So I get how you might have supported invading a country that represented absolutely no threat to the United States back in 2003 (ok maybe I don't), but how could you *still* think it was a good idea now in 2014?

6/15/2014 12:03:54 AM

We've never done anything wrong ever.

6/15/2014 12:17:42 AM

isn't this thread already out there?

6/15/2014 1:31:38 AM

Lock. Suspend.

6/15/2014 7:28:01 AM

^^ Well my original WHERE ARE THE WEAPONS OF MASS FUCKING DESTRUCTION thread has been purged

...and there is one discussing the Iraq war in general, but this one is specifically for people to defend the stupidity of that decision in 2003.

6/15/2014 11:28:32 AM

We've had no 9/11s since then.

6/15/2014 11:58:43 AM

Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

I'm starting to think we should have allied with Saddam and invaded Saudi Arabia if we're going to invade someone.

6/15/2014 12:50:12 PM

I would say it was among the gravest mistakes in all of US History.

6/15/2014 12:53:28 PM

My greatest TWW-wish is that we could see posts dating back to 2003.

There are a lot of people on this forum who thought invading Iraq was a fantastic idea, but have adopted a much more nuanced approach since then.



[Edited on June 15, 2014 at 2:14 PM. Reason : ]

6/15/2014 1:56:36 PM

They'll say the same things they were saying back then.

"But we weren't the only ones that thought Iraq had WMDs, Russia and Germany said so too!!!"

"Iraq would have collapsed on it's own, it's better for us to do it so it can be stabilized afterwards!!!" (This is the only argument that showed any nuance or foresight whatsoever from the pro-war crowd)

"Saddam was a still a threat who was destabilizing the region."

"Look at all those hundreds of civilians Saddam killed, surely they want us to come and liberate them!"

And on and on it went, i'm sure not a single one of them has changed their tune.

6/15/2014 3:57:38 PM

I thought destabilizing every country in the middle east was our goal from the start.

6/15/2014 9:37:00 PM

TreeTwista had a huge hardon for knocking off the evil Saddam regardless of whether WMDs were found or not. Though...I kind of assumed it was all just real solid trolling and the dude actually didn't give two shits at all about politics or Iraq.

[Edited on June 15, 2014 at 10:23 PM. Reason : .]

6/15/2014 10:22:39 PM

I remember the Iraq cheerleaders.

One of the biggest ones won't be back after his incident with Dave, Juliet, and the twins.

6/16/2014 8:33:50 AM

Murricuh son. Murricuh.

6/16/2014 3:38:38 PM

^^ DO TELL

6/17/2014 12:11:05 AM

http://www.policymic.com/articles/91281/6-big-lies-we-need-to-stop-telling-about-the-escalating-crisis-in-iraq

6/17/2014 8:06:00 PM

^ +1

6/17/2014 11:17:45 PM

^^6 common sense phrases somebody put together about the current situation in Iraq.

6/17/2014 11:31:10 PM

we shouldn't have pulled out. we could have spread our seed in iraq had only we kept pushing a little bit longer.

6/18/2014 8:50:07 PM

^^^^ Fuck that shit.

"No one could've predicted things would go wrong. Please don't search for articles from 2003."






[Edited on June 18, 2014 at 8:51 PM. Reason : ]

6/18/2014 8:50:45 PM

I'm not re telling the old embarrassing stories about users.

I will say that if you were a Republican voter in 2003, 99% certain you supported the war AND called people opposing it unpatriotic.

6/20/2014 8:39:45 AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6yLQRF-cEU

Quote :

"I hear people saying we don't need this war But, I say there's some things worth fighting for What about our freedom and this piece of ground We didn't get to keep 'em by backing down They say we don't realize the mess we're getting in Before you start your preaching let me ask you this my friend Have you forgotten how it felt that day? To see your homeland under fire And her people blown away Have you forgotten when those towers fell? We had neighbors still inside going thru a living hell And you say we shouldn't worry 'bout bin Laden Have you forgotten? They took all the footage off my T.V. Said it's too disturbing for you and me It'll just breed anger that's what the experts say If it was up to me I'd show it everyday Some say this country's just out looking for a fight Well, after 9/11 man I'd have to say that's right Have you forgotten how it felt that day? To see your homeland under fire And her people blown away Have you forgotten when those towers fell? We had neighbors still inside going thru a living hell And we vowed to get the one’s behind bin Laden Have you forgotten? I've been there with the soldiers Who've gone away to war And you can bet that they remember Just what they're fighting for Have you forgotten all the people killed? Yeah, some went down like heroes in that Pennsylvania field Have you forgotten about our Pentagon? All the loved ones that we lost and those left to carry on Don't you tell me not to worry about bin Laden Have you forgotten? Have you forgotten? Have you forgotten?"

[Edited on June 20, 2014 at 1:35 PM. Reason : ]

6/20/2014 1:35:03 PM

What would you do If someone told you to fight for freedom? Would you answer the call or run away like a little pussy?

'Cause the only reason that you're here is 'cause folks died for you in the past. So maybe now it's your turn to die kicking some ass

[Edited on June 20, 2014 at 2:03 PM. Reason : ]

6/20/2014 2:02:48 PM

It's funny how conservatives shift their perspective on wars and interventions so readily.

6/20/2014 5:41:24 PM

I wasn't sold on it the first time around. I'm not sold on it now. Nothing has shifted, at least not for me.

6/20/2014 6:10:00 PM

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this thread was created in response to the ISIS business happening as we speak.

I'm no longer 100% convinced that invading iraq was a good idea, but recent events have 0% to do with that.

I'm already sick of the wannabe facebook experts saying, purely as a knee-jerk, that the ISIS adventure is because of us.

We left Syria alone. Syria has a leader of a similar political background with regards to ba'athism, though there's no ignoring his friendship with Iran (a trait not shared by Saddam in his heyday). But, anyway, a pretty strict dictator. And he managed to let his country get totally out of control. (As did, for example, Gaddaffi. A guy we were buddy-buddy with until shortly before his passing)

And what did he do? He gassed his country, repeatedly. No conspiracy about this. Dude used chemical weapons to attack Syrian people.

We come down to the impossible argument. Nobody knows what would have happened had GWB left Iraq alone. But I can look at similar regimes around the middle east and quickly find ones who used abhorrent methods to stem the Arab Spring tide.

I submit the following: Iraq is collapsing not because we invaded, but because it is (along with most of the middle east) a cross-border hodgepodge of fuckery that is finally trying to assert itself in something that approaches natural fucking boundaries. Iraq barely held together under Saddam. At least now the Kurds are getting along with...anybody. Even the Iranians are playing nice, even if they are using the advantage to be dicks at the nuclear negotiating table.

6/20/2014 6:22:47 PM

from my perspective, no.

however, i tend to be more lenient with presidents in terms of military decisions and foreign policy. this is so rarely pointed out, but the president and his cabinet are privy to so much more detailed intelligence than the general public, and to an extent i feel like you have to trust them to make these types of decisions. i'm speculating, but when presidents go against the foreign policy they espoused while running for office, it's mainly because of their new perspective on the political landscape.

although he clearly lacks eloquence, i don't think bush is the idiot a lot of people make him out to be...nor do i think he would have started a new campaign unless he thought it was really necessary. in turn, i think obama's continued involvement in foreign matters, despite public opinion to the contrary, means he feels that the military action is of great significance.

6/20/2014 6:55:44 PM

Quote :

"I will say that if you were a Republican voter in 2003, 99% certain you supported the war AND called people opposing it unpatriotic."

Guess I must be the 1%... Which is one of the reasons I'm no longer a republican

6/20/2014 7:32:12 PM

^^^ You're saying rebels would've captured Mosul while Saddam was in charge?

ISIS-- the Sunni, former Republican Guard militants?

This sort of ignorance is what made you think invading was a good idea to begin with.


^ This is why I wish I could look back to 2003, because I'm 97% sure you're full of shit right now.

6/20/2014 8:50:16 PM

we should have doubled down instead of pulling out.

6/20/2014 8:53:40 PM

God damn it, I hate Benin technology. It just ate my response.

Quote :

"You're saying rebels would've captured Mosul while Saddam was in charge? ISIS-- the Sunni, former Republican Guard militants? "

No. I'm saying that Saddam wasn't going to be immune to the arab spring or to spillover from the Syrian civil war and probable Iranian involvement. That doesn't mean "ISIS in Mosul," specifically.

As things stand now, we have former enemies working together to oppose extremists -- Kurds, the Iraqi government, Iran, and the US. That, to me, is vastly preferable to the probable Saddam alternative, which is that Saddam starts gassing everybody because the West has already proven we don't care when dictators do that.

People act like Saddam had this iron lock on his country and would have been immune to the problems, but much of what you can say about his regime could also be said of Assad's, and look where that got him.

6/21/2014 4:28:10 AM

^so basically you are claiming that Iraq would be in the same (or similar) position it is in today if the US had never invaded (with the exception of Sadaam maybe murdering more civilians, pure speculation)

The US could have avoided 4,000+ casualties and saved $2-6 trillion dollars and Iraq would still be in nearly the same position it is in today. Am I missing something? How is that an argument for invasion?

6/21/2014 8:30:18 AM

Quote :

"We left Syria alone"

Why do you think that is? Perhaps the war-weary US public didn't support *another* war in the Middle East? That capital had already been spent by W.

^+1

6/21/2014 10:35:28 AM

If you don't pay your BUCK O FIVE who will???

The smoking gun...is a mushroom cloud.

6/21/2014 1:24:40 PM

Quote :

"so basically you are claiming that Iraq would be in the same (or similar) position it is in today if the US had never invaded (with the exception of Sadaam maybe murdering more civilians, pure speculation)"

Most of the discussion is bound to be "pure speculation," since it implies a comparison between the world as it is now and a hypothetical world in which we didn't invade invade Iraq.

And that's not exactly what I'm claiming. Honestly I regret some of what I've said in this thread, not because I think it was false but because it presupposed that the OP was making it purely in response to recent world events. I'd just left a similar discussion on facebook and my internet argument nerves were exposed and I responded too quickly in opposition to a claim that hadn't actually been made here, the claim being:

"Iraq is being destabilized by extremists because of the US invasion."

My only effort here has been to refute that statement. My position is that the same shit happening in Syria was bound to spill over into Iraq in a big way, and that Saddam's response to resistance -- especially given the example of Assad left off the hook -- is well-documented in history.

So, let me step back and answer the question without dumping my other argument baggage on it: I still think invading Iraq was a good idea. I think our ideas about occupying and rebuilding Iraq were pretty much all bad once you get past "we should probably rebuild Iraq."

Quote :

"Why do you think that is? Perhaps the war-weary US public didn't support *another* war in the Middle East?"

Well, obviously. I'd throw in the economy surpassing terrorist and international threats as the main concern of Americans, but war-weariness was big in there. So?

6/21/2014 6:19:00 PM

I get that there is a pretty high potential that Iraq would be unstable today regardless of the US invasion. I'd also point out that there are some pretty clear complaints we are hearing from Sunnis that are a direct result of US choices in Iraq. The US invasion was a direct incubator for extremism toward the Al-Maliki government and even worse, extremism toward the US. We know this by listening directly to the disaffected Sunnis.

If you still support the invasion, what is it that you think we've accomplished? If you disagree with our "nation building" how exactly do you think it could have gone better?

Not that it matters. The problem with speculation is it doesn't do a damn thing to help us with the current reality, it just lets us pat ourselves on the back so we can double down on the same bad decisions the next time we are faced with a similar situation.

6/21/2014 6:49:31 PM

Another thing we get from listening to the Sunnis (and everybody else) is that al Maliki has been an ineffective leader who promised a coalition government and then didn't follow through.

Yeah, the invasion was an incubator for extremism. So was Saddam. The guy's regime was a pressure cooker making the majority Shi'ites ever more resentful of the Sunnis he held in power. That powder keg was gonna go off one way or the other, quite possibly in the same fashion as in Syria now. We accelerated the process and didn't do a very good job of managing it, but Saddam had set the country up for extremism and failure.

So, what did we accomplish? We dismantled a regime of bad guys who had done bad things before and vocally expressed an interest in wanting to do more bad things in the future, to their neighbors, to our allies, and to us. We knew Saddam was a shit, we knew that the kids he wanted to replace him were at least as sociopathic as he was (and probably less in tune with reality). We dismantled an army and a government that really enjoyed invading neighboring countries. I have no reservations about saying that these are good outcomes.

I'm not opposed to nation building per se, but we went in overly optimistic about how easy that part would be. We weren't prepared to instill order and restore public services in the early days. We didn't pay enough attention to the divides between Iraqi populations that inevitably blew up. These are all things that could have been reasonably foreseen and understood before going in. And the dismantling of the army and apparatus of government was a bit too thorough.

I don't think speculation is useless or only an exercise in "patting ourselves on the back." Reviewing what went right, what went wrong, what we could have done differently is all useful in thinking about the future. Hopefully we'll never have to invade anything ever again, but history is against us there. And reviewing what happened in Iraq is important to understanding what is happening now in Syria.

6/22/2014 8:12:13 AM

-Our biggest problem with Maliki is he has had expressed US support and backing until very recently. Any hate directed toward him is also directed toward the US. It took an absolute meltdown for the US to even realize that maybe this guy is screwing up.

-Yes, I realize that a Saddam controlled Iraq is probably unstable today.

-The problem with this thinking is where do you draw the line? If you are going to attempt to invade every country that is controlled by "bad guys" or every country that expresses hate toward the US, or every country with expansionist tendencies, well, that's a damn long list and it includes some fairly powerful nations (russia, china, etc). Iraq was some of the lowest hanging fruit and we still royally fucked it up. The secondary problem is when we invade, we are often creating even more resentment in the region toward the US leading to the possibility of more invasions. Its never ending really.

-Of course, you are right that reviewing our decisions is a good thing.

The real problem I have with speculation (and what I was attacking) is when the hand-wringing Cheneys, Rumsfelds, and Kristols of the world lament "oh if only we had [insert minor policy or strategic change], then we would have been successful in Iraq." Its so unconvincing. Iraq has been a turd rolling downhill, gaining momentum and growing in size, for 13 years and its insulting to me that these people think we are so stupid as to accept that. They are just attempting to deflect from the poor decisions they DID make. Luckily, even the brain dead talking heads don't even accept this anymore.

6/22/2014 9:17:46 AM

Quote :

"-Our biggest problem with Maliki is he has had expressed US support and backing until very recently. Any hate directed toward him is also directed toward the US. It took an absolute meltdown for the US to even realize that maybe this guy is screwing up."

Maliki might be screwing up. But the Iraqi's, just like us, get the government they deserve. It is theirs to screw up.

6/22/2014 10:43:34 AM

Quote :

"But the Iraqi's, just like us, get the government they deserve."

That's an odd thing to say. While our government isn't perfect, there's no way to compare it to Iraq's. Or any third world or autocratic government. Their citizens (especially the sunnis and kurds) have very little say in the policies of their elected leaders. Did they deserve Saddam?

[Edited on June 22, 2014 at 11:34 AM. Reason : ]

6/22/2014 11:33:48 AM

freedom costs a buck oh five

6/22/2014 12:36:52 PM

Quote :

"We knew Saddam was a shit, we knew that the kids he wanted to replace him were at least as sociopathic as he was (and probably less in tune with reality)."

Hah, so basically we should have just assassinated his kids and then waited for Saddam to die or be deposed on his own.

Quote :

"We dismantled an army and a government that really enjoyed invading neighboring countries. I have no reservations about saying that these are good outcomes."

Yeah but, we did that in 1991. Iraq in 2002 was in no condition to invade any of it's neighbors.

[Edited on June 22, 2014 at 12:50 PM. Reason : :]

6/22/2014 12:48:28 PM

Quote :

"Our biggest problem with Maliki is he has had expressed US support and backing until very recently. "

Sure. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we did a bad job of aligning our support. That was always going to be one of the hardest things to get right. You have to support whoever gets elected, or else you can't keep working. You can't be too blatant in your support of anybody, or they're a total puppet. But you can't be too lax in your support, or they start getting away from you. Meanwhile you've got a limited set of potential leaders, and most of them are shitheads.

We probably would have been better off if we didn't even pretend to have a national government or elections until years after when we did. Everybody thought we were occupiers anyway, might as well act the part -- and, while we're at it, establish a few semi-functional institutions without interference. Then have the election about when we're ready to leave anyway, so even if we don't like the guy who wins, so what? He asks us to leave and we happily oblige. We have no reason to be involved in the election and can distance ourselves from the winner.

Quote :

" Iraq was some of the lowest hanging fruit"

Part of the reason I was in favor. In the idea world, we would have the power, the national will, and the international backing to start cleaning house. Oust dictators, pressure Russia into real democratic reform, give real support to nations struggling to hold onto democracy in the face of insurgency, corruption, and crime. But we live in the real world, and in the real world, you don't get to go after all the bad guys. So when you really think you've got the chance, I say go for it.

With Iraq we had the capacity, the national will (sadly fostered on bullshit instead of the good, legitimate reasons), and just enough international backing to make a go of it.

Quote :

" The secondary problem is when we invade, we are often creating even more resentment in the region toward the US leading to the possibility of more invasions."

But is that really true, in the grand scheme of things? We haven't done that much invading, historically, and what we have done has a mixed record on creating serious resentment. We invaded Canada twice, they got over it pretty fast. Puerto Rico likes to bitch about Vieques and occasionally try to kill Truman but otherwise, you know, pretty chill about the whole thing, and we straight took their asses over. Parts of Japan still glow in the dark and we treat Germans like untermenschen, but neither of those countries are looking like probable re-invasion targets. North Korea's problem is we didn't finish the job, and by all accounts the Vietnamese man on the street is completely over that whole mess.

The rolling resentment train really gets started in Iraq and Afghanistan, in neither case because of the invasion itself but because of the clusterfuck that ensued. There really were huge crowds celebrating the downfall of Saddam, and there was a long-lived resistance to the Taliban that was happy to see the backs of them. If we could have ridden that wave, we might have two reasonably functional countries on our hands. But we went in and didn't know how to keep Ethnic Group A from murdering Religious Faction B, or even that this was going to be an issue. We weren't prepared to get the lights back on and the water running. Our troops, who had developed a reputation for playing by the rules in recent minor conflicts, suddenly turned out to be awfully eager to shoot civilians, humiliate prisoners, and just piss off everybody in general. Not always the fault of the troops, but our own military apparatus that was dragging people into multiple tours or just out of civilian jobs. All this just to list a few of the problems before we even get to "installing corrupt and incompetent leaders."

Quote :

"Hah, so basically we should have just assassinated his kids and then waited for Saddam to die or be deposed on his own."

Didn't we try, as the first action of the war, to do a surgical strike on all these guys? If it had worked, things might have gone much more easily for everybody. I can envision a savvy general or colonel seizing power and the opportunity to say, "Here, America, come in and look around, seriously, check everywhere, take a gander up my own ass if you want, we have no weapons, please just leave us alone."

Quote :

"Iraq in 2002 was in no condition to invade any of it's neighbors. "

I would have said the same thing about one component faction of the Syrian resistance in 2014, but somehow they managed to invade huge swaths of Iraq, a country with a military equipped and trained by us. If ISIS can get to the gates of Baghdad with technicals and captured Syrian equipment, then I think that a determined Iraq with T-72s and an air force could have done some invading.

Or, if not, it's because the US had military in all of the otherwise invadeable nations in the area.

6/22/2014 5:41:14 PM

Quote :

" If ISIS can get to the gates of Baghdad with technicals and captured Syrian equipment, then I think that a determined Iraq with T-72s and an air force could have done some invading. Or, if not, it's because the US had military in all of the otherwise invadeable nations in the area."

They wouldn't need the US military, Iran would stop that (and Russia would probably lend some aid)

But even if they could, this is an astoundingly dumb justification because if we were worried about Iraq moving into a US-destabilized country we could just mobilize when they started without the need to be preemptive

[Edited on June 22, 2014 at 5:47 PM. Reason : I bet you still support our invasion of Grenada ]

6/22/2014 5:46:43 PM

Iran and Russia didn't do much to help Kuwait. Russia didn't do anything to help Iran when it was invaded.

The second chunk doesn't make sense to me. "US-destabilized country?" Nor do I think "preemptive" is a dirty word. I'd rather stop the bad thing from happening beforehand.

I don't think the invasion of Grenada was necessary or wise.

6/22/2014 5:54:35 PM

Quote :

"Didn't we try, as the first action of the war, to do a surgical strike on all these guys? If it had worked, things might have gone much more easily for everybody. I can envision a savvy general or colonel seizing power and the opportunity to say, "Here, America, come in and look around, seriously, check everywhere, take a gander up my own ass if you want, we have no weapons, please just leave us alone.""

It's not a surgical strike if you tell them you're coming lol. We could have taken those guys out well before threatening a land invasion, before they had their guards up.

Quote :

"I would have said the same thing about one component faction of the Syrian resistance in 2014, but somehow they managed to invade huge swaths of Iraq, a country with a military equipped and trained by us. If ISIS can get to the gates of Baghdad with technicals and captured Syrian equipment, then I think that a determined Iraq with T-72s and an air force could have done some invading."

Yeah, I can't buy this. What ISIS did wasn't remarkable, they basically moved into territory where the local populace felt the government in Baghdad no longer represented them. They didn't meet any real resistance, Iraqi security forces mostly dropped their weapons and fled. If Saddam was planning on invading a neighbor with his ancient Russian rust buckets, I say let him try, and just like in 1991 we'd have the whole world behind us to put a stop to it.

6/22/2014 6:06:38 PM

Quote :

"We could have taken those guys out well before threatening a land invasion, before they had their guards up."

I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of assassinating one person, let alone three. How many times did we try to get Castro?

Quote :

"If Saddam was planning on invading a neighbor with his ancient Russian rust buckets, I say let him try, and just like in 1991 we'd have the whole world behind us to put a stop to it."

You know, if there's one thing recent events prove, it's that "the whole world" won't lift a finger when one country invades another. See Ukraine.

6/23/2014 4:03:16 AM

The whole world is a little more scared of Russia than they would have been of Iraq, particularly after already thrashing Iraq once before.

6/23/2014 8:30:51 AM

Sure. I'm not expecting NATO to saddle up and march on Moscow, but you have to admit the response was pretty wimpy. Then we throw in the collective "meh" over chemical weapons being used in Syria. It's not a pattern of firm responses lately, from anybody.

6/23/2014 10:36:26 AM

I think it's just a sign of developed nations becoming less and less dependent on oil from those parts of the world, plain and simple. You've got the EU pushing towards renewable energy and we're fracking our way to all this ng, it's just not worth it to us to care anymore.

6/23/2014 11:06:43 AM