all the shirt rending I read about gassing Kurds and rape rooms is really just a smokescreen for Realpolitik calculus?

    When we have allied ourselves with unsavory characters in the past I think that it’s been a matter of necessity and not a matter of preference. I mean, could you ever entirely divorce Realpolitik from the actions of nations?

    I think that the complaints were legitimate – and you could extend them further to the depredations which Iraq committed in the Iran/Iraq war, but obviously, that would carry with it the whiff of our tolerance of it from that time – but for ultimately justifiable reasons.

    When we funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan (people who later became… the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden!) we were funding what boiled down to essentially terrorism.

    It was better than the alternative: allowing the Soviets to dominate Afghanistan and to use a genuinely ruthless hand in doing so.

    I’m honestly flabbergasted by this assessment.  Planting the seeds of 9/11 was a better alternative than letting the Soviets establish hegemony in Afghanistan?  Really?  Why care about Soviet rule of Afghanistan if not for the squishy humanistic reasons you seemingly dismiss when it suits your convenience?

    • #122
  3. Majestyk Member
    Majestyk
    @Majestyk

    FloppyDisk90:

    I’m honestly flabbergasted by this assessment. Planting the seeds of 9/11 was a better alternative than letting the Soviets establish hegemony in Afghanistan? Really? Why care about Soviet rule of Afghanistan if not for the squishy humanistic reasons you seemingly dismiss when it suits your convenience?

    You think that breaking the Soviet Union on the wheel in Afghanistan was a valueless proposition?

    You aren’t one of these people who think that we ought to only hire Mormon Missionaries as our spies and operatives in the field, right?

    On the topic of OBL: he was our ally until he became our enemy.  Do you know any of his history?  His grievance with us wasn’t because we helped him in Afghanistan, BTW.  He hated us because we put troops into Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.  One really had nothing to do with the other.  It just happens that him and his crew were on our side – against the Soviets – in the 80’s.  Bad luck, really.

    Because we employ bad people against our enemies at times does come with a price.  Should our policy with all allies of slightly seedy character be to kill them immediately after they’ve served their purpose?  You don’t get many allies if that’s your plan.

    The seeds of 9/11 were planted when Gabriel dictated the Koran to Muhammad – Osama Bin Laden was just its latest messenger who managed to land a punch on us.  If you’re looking around for somebody to blame for that, try Bill Clinton, who instead bombed Aspirin Factories or something when stained dresses were in the headlines.

    • #123
  4. FloppyDisk90 Member
    FloppyDisk90
    @FloppyDisk90

    @123,

    The Soviet Union was broken by a combination of Reagan’s Cold War build-up and long run systemic inefficiencies that eventually caught up to it.  Attributing the collapse of the Soviet Union on sending a few Stinger missiles to the mujahideen is wishful thinking.  We indeed royally <CoC violation> in helping Bin Laden along in Afghanistan.  Who knows, maybe if we’d stayed out of it he’d be gummy matter under the treads of a BMP.  But we’ll never know because we were more focused on preventing the Soviet Union from acquiring a worthless, land locked tribe of opium growers. 

    • #124
  5. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    Calvin Coolidg:

    Then how do you explain this? http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/iraq.uranium/

    Or this?http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0

    http://news.yahoo.com/chemical-weapons-found-in-iraq-nyt-report-135347507.html

    Or that?

    Give me a break!

    You’re intelligent enough to know what these articles are saying, and you know we’ve had this conversation before.

    Yet here we are in 2015, still discussing this.

    The uranium was left over from the 1981 reactor. It was all accounted for, inspected and collected well before 2003. It wasn’t “hidden”.

    Same for the chemical weapons. 100% of them were accounted for and collected at a site by the UN inspectors. Most was destroyed. Some was not destroyed, because it was unsafe to do so, and was collected inside bunkers by the UN inspectors.

    These bunkers were later looted after the 2003 invasion, and ended up in the open.

    None of it was hidden, none of it was unknown prior to 2003, none of it was “hidden”.

    Nothing was discovered. This is according to declassified US reports from many years ago.

    • #125
  6. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    Arizona Patriot:

    AIG:Sorry, but Bush did lie.

    I disagree with your points in post #96, but am only going to respond to this one. The accusation that President Bush lied is vile slander. He may have been mistaken about the extent of Iraq’s WMD weapons and program, but he didn’t “lie.” A lie is a conscious, knowing misstatement, not a mistake. You know, like what Kerry did when he came home from Vietnam, threw away his medals, and testified about alleged war crimes by Americans that he never witnessed. Essentially everybody believed that Saddam had WMD. Even President Clinton said so a few years earlier.

    Moreover, lately even the NY Times has admitted that large quantities of WMD were found in Iraq, though it seems that they were old and somewhat degraded.

    No, it was a deliberate lie.

    The NYT article is wrong in that none of the weapons recovered were “hidden”. They were all accounted for prior to 2003. They were collected by the UN inspectors in a single site. Those were weapons which were unsafe to be destroyed, so they were put in a bunker. This bunker was looted after the 2003 invasion…and that’s how they ended up in the hands of terrorists.

    Bush lied because the “evidence” he provided in 2003, was already debunked as a lie in 2003.

    He showed evidence of those supposed “mobile labs”, which well prior to the war in 2003 were shown to be weather balloon vans. You expect me to believe that no one in the CIA or the US military knew what these vans were, but every external observer was able to identify them as such?

    Of course not. They knew what they were, and they still put it out there as “evidence”, and disregarded all other experts who correctly identified them for what they were.

    That’s a “lie”.

    • #126
  7. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    Petty Boozswha:A response to comment #104

    I said at the outset that I was against the war, we did not have enough justification, in my opinion, to go in until Saddam had “fired on Fort Sumter” and convinced the remaining 30% of the US population that it was necessary.

    With the exception that…the arguments like mine, turned out to be true.

    OK. you won the lottery. Who knows, maybe OJ will get out of jail and find the real killers too. I just don’t think rational decision making should be made on that kind of conjecture. Bush and Cheney were very open about not having any new evidence other than what Bill and Hillary and Ken Pollack had seen, they just said they were looking at old evidence with new eyes — these nuts really meant it when they said they wanted to kill us.

    It’s not a lottery. It’s not wild guessing. It’s analyzing the evidence prior to 2003. The only way anyone could have concluded in 2003 that Saddam had an active program, or that this required a US invasion…were people who had already made up their minds irrespective of the evidence.

    What do East Europeans or Albanians have in common with Arabs? 

    I was referring to our track record with nation building, and I notice you edited out my inclusion of Kurdistan, where we really were basically greeted as liberators.

    None of our experience with nation-building prior to that involved nation building in the midst of a hostile population.

    The Germans or the Japanese weren’t hostile populations.

    The Kosovar Albanians weren’t a hostile population.

    The Kurds weren’t a hostile population. Also, we didn’t “invade” Kurdistan. We pretty much let them figure it out on their own. That’s not what we did in Iraq.

    Chalabi was a con-man. 

    So was Charles de Gaulle, but both had come out on top when organizing exile communities and that should have counted for something.

    De Gaulle was a pre-war French general. He was a representative of a government in exile, a continuation of pre-German invasion French government. He had wide support among the population, which was pro-American.

    How does that compare to Chalabi? In no way.

    The so-called “Greatest Generation” put this world policemen obligation on our shoulders – I think that was a mistake – but until we figure out how to delegate it to someone else we will continue to be confronted with challenges like this.

    Fine.

    My criticism isn’t so much a “libertarian” one that we shouldn’t be the world’s police. I’m ok with that.

    My criticism is with taking actions which are clearly obviously, ex-ante, to be poorly thought out, poorly planned, and with no expectations of success.

    I.e., we acted stupidly and rashly. We acted in the way the Left portrays GWB: a wild cowboy who shoots first and asks questions later.

    My criticism is that we deviated 180 degrees from Reagan’s way of handling such things. Our way was to let someone else do the fighting, someone else do the post-war cleanup, someone else to fight their own wars. Not to get ourselves involved in invasions and nation building.

    The Bush doctrine was the anomaly here.

    • #127
  8. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    Michael Sanregret:One other point that occurred to me, it was suggested that ISIS wouldn’t have formed if Saddam hadn’t been toppled. Maybe. However, Boko Haram is very similar to ISIS. It has taken and controls territory, abour 20,000 square miles in the northeast corner of Nigeria. We never invaded Nigeria, which suggests to me that psycho terrorist mini-states are more a product of Obama’s weakness than Bush’s aggressiveness.

    Considering that such groups existed long before Obama, and in that part of the world have a history of such behavior…it’s hardly evidence that this has to do with Obama.

    Boko Haram was created in 2002.

    The Taliban and AQ were created long before. The Muslim Brotherhood dates to the 1930s. Hezbollah and Hamas and Fatah were created long before Obama.

    This isn’t a question of whether Islamic terrorism would exist or not.

    It’s a question of whether they would be able to take hold of parts of Iraq or Syria. They came to Syria as groups of fighters which went into Iraq to fight the US. Of course, Assad is responsible for it too…since he allowed them to operate from Syria. But they were there to fight the US.

    • #128
  9. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    James Of England:

    It’s worth remembering that Zarqawi, who started the chief predecessor to ISIS, started it in Jordan, but was later in Iraq for a while under Saddam.

    No he wasn’t.

    The only “evidence” was that he was in an Iraqi hospital for a few months in 2002. That’s not evidence that he was conducting anything related to AQ in Iraq, or that Saddam sponsored or allowed him to.

    Lots of people go to hospitals.

    He was in Jordan, in Syria, in Iran and other places between those years, and never has there been any evidence that AQ or any Islamic terrorist group was operating inside Iraq at any time prior to 2003’s invasion.

    The only AQ affiliated group prior to 2003 was in Kurdistan, away from Saddam’s control.

    AQ affiliated groups operate in virtually every ME country. It doesn’t mean the local governments are endorsing them or protecting them. It means they have only a feeble control over their own peripheries. If the argument is that we have reason to invade every country where some AQ affiliated group, or AQ affiliated individual resides, or travels through…then that would imply literally half the world.

    Why didn’t we invade Jordan, or Syria, or Iran, or Sudan, or Saudi, or Yemen, or Algeria, or Egypt or…etc etc? Why Iraq? That was the one place they were not operating from.

    • #129
  10. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @

    AIG:

    Give me a break!

    You’re intelligent enough to know what these articles are saying, and you know we’ve had this conversation before.

    Yet here we are in 2015, still discussing this.

    The uranium was left over from the 1981 reactor. It was all accounted for, inspected and collected well before 2003. It wasn’t “hidden”.

    Same for the chemical weapons. 100% of them were accounted for and collected at a site by the UN inspectors. Most was destroyed. Some was not destroyed, because it was unsafe to do so, and was collected inside bunkers by the UN inspectors.

    These bunkers were later looted after the 2003 invasion, and ended up in the open.

    None of it was hidden, none of it was unknown prior to 2003, none of it was “hidden”.

    Nothing was discovered. This is according to declassified US reports from many years ago.

    Where does it say the Uranium was left over from a 1981 reactor? They don’t have one AIG, and never did. And you claimed “NO WMD”. Well I provided plenty of proof there was.

    Declassified reports huh? Prove it.

    Left over from a 1981 reactor? Give me a break AIG.  Why don’t you read all 3 articles, entirely this time. Geez.

    • #130
  11. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @

    AIG:

    He was in Jordan, in Syria, in Iran and other places between those years, and never has there been any evidence that AQ or any Islamic terrorist group was operating inside Iraq at any time prior to 2003′s invasion.

    He was in Northern Iraq for quite awhile. Granted it was Kurdish territory, but he was there. That’s also “Declassified” in case you want to look that up while your finding the rest of the information to prove there was no WMD.

    • #131
  12. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Who was rocketing the prison. Certainly we weren’t. So a merciless psychotic enemy in a war zone rocketed a prison camp and one child held in our custody died as a result. You blame the American Army for this???!!!

    Abu Ghraib was located within 15 miles of both Baghdad and Falujah, and the road between ran right next to the prison. The bad guys’ mortar teams had spotters on that highway with cell-phones, guiding the mortar rounds, since from the highway overpass they could literally look down into the compound.  The prisoners were penned in big cages with no protection from the merciless psychotics whose presence and intentions were hardly a secret.

    After the scandal broke and was, in effect, weaponized, Abu Ghraib became one of the most frequently attacked forward operating bases of the Iraq theatre.

    The Geneva Convention clearly states that when you take prisoners, you are responsible for their care and safety and  obliged to remove them to an area away from hot zones. This has to be an especially binding obligation when mingled more or less randomly  among the bad guys you have taken into custody are large numbers of innocent non-combatants—the  Army’s own estimates were that well over half of the 8-10,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004 posed no threat to allied forces, a number that was later revised upward to 3/4… including children.  

    Yes, I blame the American Army for this.

    • #132
  13. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Mark Wilson:Kate, I think you have two significant and questionable leaps of faith in your scenario. First,

    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.

    Simply declaring that it should be easy is wishful thinking.

    Second,

    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…

    Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just more wishful thinking?

    Oh, definitely wishful thinking, Mark.

    I didn’t say our attack on Afghanistan should BE easy, I said it would (by preference) LOOK easy.  So that the take-away could be: “we can do this again. Oh,  and you over there? If you give us problems, we can do it to you, too.”

    I think this may be akin to the Jacksonian, “get in, get it done, get out” strategy that has been described in this thread, in contrast to the invade-and-occupy strategy actually employed, which I don’t think worked particularly well in Afghanistan. Now that I’ve read all these wonderful posts, I’m a lot less sure of whether it failed in Iraq. Because I’m inclined to want things to work out for the best, I’m hoping I was wrong to be so pessimistic. I’d be very happy if the Iraqis get to have a reasonably decent country after all their suffering.

    If invade-and-occupy is what we choose to do next time, let’s try to make sure we don’t make the same big mistakes again (e.g. Abu Ghraib and Detainee Operations). We will, of course, make new ones.

    • #133
  14. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    AIG:

    James Of England:

    It’s worth remembering that Zarqawi, who started the chief predecessor to ISIS, started it in Jordan, but was later in Iraq for a while under Saddam.

    No he wasn’t.

    The only “evidence” was that he was in an Iraqi hospital for a few months in 2002. That’s not evidence that he was conducting anything related to AQ in Iraq, or that Saddam sponsored or allowed him to.

    Lots of people go to hospitals.

    My claim was that he was in Iraq. Lots of people go to hospitals in country x, but all of those people are, at the time they are in hospital there, in country x.

    I’m not arguing that Saddam was sponsoring him, or that Saddam intended to be helpful.

    He was in Jordan, in Syria, in Iran and other places between those years, and never has there been any evidence that AQ or any Islamic terrorist group was operating inside Iraq at any time prior to 2003′s invasion.

    The only AQ affiliated group prior to 2003 was in Kurdistan, away from Saddam’s control.

    You’ll note that the first claim “not in Iraq” differs from the second claim “In Iraq, but not a portion governed by Saddam”.

    It’s also flatly false, and I’m sure you know it is. There were plenty of terrorists who hung out in Iraq, whether MEK, an Iranian terror group, the Palestinian Liberation Front, the Abu Nidal Organization, and the various Iraqi groups hired to engage in terrorism on behalf of Saddam (bombing Bush 41 and other targets).

    The defensible version of your claim is that the portion of Iraq effectively governed by Saddam cannot be shown to have included active Al Qaida groups. This is true, but the group that became ISIS was still in Iraq under Saddam, and was safe in part because Saddam was in power. I’m not saying here that it was Saddam’s fault. While most of the awfulness in Iraq was Saddam’s fault, there were also horrors that occurred because his rule was too weak.

    It should also be noted that Saddam was the primary sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East throughout his life and that the end of his regime has been tremendously helpful for violence levels in Israel. I wasn’t arguing, as you appear to be suggesting, that Saddam was a key backer for AQ, but I want to put a disclaimer on that disclaimer to say that I think that it was just a matter of time before he became so.

    AQ affiliated groups operate in virtually every ME country. It doesn’t mean the local governments are endorsing them or protecting them. It means they have only a feeble control over their own peripheries.

    Right. I was rebutting a claim that ISIS couldn’t have started if Saddam was in power on the basis that it did just that. I’m not saying here that it’s Saddam’s fault (although, obviously, if he’d been a less terrible leader the area wouldn’t have been in revolt)

    If the argument is that we have reason to invade every country where some AQ affiliated group, or AQ affiliated individual resides, or travels through…then that would imply literally half the world.

    Happily, most of the world will cooperate with us in this stuff. When Boko Haram cause trouble, we don’t have to invade Nigeria to deal with them because we can work with Nigeria. Sometimes cooperation is harder (eg. Pakistan), but so far only Iraq and Afghanistan have actually had to be invaded on this basis.

    Why didn’t we invade Jordan, or Syria, or Iran, or Sudan, or Saudi, or Yemen, or Algeria, or Egypt or…etc etc? Why Iraq? That was the one place they were not operating from.

    Jordan’s been super helpful in the fight against ISIS and has regularly acted as a good ally to the US and a defender of Western values. We absolutely should have provided support for the Free Syrian Army, which would have prevented ISIS ever growing to a position of importance. I think we probably do need regime change in Iran to end its support for terror and developing nuclear arsenal, but the Iranian regime is dramatically less oppressive than Saddam’s, and it thus appears plausible that the regime change can come without an invasion, although perhaps air strikes and more sanctions may be necessary. Western and AU efforts freed South Sudan (although more support there is probably a good idea), and Darfur is mostly peaceful now; it’s possible that there is currently a major AQ presence, but I’m not aware of it. The last AQ presence ended because Sudan was open to being pressured into expelling them and had the ability to do so. We absolutely should be, and are, involved in defending Yemen’s ability to fight and defeat AQ, and the same is true of both Egypt and Algeria.

    Iraq was uniquely awful, and required a uniquely extensive response, but lots of places require responses.

    • #134
  15. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    FloppyDisk90:

    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.

    I’m waiting for you and James to have a conversation because, by his account, Iraq is a beacon of Western values for the rest of the Islamic world and, according to you, it is an ISIS hell hole.

    Until conservatives can get in line on even the broad state of Iraq today (is it broken, is it fixed?) I take their various pronouncements and lecturing on global responsibility with a grain of salt.

    I should clarify that there are parts of Iraq that are ISIS hellholes, and that the last year and the upcoming year look set to be almost as bad as some of the better years from the decades of Saddamite rule. The simultaneous cutting of funds from oil and from ordinary business (a lot of people don’t want to deal with Iraqi businesses until ISIS is gone) and massive new expenditures (a lot of people need new homes, medical care, schools, etc. military action isn’t cheap, the guys whose factories were destroyed by ISIS need jobs etc.) would put any country through a grinder and Iraq is in particular need of reconciliation and good feeling right about now. There’s plenty for every community to feel betrayed about, and no good guys uncontaminated by compromise.

    In 2013 things were working pretty well.

    • #135
  16. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Majestyk:

    FloppyDisk90:

    Much of this reads as if you’re OK with murderous thuggery as long as it’s pro-US murderous thuggery. Remember that Saddam was our friend prior to becoming our enemy.

    So was Josef Stalin. He was our enemy before he was our ally before he was our enemy again. Unreal. How could we do such a thing?

    You misunderstand: Nations have permanent interests, not permanent allies.

    Saddam was never America’s friend. He was an enemy of America that America dealt with. America sold him around 1% of his arms. The vast bulk of the rest was Soviet, during a time when Soviet clients were not generally understood to be allies of the US. It’s true that the US issued loan guarantees to help him buy American goods (mostly civilian), but they did that with everyone, including the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. It’s also true that Iraq got an ambassador in 1984, bringing it to the same level of friendliness as East Germany and Yugoslavia.

    Not wanting Iran to have Iraqi oilfields is not the same as being a friend to Iraq. It’s not even as if the US went to much effort to keep Iran from winning. It’s a classic anti-Western myth, but it’s not one with a grounding in reality.

    • #136
  17. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    FloppyDisk90:

    Majestyk:

    FloppyDisk90:

    …..

    Broken, fixed – the terms have different meanings depending upon what context you’re using them in.

    In my observation the context boils down to if you’re justifying the cost/effectiveness of the war then it’s fixed…”Look! Electricity and voting!”…whereas if the discussion is a critique of leaving then it’s broken…”Look! Power vacuum, ISIS and be-headings!” While these two views don’t necessarily exist in opposition to each other, I think there’s more than a little bit of, shall we say “opportunistic”, interpretations of facts on the ground depending what point is trying to be made by conservative hawks.

    I don’t think it’s particularly opportunistic to say “they successfully built a multi-party democracy with a free media, a functioning economy, better standards of living, education, and such, but it sucks that they’ve been invaded and we should probably help with that.”

    Similarly, after the First World War, the real success story was Easter Europe, where a variety of liberated peoples did pretty well at setting themselves up and making lives for themselves before being invaded by either Stalin or Hitler. It wasn’t opportunistic for people to say a little later “we really like the way a liberated Poland worked out; much more humanitarian and prosperous than before, but it’d definitely be better if it wasn’t for this Hitler/ Stalin stuff”. It wasn’t wrong for Giuliani to say “We’ve done really well in NYC; crime is down, the economy is booming, but the WTC thing is definitely a drag and we should do something about it.”

    Thankfully, Iraq doesn’t need all that much help to kick out ISIS, but the failure to act in Syria delivered a gut punch to the Iraqi economy as well as the beheadings you mention and other horrors.

    • #137
  18. FloppyDisk90 Member
    FloppyDisk90
    @FloppyDisk90

    James,

    This is all nice to know but I still think hawks talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue.  If Iraq was doing so well in 2013, then why the visceral reaction to pulling out the troops?  And the conventional wisdom that a small peacekeeping force was all that was needed doesn’t hold water with me.  Would a small peacekeeping force have prevented the IA collapse at Mosul and Tikrit?

    You can’t have it both ways.  Either Iraq was doing well in 2013 and the ISIS invasion is an unfortunate turn of events compounded by egregious incompetence on the part of the IA or Iraq still had fundamental disconnects in its ability to function as a nation state after 10+ years of effort and metric tons of money and blood.

    Saying, “It was OK but still needed significant support” is a dodge.  You can always make that statement.  It’s a meme, not an argument.

    • #138
  19. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    FloppyDisk90:James,

    This is all nice to know but I still think hawks talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. If Iraq was doing so well in 2013, then why the visceral reaction to pulling out the troops? And the conventional wisdom that a small peacekeeping force was all that was needed doesn’t hold water with me. Would a small peacekeeping force have prevented the IA collapse at Mosul and Tikrit?

    You can’t have it both ways. Either Iraq was doing well in 2013 and the ISIS invasion is an unfortunate turn of events compounded by egregious incompetence on the part of the IA or Iraq still had fundamental disconnects in its ability to function as a nation state after 10+ years of effort and metric tons of money and blood.

    Saying, “It was OK but still needed significant support” is a dodge. You can always make that statement. It’s a meme, not an argument.

    Also—if Iraq was doing well in 2013, does Obama get some of the credit for that, given that he’d been in office for five years by then?

    • #139
  20. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @ArizonaPatriot

    AIG:

    Arizona Patriot:

    AIG:Sorry, but Bush did lie.

    I disagree with your points in post #96, but am only going to respond to this one. The accusation that President Bush lied is vile slander. He may have been mistaken about the extent of Iraq’s WMD weapons and program, but he didn’t “lie.” A lie is a conscious, knowing misstatement, not a mistake. You know, like what Kerry did when he came home from Vietnam, threw away his medals, and testified about alleged war crimes by Americans that he never witnessed. Essentially everybody believed that Saddam had WMD. Even President Clinton said so a few years earlier.

    Moreover, lately even the NY Times has admitted that large quantities of WMD were found in Iraq, though it seems that they were old and somewhat degraded.

    No, it was a deliberate lie.

    The NYT article is wrong in that none of the weapons recovered were “hidden”. They were all accounted for prior to 2003. They were collected by the UN inspectors in a single site. Those were weapons which were unsafe to be destroyed, so they were put in a bunker. This bunker was looted after the 2003 invasion…and that’s how they ended up in the hands of terrorists.

    Bush lied because the “evidence” he provided in 2003, was already debunked as a lie in 2003.

    He showed evidence of those supposed “mobile labs”, which well prior to the war in 2003 were shown to be weather balloon vans. You expect me to believe that no one in the CIA or the US military knew what these vans were, but every external observer was able to identify them as such?

    Of course not. They knew what they were, and they still put it out there as “evidence”, and disregarded all other experts who correctly identified them for what they were.

    That’s a “lie”.

    I think you’re completely wrong on this.  Crazy, whacky, “9-11 was in inside job” wrong to think that it was obvious that Saddam did not have WMD in 2003.

    In fact, we found WMD, though not in the quantities expected; even the countries opposing the war thought Saddam had WMD; and we sent our troops into action with protective gear.  There’s good discussion of this at Fox News, Special Report, in the 2/18/2015 edition of Special Report Online.  Ron Fournier — who made the same incautious “lie” accusation that you make — was called on it, apologized, and backed down.

    • #140
  21. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    Kate Braestrup:

    FloppyDisk90:

    Also—if Iraq was doing well in 2013, does Obama get some of the credit for that, given that he’d been in office for five years by then?

    I think that he gets credit in the “he didn’t take radical steps to mess up a popular program” sense, but he didn’t do much in the way of positive reform and he didn’t manage to negotiated a SOFA that would have been helpful (not so much with violence as with helping influence Maliki).

    There are quite a lot of areas where Obama should get credit for failing to follow through on promises, and while it’s a pretty weak form of praise, many of those retreats from the brink have been extremely helpful to America.

    Sadly, his promise to fix Syria if Assad used chemical weapons was one of the few really positive promises he made and he ran from that with more enthusiasm than he ran from his GITMO closing positions.

    Outside Iraq, Obama does get a lot of credit from me for his continuation and expansion of Bush GWOT programs in Somalia and elsewhere. His decision to prioritize criticizing human rights in Nigeria over helping fight Boko Haram strikes me as nuts, but he’s got a mixed record on this stuff, which by the standards set in other policy fields is pretty darn wonderful. I think it’s mostly because he doesn’t care, so he lets the military do what it wants and lets Susan Rice do what she wants some of the time.

    • #141
  22. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    FloppyDisk90:James,

    This is all nice to know but I still think hawks talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. If Iraq was doing so well in 2013, then why the visceral reaction to pulling out the troops? And the conventional wisdom that a small peacekeeping force was all that was needed doesn’t hold water with me. Would a small peacekeeping force have prevented the IA collapse at Mosul and Tikrit?

    I think for some of them, the reaction to pulling out the troops was partisan anger, for some the low level of casualties never sunk in (much as you’ll find lots of people who think that the UK was a war zone for years because of the IRA; indeed, I went to schools with global maps that marked the school as being in such). AQ was always good at making its violence seem important. For some, it marked the end of US involvement in Iraq, and it seemed clear that economic aid was also going to decline. There was always the possibility of renewed violence, which turned out not to be much realized. Some thought that Iraq was a useful base from which to extend influence over other portions of the Arab world.

    You can’t have it both ways. Either Iraq was doing well in 2013 and the ISIS invasion is an unfortunate turn of events compounded by egregious incompetence on the part of the IA or Iraq still had fundamental disconnects in its ability to function as a nation state after 10+ years of effort and metric tons of money and blood.

    I don’t think that the June rout was particularly important as a marker of general government. Lots of countries suffer the occasional embarrassing military defeat. When the US lost at Bladensburg after decades of effort and metric tons of money and blood (by 18th century standards), that didn’t mean that the country wasn’t awesome, essentially similar to the one Tocqueville marvelled at.

    Of course there were still problems; returning refugee numbers really picked up from 2011-2013, and those will always cause problems. Decades of unending emergency and horror don’t leave people developing lengthy event horizons overnight, and not every Iraqi was as forgiving as most of them have been.

    Saying, “It was OK but still needed significant support” is a dodge. You can always make that statement. It’s a meme, not an argument.

    Economically, I think that it was functioning effectively, but could have done much better with more support, particularly in accountancy training (corruption really is still a problem, and it’s not one that can be fixed without long term and large scale higher education programs that haven’t really happened). It’s a shame that that didn’t happen, and I think with hindsight we can see how helpful it would have been to the West if we’d had a less cash based society for ISIS to loot (looting cash from refugees is much easier than looting bank accounts). Still, you’re right that while Iraq would have benefited from that, it didn’t need it.

    Militarily, there’s no shame whatsoever in smaller countries needing the support of larger countries in the face of external threats. The “slogan” is an accurate diagnosis of Poland’s position, for instance.

    Unless you mean that I’m saying that about Iraq today, in which case you’re misreading me. I think that Iraq badly needs economic aid today, and that it would have been awesome if the US had acted a little more promptly last year, would have been far more awesome if the US had prevented the situation from arising by opposing Assad before that, and it would still be nice if the US could do more today. I think that preventing the Iranians from doing awful things in Iraq would be nice rather than being essential, but the current practice of being a kind of terrible ally for Iraq, Nigeria, and other countries being helped seems unlikely to yield positive results.

    • #142
  23. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    FloppyDisk90:And the conventional wisdom that a small peacekeeping force was all that was needed doesn’t hold water with me. Would a small peacekeeping force have prevented the IA collapse at Mosul and Tikrit?

    Sorry, I should have answered this.

    Yes, a small peacekeeping force with a little airpower could likely have prevented the rout. Iraqis fled, because it seemed as if no one was fighting ISIS, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A handful of leaders were personally targeted with psy-ops and fled, and the troops woke up to find they had no leadership structure. If nothing else, American troops in Iraq had plenty of experience in restructuring Iraqi military command on the fly. A small amount of airpower would have been tremendously helpful in  slowing the ISIS columns, and it was their speed that combined with the confusion to result in a panic.

    That said, the failure of Americans to stop ISIS in June doesn’t rank all that high on my list of poor decisions; I think US influence would have been valuable for other reasons (I mean, with hindsight it would have been wonderful to have knocked back ISIS, but I don’t recall a single expert predicting what happened, so I don’t blame the President for not predicting it). It would have been vastly easier to have accomplished the same goal by keeping the President’s word on Redlines, or by following through after claiming to implement a policy of arming the FSA, or by making commitments to Turkey that Assad wouldn’t remain, or at any number of stages of the Syrian conflict.

    • #143
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