[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Outstanding article....

[G8 Diplomat]

Whoa, yeah...that is a great article.

The Iraq war was entirely worth it. Iraq is a completely different country now. We’ve seen it go from an enemy to a friend. Once it was ruled by a brutal dictator who killed his own people and invaded his neighbors, now it is a democracy with zoos, stadiums, parks, schools, and a legislative body that passes more laws than Congress and has enough sense to cut spending when revenue is low, and has this year made Christmas an official holiday (while the ACLU tries to ban it here).

And for all the libs whining about a civil war, I once saw a picture of an Iraqi holding a poster with a portrait of President Bush on it, and underneath was written “Batal al-Salaam”...and that means “Hero of the Peace.”

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ernest. What happened in Iraq is, we used conventional forces to liberate a country, and then, slowly but surely -- more rapidly in the past 18 months -- beat a fanatical insurgency which was financed and supplied (and partially recruited) from outside the country, still using conventional forces. By contrast, in Afghanistan from 1979 - 1989, the Russkies suffered 13,833 casualties and 11,381 combat deaths, along with 450,000+ non-combat injuries/illnesses, and losses of 147 tanks, 1315 APCs, 114 planes, and 333 helicopters. * *

[Marine_Uncle]

Almost everything went right, including the earliest attempts to consider trying to install the disenfranchised Iraqi Army most made up of Sunni, and many supporters of Saddam. It was the right thing to do because it showed the Iraqi we where willing to give them a try. When it was quite obvious the resurrection was not possible the US then put in place a recruitment program to build a new Iraqi Army and later Police force that would hold allegiance to Iraq, not to some particular ideology.
Of course Bremmer and company should not have gone along with the UN butting in and controlling how the Iraqi voting system would be set up. That was about the only negative I see coming out in all this. They should have had a system built into their new constitution based on the popular vote, not one where Iraqi would vote for a political party.
That's my two cents.