The Iraq War retrospective Thread

[Thecla]

I promise it will be a friendly discussion... for my part of the discussion at least. :) I see your opinions are very strong here.

Well, I genuinely appreciate that. To be clear, none of my venom is directed at you personally. And, yes, I do feel very strongly about this. Something about deceitful, unnecessary, disastrous, and incredibly costly wars that lead to a large and avoidable waste of human life brings out my bad side.

Zero? Really?

Zero. Really.

Obvious? I dare say not.

As I said, it was obvious before the war that: (a) the Bush administration was peddling intelligence without regard for its truth or reliability to sell the Iraq war; (b ) there was a significant chance that a US invasion in the middle east would lead to disaster.

The UN Security council was not certain, and the most of the worlds intelligence services were not certain. The only people who were certain, were those who chose not to believe the evidence.

I didn't say it was obvious that Iraq had no chemical weapons . It is clear that, since Iraq did not in fact possess such weapons (not withstanding your hopes of finding them even now buried somewhere in the desert), the evidence for them was far from conclusive.

But so what if Iraq had chemical weapons? What vital threat would that have posed to the US? Nuclear materials might be another issue, but there was no credible evidence that Iraq had them (despite the administration's irresponsibly loose talk about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons labs, niger yellow cake, mushroom clouds, and all the rest of it) nor was there any credible evidence that Iraq was working with al Qaeda. In fact, it was clear that Iraq, basically a secular dictatorship, was a very unlikely co-conspirator. The use of the term "WMD" to lump together chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is interesting in itself, and allowed the Bush administration to conflate the possession of chemical weapons with the consequences of nuclear weapons in selling the war.

You use the phrase "criminal incompetence", but I'm not exactly sure what you are talking about. There were "crimes" committed by soldiers that have occurred, and have been prosecuted.

I'm not referring to the military aspects: many bad things happen in war, one reason why you should be damn sure what you're doing before starting one.

I was referring to the total lack of planning by the administration for the post-invasion phase, which was criminally incompetent in my view. As far as I can see, the administration's plan was something like this: 1) Collect flowers. 2) Take carefully cropped photo of toppling of statue of Saddam Hussein. Ignore looting. 3) Send cadre of fresh-faced college graduates, selected on the basis of their views regarding gay marriage and abortion, to reconstruct country in mold of western capitalist democracy. 4) Install pro-US government run by former Iraqi exiles. 5) Declare mission accomplished. When that turned out not to work, they had no clue what to do.

But, also, many people including Saddam, had the opportunity to steer events away from the war. War was not inevitable. It was a choice, and not just a Bush choice.

I disagree. Hussein did not decide to invade Iraq, Bush did. That was entirely his choice, not Hussein's.

It was the US Congress who was mostly unanimous in authorizing the use of force against Iraq. It is also false to think of this as a "right-wing" affair.

It's true that congress made a big mistake in failing to prevent the war with it's authorization of the use of force in Iraq, and those democrats who were too cowed to vote their conscience bear some responsibility for that. But the only meaningful opposition came from democrats (Robert Byrd, whom I'm not always a fan of, gave a great speech before the vote, which was unfortunately not listened to), and it is the rebulicans who are most to blame. (According to Wikipedia, the yes/no vote Republican vs. Democrat was 215/6 vs. 81/126 in the House and 48/1 vs. 29/21 in the Senate.)

My vehement opposition to the Iraq war is not based on party politics. Blair in the UK is highly culpable for his role in supporting the war, and had Clinton done what Bush did I'd be just as opposed. But the fact is: Bush started this war.

I'm sorry I don't see the "right-wing media"? The only place that right-wing media has any foot hold is talk radio. All the other media venues (newspapers, TV, magazines) are dominated by "left-wing media".

I wasn't aware that Fox News, for example is a "left-wing" media venue, or has no foothold in TV "news".

The reasons for war with Iraq were more complex, and other than the window dressing presented (publicly) to the UN Security council and the American public. I'll take this as your opinion.

I think you can take it as my opinion, that the Bush administration exploited 9/11 and used deceitful arguments to take the US into a disastrous war for which there was no adequate justification, simple or complex. They then cocked it up beyond belief.

It's easy to lambaste the actions that are taken, but harder to offer the alternative.

It was very easy to offer an alternative: don't invade Iraq. Now, I agree, there are no good alternatives left.