Iraq consensus?

[Kincaid]

I "turned against it" due to the immense amount of carnage it caused everywhere it touched.

But I maintain that it is very possible with no war we would have both a nuclear armed Iraq and Iran today.

So I am just choosing a speculative evil v. a known tragedy.

[jon-nyc]

It’s true you never get to run the counterfactual. I guess that allows all of us a claim to getting it right.

[Copper]

There is no end to the game

We have to be involved all over the world for our own safety

And of course for our oil supply

The motivation from oil has diminished a little, but, at best, we need lots of oil for decades

[taiwan_girl]

@Copper said in Iraq consensus?:

We have to be involved all over the world for our own safety

I agree. I am a big believer in an "outward" looking foreign policy, rather than "inward".

[Mik]

Agreed, but if we get involved militarily there needs to be an end game, and a commitment to see it through. That is where we failed in Iraq. We pulled out too soon, leaving a vacuum for Iran and ISIS.

Whether it was a good idea to go in is debatable. It might have left a better power balance in the region against Iran had we not.

[Jolly]

I think Sadaam needed to go. The Saudis thought the same thing.

The question is how well did we handle success. We're very good at breaking things, but we're not always as good at nation building.

[Larry]

Saddam was stuffing people into industrial shredders. His sons and his top military would pick women just walking down the street, force them to have sex, then kill them. If their husband objected theyd jill him.

He would capture a man, lock him up with no food until he was almost dead from starvation. Meanwhile his men would rape the man's wife and kids repeatedly, then rape them to death, then chop them up and have them cooked into a stew. He would feed the starving man the stew, halfway through his meal he would play a video for the man to watch as he ate showing his wife and kids being raped to death and cooked into the stew he was eating.

Saddam was an evil, vile man. His people begged us to step in and save them from Saddam. Had we not done so the middle East would be a much different, much worse place, than it is now. We were well justified in going in, and our soldiers cut through the place like a hot knife through butter. We won that war in less than a week, as I remember. Where we messed up was in not leaving after we had won.

[Rainman]

I disagree with your last part, Larry.
IMO, we should have laid down the law as if a complete military occupation, as with Japan after WWII. Let them continue with their religious belief, but structure a system where freedom and democracy reign, but the government would be secular. And all this laid out in a constitution, and we ensure they adhere to their constitution.

Of course I'm just an armchair dope when it comes to understanding the intricacies of Iraq or the entire middle east, but in my view we left too early, and we seem to not have had any idea what to do once our military completely busted theirs. Come to think of it, after Sadam ignored the UN requirements, it was not just us, but our allies Canada, Australia, and maybe others' that busted their military.

And you're absolutely right, you even agree with my old man. He used to rage at the U.S. by yelling at the TV nightly news, saying that everywhere the U.S. went, we knew how to start a war, but we never learned how to finish. (WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, etc.)
Of course if my old man would have been in charge, we'd all be speaking Estonian.

[Doctor Phibes]

I always thought that the problem with the Iraqi invasion was that the American people wouldn't have the patience or stomach to stick with it for as long as was needed to complete the process.

I (now) also think that Bush was talked into it by a couple of horrible old men who should never have been brought back into the US government.

[jon-nyc]

@Doctor-Phibes said in Iraq consensus?:

I (now) also think that Bush was talked into it by a couple of horrible old men who should never have been brought back into the US government.

Actually Cheney wanted to replace Sadaam with another Sunni strongman that was more amenable to us and our allies. That probably would have resulted in a lot less chaos and disorder and might have left Iraq a decent counterweight to Iran. But it wouldn’t have been a good look.