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.”
He doesn’t have the right to the name Lincoln anymore. How does Quisling Chafee sound?
You forgot to mention that Lincoln is also an apparent deep thinker...
Good old Chafee. Like Spector and Crist, another Democrat calling themselves Republican that the GOPe tried to foist on us. McConnell is another one. When defeated or rejected, they go to where they really belong, with the Democrats. For as long as they get away with it, they do all they can to destroy conservatism from the inside—and make themselves rich in the process.
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