Twenty Years After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Was It the Right Decision?

Townhall ^ | 03/22/2023 | Byron York

[TexasFreeper2009]

Take any issue you wish:

The border? I would complete Trumps wall and add towers manned with US Army and machine guns, with orders to shoot to kill.

Illegals? I would have mass round ups in every major US city and then ship them to the southern tip of South America.

Abortion? I would charge the doctors with murder, and the woman and nurses with assisting in a murder and failure to report a crime

The UN? I would leave that POS organization, size their building and kick them out of new york!

The US military deployment worldwide? I would pull the ALL home to guard the border.

NATO? I would say if you want our protection, then PAY UP! (a trillion a year from everyone would about cut it) otherwise, we are out, and you are on your own.

Islamic Terrorism? attack us, and I’d nuke that ugly stone to dust in Mecca

Gays - sent to mental institutions

Capital Punishment - add a TON of crimes eligible for it, and make punishment immediately after sentencing.

Military secrets? We paid US taxpayer dollars for them, and I wouldn’t share the tech with ANYONE even good allies.

I could go on and on, and am the furthest thing from a “neo-con” you could possibly imagine.

[TexasFreeper2009]

OH and I would of built the border wall on the MEXICAN side of the Rio Grande!

[TexasFreeper2009]

Fallujah.. we should of made that into a glass parking lot after they hung our soldiers from that bridge. Then we wouldn’t have had to “keep them busy” because they would of been little shadows burnt into the ground.

[1Old Pro]

Twenty Years After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Was It the Right Decision?

Clearly it was not.

[bobbo666]

If Hussain did not have WMD what was used to murder hundreds of northern Iraqi Kurds? I recall it was poison gas. Gas is WMD.

I guess to many the Kurds are subhuman and their murder does not matter.

[FlatulusMaximus]

This hints at something that nags at me to this day: I recall that Saddam went to considerable lengths to convince the world he HAD WMD, even alluding to a nuclear weapons program. He defied numerous resolutions demanding weapons inspections, so what were we to think? The thought of him with nukes was bloody serious, and I reluctantly supported W’s decision to invade. I agree that afterward we completely screwed the pooch.

[sarge83]

Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner!

If US intelligence was to be beleived it was probably right to invade. However, we had no plans for what to do after Saddam was removed. We then decided to do the nation building nightmare that Colin Powell demanded.

The Iraq war showed numerous chinks in the US’s proverbial armor:

US intelligence is a bloody joke! They lie, they get Americans killed and wounded time and again with their mistakes. They are never held accountable for their failures and lies. They presume to make decisions above their paygrade and they think they deserve to choose the president instead of the people.

The US military while it can kill anything put in front of it quickly was shown to have no forward thinking strategic visionaries. Afghanistan itself showed 20 years of failure on the strategic level. They are not even conventional thinkers, much less out of the box strategist.

The US military does not fight to win at the strategic level and allows American GI’s to die needlessly with their micromanagement of forces on the ground. In Vietnam it was said we fought with one arm behind our back, in Iraq we were handcuffed and allowed to kick with one foot-—sometimes.

I supported the war initially but after 2016 and the behavior of the entire US government and both parties, throw in Covid and one can see the government would rather lie than get near the truth and the people are not to be trusted and are the enemies of the state.

[The_Media_never_lie]

W made a stupid, emotional decision. He enjoyed playing wartime president, but he strengthened Iran, and China learned how wonderful hi tech weapons are. W enabled Obama to be elected because W was too consumed with the war to pay attention to the economy.

Other than the above, there were no serious consequences.

[lepton]

White House legal council informed W he needed an imminent threat to invade, and the WMD stories started one week later.

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The WMD stories had been ongoing for two decades. First because Iraq used them against Iran, and for the second because after the first Gulf War Iran declared them in preparation for turnover for destruction. Many were sampled and inventoried, but never turned over - and were just gone afterwards with no explanation aside from an assumption that Iraq had secretly destroyed them on their own.

[Sam Gamgee]

Yes the inept rules of engagement were and are a huge problem. I concur that it should have been made a glass parking lot.

[lepton]

Bush blames “faulty intelligence”. The fact is HE put neocons at the head of every intelligence agency, the Pentagon and even every office in the White House.

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There was no appreciable difference in the intelligence provided between the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration. The faulty intelligence wasn’t on whether there were the WMDs addressed in Powell’s speech. It was what happened to them, and where the programs to build new ones were being conducted.

[lepton]

I always thought we should have done regime change for Iran instead.

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That was always the plan. Rightly or wrongly, the U.S. government chickened out. The were in Afghanistan on one side, and Iraq on the other...and then they didn’t do it, and then didn’t do what was required to close the Iran/Iraq border.

[lepton]

You mean like the anthrax stockpiles, which were smaller than the planes they buried in the desert and kept hidden until a storm revealed them by chance?

[lepton]

I think Iraq was playing a dangerous game. They wanted the world, and especially Iran to think they had big stockpiles of chemical weapons when they didn’t (Though they did have some.) as a deterrent. So they kept giving the inspectors the runaround trying to look guilty when they were not. It caught up with them because they faked it too well.

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That was clearly at least part of what was going on.

[lepton]

From conflicts in my lifetime, I assert that US operations can effectively be maintained for no more than two presidencies before collapsing into operational morass and strategic failure.

Actual defense would be a different thing, but otherwise the plan must include the endgame and handoff to local or regional control.

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Clearly one of the issues was that the populace would elect someone like Clinton or Obama, who were incapable of not squandering what gains were present and actual.

[lepton]

I think Iran got plenty good idea of what to expect. They instead were allowed to regroup and infiltrate.

[lepton]

Back then I knew that Saddam was not a sponsor of Musalim terrorism.

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He certainly was expanding into that area, though he was farming it out and supporting groups with funds rather than directing or participating.

I did go along with Bushy that Saddam had nukes.

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Why did you go along with something Bush never claimed? Bush specifically claimed Iraq did not in major speeches. His argument was that we couldn’t wait until they did.

[lepton]

The Iraq vs Iran bloody war would have still been going on and the rest of the world would be much safer today...

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You seem to have time-skipped a bit. They hadn’t been fighting in more than a decade.

[lepton]

This hints at something that nags at me to this day: I recall that Saddam went to considerable lengths to convince the world he HAD WMD, even alluding to a nuclear weapons program. He defied numerous resolutions demanding weapons inspections, so what were we to think? The thought of him with nukes was bloody serious, and I reluctantly supported W’s decision to invade. I agree that afterward we completely screwed the pooch.

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He did more than hint he had WMDs. He turned over tons and tons, eventually allowed sampling of tons more, and we found new binary weapons systems awaiting their loading with the chemicals. It is one thing to claim things were not handled right. It is simply delusional to claim he never had them as many now do. The real question that remains is what happened to those he declared, multiple nations sampled so they could be tracked, were secured in closed facilities, and were no longer there after the war.

We did find that many of the expected programs were actually being subcontracted out with funding and manpower to Libya, but he still had plenty of materials that just disappeared.

[Manic_Episode]

According to declassified Hillary emails the real reason for going was to retrieve the mummy Gilgamesh from the Baghdad Museum for nephilim dna or some such.

Not even joking but your mileage may vary.