Posted on 06/26/2014 6:35:58 PM PDT by marshmallow
Starting in 2003, the United States has made two fundamental mistakes in Iraq, both with strong moral implications. At the risk of oversimplification, they can be summed up like this: the first mistake was going into Iraq, the second was getting out.
The first of these blunders was George Bush’s in launching an unjust and unnecessary war. The second was Barack Obama’s in pulling out before authentic stability had been restored in a country the U.S. had done so much to destabilize. By now we’ve paid heavily for both mistakes. Absent a fresh look at what we’re doing, we are likely to go on paying in days to come.
To understand how America got into this fix, a glance at recent history will help.
Turn back the clock to early 2003. In the face of mounting war fever, whipped up by the White House over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, some of us—fruitlessly, to be sure—opposed U.S. military action.
At that time, my own opposition was exclusively moral. Iraq simply didn’t meet the criteria for a just war. The Iraqis hadn’t attacked us and weren’t about to do so. On what grounds, then, were we proposing to attack them? Preemptive war? But what’s preemptive about attacking an enemy who has no intention of attacking you?
All too soon—and without altering in the least this rejection of the war on moral grounds—the practical folly of this mistaken adventure also became obvious. The Iraqis had no previous experience of democracy and no known taste for it, yet here we were, seeking to impose a democratic system on them in the mistaken belief they would fall in love with it and make it work.
Even so, it was barely possible that the U.S.-imposed solution would work—except for the fact, overlooked.........
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnewsagency.com ...
Not another American soldier can die for Islam. Let them fight each other.
I say we stand off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the
only way to be sure...then declare Victory and come home.
I see; just forget about all those Kurds killed by poison gas. That’s heartwarmingly feeling.
Mr. Shaw certainly has a selective memory. May as well stop reading there. This sort of stuff has become tiresome by now. The war was "launched" by Saddam's brutal invasion of Kuwait ten years earlier. It was not settled, it was in a stasis where U.S. planes were attempting to enforce a no-fly zone in order to prevent another atrocity such as the one at Halabja and were being shot at for their trouble. Saddam was openly disobeying the terms of the cease-fire and defying UN arms inspections. Saddam was supporting existing terror organizations within Iraq at such sites as Salman Pak. Bush was faced with a decision to remove Saddam or risk Saddam supporting organizations such as the one that had just taken down the World Trade Center. Whether his intelligence estimates were correct about the current status of WMDs or not is irrelevant - if they were inaccurate it was because Saddam did his best to make them that way. There was nothing "unjust" about the invasion.
But what’s preemptive about attacking an enemy who has no intention of attacking you?
Either the author is a mind-reader or he doesn't consider open support of terrorist organizations whose intention was most certainly to attack us to be "intention". Spare me the sanctimony, please - Saddam was a monster and removing him was a moral action. Nation-building afterward was, as well, even if it appears at this point to have been a futile effort. If we hadn't tried it, we'd still be wondering if it would have bought us the ten years it did.
There were no perfect courses of action, not even complete inaction. There was only bad and worse. The author now has the luxury of criticizing the bad. He's welcome to it.
So you’re pleased with the result? Because it was clear all this would happen if we destabilized the region.
The US isn’t very good at foreign policy, especially in the middle east, and most especially when domestic politics are allowed to drag us into suicide missions.
No more Asian land wars, please.
The WMD casus belli in Iraq was always the fictitious nuclear mushroom cloud that Dick Cheney was using to terrorize Americans. We weren’t stampeded into war because we felt sorry for some Kurds, so come off it.
Did you actually read my post? When I said "there was only bad and worse," does it sound like I was pleased with the result?
If I am not mistaken, Bob Woodward reported this exchange with VP Cheney in his book, Bush At War:
Woodward: Was the anthrax part of the attack? Where does it fit in? Where did it come from?
Cheney: We believe we know where it came from. We're just not in a position to do anything about it...right now.
The reference could well be to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. So far as I know, Czechia's intelligence chief has never backed down from reporting that the Iraqi ambassador handed a 'Thermos' to Mohamed Atta.
1. The Dick Cheney who warned about the consequences of occupying Iraq in 1994 was a hell of a lot smarter than the Dick Cheney who orchestrated the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Dick Cheney who is calling for U.S. military involvement again in 2014.
2. Saddam Hussein was a hell of a lot more effective at dealing with radical Islamic militants in Iraq than George W. Bush was.
You should see a therapist.
“There were no perfect courses of action, not even complete inaction. There was only bad and worse. The author now has the luxury of criticizing the bad. He’s welcome to it. “
The problem for me is that we seem to get involved in “open ended” conflicts. Starting with Korea. That dumb $hit, Harry Truman should have let MacArthur finish off the Norks and the Chinese. Bush gave us Obama on a silver platter because he got in and didn’t have a plan to get out of Iraq. Ditto for Afghanistan. No more of these “wars!” I do not want to see us pi$$ a way our treasure and kill our young men and women for a bunch of Effing 6th Century savages. As Col. Hunt said tonight on FNC, stay out of Iraq and let them get on with killing each other.
Not to mention the massacre of thousands of Christians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.
This was a secular, neocon project complete with secular bogeyman and utterly oblivious to the intense religious undercurrents and sentiment which pervades the region. Was this what Bush, Cheney et al., had in mind when they invaded? Did they foresee signing off on a constitution which created an Islamic Republic and considered this to be in America's interests? Did they believe that this was worth the loss of thousands of American lives?
If they did see this as a possibility, they should be tried for treason. If they didn't see this coming but marched into Iraq anyway, they're negligent idiots who should not be allowed within 500 miles of Washington.
I already have a religion.
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