Posted on 06/12/2014 12:36:01 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
PROVIDENCE. R.I. — Governor Chafee said Wednesday that the George W. Bush administration kicked “a hornets’ nest” with its 2003 invasion of Iraq, an act that unleashed sectarian divisions among Iraqis that are playing out today as militants continue to wrest control of territory from the faltering government of Nouri al-Maliki.
Chafee offered his views in an interview after the militants seized control of most of the city of Tikrit, hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein. They had captured the city of Mosul the day before.
“I never understood the original push for war in Iraq, never understood the logic of regime change,” Chafee said. “These neocons [neo-conservatives] all through the ’90s were talking the importance of regime change in Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, the strongman. I just didn’t understand stirring up the hornets’ nest that is the Middle East. It just never made any sense to me, and now we’re seeing some of the ramifications of having deviated from our Cold War containment strategy.”
(As a Republican U.S. senator, Chafee was famously the only member of his party to vote against the invasion of Iraq. He later quit the Republican Party to become an independent, and is now a Democrat.)
Chafee said of the containment strategy, “It worked. It worked in Russia. It worked in China.”
He said President George H.W. Bush “did the right thing” during the first Gulf War.
“He pushed Saddam out of Kuwait and continued on with the containment strategy. Then we radically departed from containment and did a unilateral intervention. And the ramifications are not good. I always thought our Cold War strategy depended on strong alliances. Those have been fractured through this misadventure. Obviously, it’s happening in Syria. I just believe in multinational approaches that are respectful of everybody’s positions. We deviated from that respect. We’ve got to try rebuilding those alliances with the Saudis, the Turks, the Jordanians — that’s going to be the key.”
Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat, also questioned the wisdom of the invasion.
“I thought from the very beginning that the policy was inappropriate, based upon the threats in 2003 and also the fact that we had an ongoing operation in Afghanistan,” he said.
“One other factor is the very fragile balance of power between the Sunnis, the Shiia and the Kurds that was shattered by our intervention in Iraq. What we are seeing now is the continuation of the battle between the Shiia and the Sunnis. That battle extends into Syria. There is a great instability that has been accelerating over the last few weeks … a byproduct, although an unintended one, of our invasion in Iraq.”
Reed said he had been skeptical in 2002. “Sometimes people forget that we had U.N. inspectors on the ground, and the Bush administration short-circuited their inspection,” he said. “I was one of 22 or 23 senators to disapprove of that.
”When ask to predict what the picture would look like a year from now, Reed responded, “I think there’s going to be a very turbulent region, not just for a year but for several years. I think you’ll see constant fighting. There’s potential for fragmentation of the country.”
He said the country could break up into three regions controlled respectively by the Shiia, the Sunnis and the Kurds.
Bill Babcock also had some views on the situation.
A member of the Rhode Island National Guard who served in Iraq in 2005, Babcock had been a student at the Army War College when he was assigned to submit a paper that was “a campaign plan for a mythical war” in North Africa, and particularly the city of Tripoli.
It was understood that the “mythical war” and “Tripoli” were actually Iraq and Baghdad, he said, “but this was ’99, before the towers went down.” His plan was to attack and occupy the enemy capital of Tripoli.
“My instructor wrote back, ‘Stay out of Tripoli. How do you occupy a city of five million that don’t want you there?’ That was in ’99, and in ’03 we went in. I think we did what we could for the Iraqis. Now it’s up to them.”
National Guard veteran Sekou Toure defended the invasion, “But as far as us leaving there without a stable regime, that was not a good idea,” he said. “It went down the drain pretty much. I don’t think we accomplished the mission 100 percent because we rushed out of there.”
Wow glad we stayed to train. We really did a great job in training the Iraq forces even these untrained guys are beating them. Wonder how the Afgan training is going? Somebody must be making a mint on training.
we’re back to Bush’s fault? pathetic. Next the Liberals will be blaming President Jefferson for sending troops into Tripoli.
Apparently this idiot is unaware that the sectarian issues had been there ever since the Iraq/Iran war. Heck ever since the Islamic crescent broke into two pieces over 700 years ago.
Well, if we weren’t prepared to stay there for at least 20 years, then yes, Bush did kick the hornets’ nest.
I think that Gov. Chaffee should be required to turn-in his “Christian Name” of ‘Lincoln’ due to his clueless idiocy. No matter how you slice it, the drumbeat for the war with that genocidal Tyrant was across all party lines. In the face of any number of solemn UN resolutions and restrictions, Hussein, with the wink-wink aid of Russia, France and China, played the rest of the world for fools. To state that we could have ‘contained’ Iraq is to arrogantly ignore history!
I knew it would take long to start blaming Bush. Never mind thata Obma was so eager to get out of Iraq that he didn’t even want to negotiate a stabilizing military force there.
Almost everyone seems to have forgotten what led up to the Iraq War. There had been about ten years of UN-approved economic sanctions, and critics were claiming that the sanctions had led to as many as 500,000 deaths among Iraqi children. Iraq had been in constant violation of numerous aspects of the cease-fire agreement signed after the Gulf War. Because of the alleged deaths caused by the sanctions, world opinion was moving towards having the sanctions lifted, leaving an unfettered Saddam Hussein to again wage mischief in the region. That was what prompted Bush to go to war - everything else had been tried, and everything else had failed. There was no “rush to war” as the critics incessantly claimed.
He must have been watching the ever hysterical and idiotic Shep Smith for the last hour. Bush, Bush, blah blah.
Yep.
In fact, Islam itself is a new religion. It only manifested because Bush invaded Iraq. Otherwise these people would be living peacefully like they have been for the past 5000 years.
Damn Bush.
When Bush acts on the threat, they scatter to the wind pretending they never said what they said for years and the media helps them with their lies.
All the left are liars.
My...what a revision of history. Remember how the left bashed Bush for not continuing to Baghdad and toppling Saddam? LIARS!!
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON A NEW BEGINNING Cairo University Cairo, Egypt June 4, 2009
Is Bush being blamed for everything because he is not black?
Obamanation claimed (and took credit for) the victory in 2011. After that, he owns it.
The trust fund child speaks from Providence.
Whatever, punk.
“Well, if we weren’t prepared to stay there for at least 20 years, then yes, Bush did kick the hornets’ nest.”
The Rats forget they were so in favor of the Iraq war they forced a special vote so they could approve it. Also considering how easy the 1st Iraq war was there was good reason to think Iraq war 2 would not be a hornet’s nest. It was the RATs complaining that stopped Iraq I before we could get rid of Saddam which brought about Iraq 2.
Unilateral intervention? Nope it was a coalition of nations with a vote of support by congress. One can disagree with it but a lengthy process was exhausted before we went it.
Unilateral is what Obama does.
He’s partly right, but we also had EVERY RIGHT to deal with Hussain in Iraq as he was violating the 1991 Gulf War agreements.
Even so, the idea that we could build a democracy there with a strong central government was LAUGHABLE from the start and NEVER should have been attempted.
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