Iraq invasion and getting rid of Saddam was fine.
After 911 there was no way not to make sure they didn’t have nukes or were working on ways to nuke the US.
That took five minutes.
It was the nonsense of the subsequent years that can be criticized. Same for Afghanistan.
“raq invasion and getting rid of Saddam was fine”
I agree with Trump that Bush-Cheney’s invasion of Iraq was “one of the most disastrous and stupid foreign policy decisions in US history”. From the moment Trump said this in the 2015 South Carolina debate, the Neocons would never forgive him and they started the nevertrump movement. Liz Cheney is a card carrying member. She hates Trump because he called the Iraq invasion stupid and disastrous.
The nonsense of subsequent years was the consequence of the five minute war. Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11.
These were designed to be long and expensive military operations.
NONE of it was fine. It was a fraud from day 1.
“After 911 there was no way not to make sure they didn’t have nukes or were working on ways to nuke the US.”
If Secretary Cheney would have handled Iraq correctly in 1991, there wouldn’t have been a need to go back in 10 years later.
After 911 there was no way not to make sure they didn’t have nukes or were working on ways to nuke the US.
That took five minutes.
It was the nonsense of the subsequent years that can be criticized. Same for Afghanistan
Agree 100%. Actually there was known evidence of WMD in Iraq, both nuclear and biological. The UN inventoried substantial amounts of anthrax solution, and Iraq is known to have weaponized it.
SHOULD we have invaded Iraq? That is a policy question, and we elect officials to make those decisions. In this case, GWB may have been influenced by his father, and an Iraqi intent to assassinate him.
All that said, at this moment in time we should be out of Iraq and Afghanistan completely. We surely have not profited from our involvement there - China has, sadly!
Mostly in agreement but with some different perspective.
The WMD argument was never about nukes. The Israelis took care of that problem in 1981 when they bombed saddams nuke plant while it was under construction outside Baghdad. There was a weak argument that saddam had yellow cake to sell.
The WMD argument was all about chemical and biological. To my knowledge we never found bio but I could be wrong. Chemical weapons were a known fact all the way back to the Iraq Iran wars. Those stores mostly got carted off to Syria just prior to start of OIF. But some were also probably destroyed by allied bombardment.
The other factors were saddams 10 years of violating the letter and intent of the 91 gulf war cease fire agreement. It was a war never concluded and, afte 911, was pretty much all that was needed to justify ‘ending it’.
As you noted, our problem is really in the clean up after ‘winning’ the war. We should not be in the business of nation building, especially when the culture is not attuned to our morales and western thinking. Islam is backwards in so many ways and too many in that cult don’t want to come out of the dark ages.
“ Iraq invasion and getting rid of Saddam was fine.”
Except the enemies were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
We should have won the damn war and gone home.
i hear there is a CIA list good dicators and bad dictators. Some baddies used to be goodies and some goodies are now baddies