Mark Steyn: Iraq less unwon than other wars

I will always believe that going into Iraq was the right move. The combination of Saddam, the weapons maker, and Osama, the architect of strategic attack, would have been devastating.

It closed that door.

The biggest problem we had was OUR media.

"The biggest problem we had was OUR media."

Our media and the treasonous Democrats who were willing to lose the war for 30 pieces of political gain for themselves.

If you fight a war to win the “minds and hearts” of the natives and your enemy just wants to win period, you will have the Vietnam scenario.

Add France, China, Russia, and Germany’s push to resume trade with Saddam and get the sanctions lifted. I think the problem, and the problem with any war in the postmodern ear, is the lack of resolve to finish well. Instead, we leave our people vulnerable with no defined benchmarks. The exit from both wars will be premature and overdue.

I don’t disagree, but I’m curious what you would consider “winning,” by your definition, and how your would suggest reaching such a victory.

Short of using Roman/Mongol methods, I hope.

Syria is now using Iraqi wmd’s and I’ve always wondered why Bush never pushed harder to “find” them. The Iraq war would have been a different story altogether with those in plain view.

After we invaded Iraq, we should’ve gone after Iran and Syria. Let Israel administer the Reconstruction governments there.

Let’s stipulate that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing.

That took about a month. Now can we concentrate on what the hell we’ve been doing there the past 9 years 11 months?

In 2006 we lost the House and Senate, and in 2008 we lost the White House. We now have Obamacare, $14 trillion in debt, a trillion dollar deficit, tax increases, the prospect of more tax increases, and a green agenda that is just getting underway. For those of us who work, our income is down 10 percent, and we’re in the fifth year of high unemployment. We have homosexual marriage, abortion on demand, a road to citizenship (and affirmative action) for illegals. They’re going after our guns, our tobacco, our soda, and whatever else they decide we shouldn’t do.

Oh, but Saddam, who didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, is out; and, our military is sequestered and headed for down-sizing while Iran and North Korea are developing nuclear capabilities.

Thanks a lot, Bush and Cheney.

Israel stopped at the Golan Heights rather than become entangled in administering “the peace” in Syria. And, Ronald Reagan re-deployed the Marines off-shore rather than become entangled in Lebanon.

But, later, Bush and Cheney thought they could do what others had thought impossible; namely, turn countries that have no history of democracy into democracies by holding an election.

Elections? Yeah, that’s the ticket!

I thought conservatives believed in a republic under law, not democracy per se. A republic under law requires the majority of the people to embrace the values of a free society. Without the embrace of the values of a free society, elections might be little more than how the moochers and looters join together to re-distribute to themselves the earnings of those who work; and/or, how members of this religious or ethnic group put it to the members of another religious or ethnic group. You now, what this country has turned into.

We exchanged one tyrant for a worse one, who is friendly with Iran, we lost thousands of lives and many more scarred for life, spent billions of dollars, and that was worth it?

There are only 2 reasons conservatives continue to say this wasn’t a huge, tragic error:

1 - A Republican president started it

2 - Nobody wants to tell the families of those who were killed or whose lives were shattered by life-changing injuries that they sacrificed themselves for a bunch of hubristic politicians and policy wonks who thought they could reshape the Middle East.

He [Saddam] might now be engaged in a nuclear arms race with Iran.

And this is a bad thing? One of the best things in recent years for the western world was the Iran-Iraq war - a real manifestation of the Shia vs. Sunni conflict. Muslim savages were busy killing each other, rather than going after the west. Left alone, an escalating arms race between Iran and Iraq w/o the U.S. butting in would likely have resulted in more intra-middle east fighting, which IMHO is a very good thing for the west.

I was on the fence about the Iraq invasion thing, but have definitely been *against* the prolonged nation building crap that has gone on since. We should have gotten out of Iraq and Afghanistan a long time ago. One of the things that always angered me about Bush I and Bush II was their continued insistence that our meddling in the middle east was NOT about oil. This was total and utter BS, and everyone knew it.

What they should have done was told the truth (truth = good for credibility) and admitted it was about oil. They should have repetitively explained why that was the case, that it was NOT a bad thing in terms of putting our national interest out front, and changed the dialog. Oil runs our economy. It's our lifeblood. If there's an issue with energy, it does affect our national interest - hence a reason for getting involved at some level.

If they had just admitted that yes, stabilization of the world oil supply is in the US national interest since we are not energy independent, rather than concede to the liberal mantra that oil and energy are somehow inherently evil, then the debate and outcome could and should have been different. Perhaps we could have had a dialog on the real problem, which is our lack of energy independence.

If we in the U.S. could become self sufficient in terms of meeting our own energy needs, which is well within our means now due to today's technology, we could leave the savages in the middle east alone, and let them kill each other off. Let them get into arms races and go after each other, with less focus on us. That would be to our benefit, and far less expensive. On the occasions when they venture out of the middle east and try to hit us with terrorist crap to draw us back in, we hit back hard and get out without getting mired in all their dark ages backwater muslim geopolitical nonsense.