Irvine511 said:
but that’s simply not what the administration told the American people. throughout 2002 and early 2003, there was a clear linking between 9-11 and Iraq, as well as the fact that Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s posed a clear and present danger to the American people as any reading of any of the transcripts from speeches to Sunday morning talk show appearances will attest, especially where Cheney is concerned.
clearly, this case was not reality.
let’s imagine, for a moment, that the Bush administration agreed with your series of rationalizations. why, then, the need for speeches about “reconstituting nuclear programs” and “mushroom clouds”? could it be that the original case for war was not terribly compelling to begin with? it failed to convince the UN that an invasion in March of 2003 was the only possible solution to the Iraq problem, nor did the administration think this would be compelling enough for the American people who would understandably balk at shouldering the costs and death toll of invading and occupying a country that never posed a direct threat to the American people. most Americans do not believe that the security of the Middle East and the planet (to use your alarmist language) is their sole responsibility.
thus, the invasion had to be sold in a package of intelligence manipulations designed through the use of post-9/11 trauma and fear-mongering to hustle Congress and the American people into war. the truth is that 9/11, important as it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no place in any discussion of the war.
are you suggesting that it is appropriate for a government to manipulate it’s people into a war because they believe it to be necessary especially when they know that the “real” case for war would not be accepted?
further, if such security was in such a state of crisis, why the difficulty making the case? The case you make for war is further complicated by Wolfowitz who suggested last week that suggested that US forces might not have invaded if Washington had known then that the regime of had no weapons of mass destruction, and that there would have been policy options and alternative to war that, in hindsight, look far preferable than the mess we have today.
[Q] Mistakes have been made in the years since the initial invasion that indeed have made things much more difficult than they had to be in Iraq. But that does not change the fact that Saddam's removal had become a necessity for the planets security and that in his place, a new government and would have to be shaped and developed as well as a new military. Find a war where mistakes were never made. But the majority of the military continues to support the President on Iraq. As measured by the "Army Times" poll of over 4,000 soldiers, a much higher sample than most national polls conducted for a country of 300 million people, showed that over 80% of the military voted for Bush in the November 2004 election. Support for the President was slightly higher among those who had actually served on the ground in Iraq.[/Q]
The president’s approval ratings in US military is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and it’s natural for people who have been asked to die for the ambitions and goals of a particular administration to believe that their current mission – one in which dozens are dying for every week – is one that is righteous and legitimate.
Simply tossing off mistakes in a Rumsfeld-esque “mistakes happen” bravado undercuts even more the sacrifices of American soldiers as well as the central case for the war itself.
[q] I don't dismiss the thousands of Iraqi's who have died primarily from terrorist and insurgent activity over the past 3 years just as I do not dismiss the 1.7 million people who died as a result of Saddam's actions both inside and outside of Iraq. If you want to talk about statistics involving death, there is no better place to start than with Saddam's in his actions over the past 24 years. Imagine if over 20 million Americans had been killed in unprovoked wars and executions over the past 20 years. That what it was like under Saddam. [/q]
why, then, wasn’t the humanitarian Saddam-is-a-really-bad-guy used when making the case for war back in 2002/3? is it reasonable to ask American kids to die because a dictator in another part of the world is a tyrant? do we really want to compare the 1.7 million killed in Iraq with, say, the millions who were killed as part of US proxy wars during the Cold War in battlefields ranging from El Salvador to Chile to Indonesia to Nicaragua.
i can agree that a strong democracy in the Middle East would have huge benefits for Iraq and for its neighbors as well as for the rest of the world. unfortunately, due to a combination of hubris and poor planning, our actions are not helping to bring this about. the removal of Saddam Hussein would be one thing. a skillful, international removal of Saddam would be a good thing. but this botched removal of Hussein followed by a stubborn insurgency and the creation of previously unknown problems (like suicide bombers) in Iraq has created many, man bad things.
the ineptitude of the post-war belies the fact that talk of democracy and the evils of Saddam are little more than a hollow mantra, a group of public rationalizations for a war motivated by the Bush administration's desire to dominate Middle Eastern politics and economics.
and don’t forget: the U.S. government has never actually relinquished sovereignty to the Iraqi government, nor will it any time soon, if ever
.
[q] To many people blindly make overblown claims about how terrible the sitution in Iraq is and miss the point that the majority of Iraq's provinces are relatively calm and several are actually dramatically improving in terms of standard of living as anyone who has been to Irbil Iraq can attest to. Its important to point these facts out because they rarely get mentioned by the media.[/q]
again, you seem to be viewing the situation through glasses even more rose-colored than the Media – which has been pro-war from the start and has only recently started to acknowledge the complexity of the situation. water and energy delivery, the state of hospitals (and medical supplies), highways, oil production and schools are worse off than before the U.S. invasion.
there is no question that elections are a positive change; it’s a good thing to see Arabs voting. however, the elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real choices about their future. one example: the Shiite/Kurdish political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American withdrawal. as soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise (under pressure from the US). they have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily Shiites) are becoming ever more disillusioned. in the most recent polls, Shiite Iraqis now are about 70 percent in favor of U.S. withdrawal.
again, the sense of crisis – beyond the humanitarian – you express in regards to SH’s regime is simply not shared by anyone else. and what might be more terrifying than Saddam is the current emboldening of Iran whose leaders were much more compliant to U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than they are now that they have seen how the Iraqi resistance has frustrated our military. the invasion of Iraq has probably done more to strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime than any other set of events since 1979; the longer the Bush administration stays and flounders, the more it undermines its ability to use the threat of military intervention to force other countries to conform to its demands.
it is interesting to note, though, that it’s entirely possible that the undermining of U.S. credibility and efficacy is one of the few good things to result from Iraq. in general, American military adventures tend to impose bad policies on other countries. we will all be better off with the multipolar world in which no single state can impose itself on others without at least the support of a great many others. we will be far better off in a multitude of ways if our country stopped spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined and started spending some of that money on things that would improve the welfare of our people like health care and education.
but you’re right, we are at an historic point, and it’s looking as if the best option is If the United States withdraws soon, there is at least a reasonable chance that the violence will subside quickly – as we saw in Vietnam where the millions dead as a result of US involvement subsided after 1975 – and that peace and stability in the region might ever so slowly take hold. the longer the United States stays -- further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) -- the more likely it is that horrific civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur.
It is what the administration told the American People. The President began to make his case on September 12, 2002 at the United Nations and continued to list the key reasons that action needed to be taken up to the October 11, 2002 resolution by congress. The central case for war was always the fact that Saddam had failed to verifiably disarm of all WMD and the danger that posed to the region and the world. No one ever claimed that Saddam planned or launched the 9/11 attacks on the United States. That is simply false. Democrats are the ones who have gone through speeches to cherry pick various statements and comments to support a view that the administration was misleading the public into war. They have been spewing this crap long enough now that plenty of people believe it.
The administration put up as much of the intelligence they currently had on Saddam's WMD capability to support the central case for military action, but the intelligence that said chemical A was in the basement of build X or that Saddam's military had mobile bio weapons lab were in of themselves never the central case for military action, but indeed supported the central case for military action. The administration did not want to leave people completely in the dark about the intelligence they were seeing especially after such a catastrophic event like 9/11.
The United Nations was solidly convinced about the need for military action and passed resolution 1441 (15-0 vote) in November of 2002 authorizing such action if Saddam failed to comply with the 17 UN Security Council resolutions he was in violation of. Then in June of 2003, the United Nations passed another resolution approving the occupation of Iraq and has since that time passed two more resolutions approving the occupation and development programs there.
The United Nations as well as the American people recognized at the time that Saddam's continued failure to disarm and comply with the 17 UN resolutions passed under Chapter VII rules of the United Nations were indeed an intolerable threat to the security of the region and the planet. Americans heavily supported the 1991 Gulf War because most Americans understand how important the free and undisturbed flow of oil from the Persian Gulf is to the global economy as well as their individual lives. Bottom line, industrialized society depends on energy and a sudden surge in the cost of that energy for what ever the reason has a massive and sudden impact on the global economy. The Planet is currently dependent on the energy in the Persian Gulf for its standard of living. If Persian Gulf Oil were to be suddenly be completely cut off from the rest of the planet, a global economic depression would insue. Just look at what being cut off from a few oil rigs in the Gulf Of Mexico did after Katrina. The price shocks from that relatively minor disruption in supply were eventually felt on every corner of the globe. One would not be able to find a comparable event to the total disruption of oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. Within months, the planet would be experiencing and economic recession that would make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like a picnic.
The importance of Persian Gulf Oil supply to the economic health of the planet has been growing since the 1940s. President Jimmy Carter even warned the Soviet Union in vague terms of the potential use of Nuclear Weapons by the United States if the Soviets decided to push beyond their current adventure in Afghanistan back in 1979/1980, into the Persian Gulf area. Its simply a widely accepted fact of the importance Persian Gulf energy to the global economy and that anything that would threaten the supply of that energy is a threat to the entire planet. US military planning for decades through both Democratic and Republican administrations has known and made plans based on this reality.
The only manipulation currently going on is by Democrats who are engaged in historical revisionism and are ignorant of the impact Persian Gulf energy has on the economy and the threat Saddam posed to that energy supply with both conventional and at times unconventional military assets.
There was no real difficulty in making the case for war. It took less than a month for the President to get 75% of the congress to pass the resolution authorizing the President to use military action, and it only took another month beyond that to get the UN to pass a by unanamious vote, resolution 1441 authorizing the use of military action against Saddam if he failed to comply. Since then, the United Nations has passed three different resolutions approving the occupation.
Wolfowitz is correct in his statements since the only way that anyone could prove that Saddam did not have WMD would have involved his 100% cooperation and accounting for all WMD and the United Nations Weapons Inspectors verifications of that. This NEVER happened though! Not even close. There was some cooperation from 1991 to 1996, but by 1996 all cooperation had for the most part stopped and the inspectors were essentially kicked out in 1998.
If Saddam had cooperated 100% over the past 10 years with the UN resolutions and had verifiably disarmed of all WMD, it is highly unlikely that the coalition would have invaded because the need to would simply not be there in the way it was in 2003.
The opinions of the United States military are always relevant. I also do not simply dismiss the fact that mistakes have been made. I take it very seriously, but one also has to realize that the fact that mistakes have been made does not make the mission or the prosecution of it a failure. Otherwise, one could make the case that every war the United Sates has been in was a failure.
You were the one that brought up the deaths of Iraqi's since the invasion in attempt to explain why it has made the lives of Iraqi's worse off than before. I simply came back with the statistics on death in Iraq when Saddam was in power to demonstrate that was simply not the case. I never listed it as a reason for going to war in 2003, but simply to show how tough Iraqi's had it under Saddam and why his removal allows the Iraqi people the opportunity to have lives they never even dreamed of.
I also don't understand why you want to suddenly compare Saddam to the United States and its policy of containment during the Cold War which saved the planet from World War III and the end of all life on the planet.
US actions are bringing democracy to Iraq as anyone with access to some type of media outlet can see. The first Democratic elections were held in January of 2003 despite the fact that Anti Bush supporters said it would never happen. Then in October the country approved a consitution and on Thursday the country will elect a permanent government for the next four years. Iraq in terms of developing a new government is years ahead of both post-war Germany and Japan! More countries have been involved in Iraq around the world than were involved in Germany and Japan after World War II. There are more non-US troops in Iraq than there are non-US troops in Afghanistan. The occupation has been approved and supported by 3 different UN resolutions since 2003!
The fact that members of Saddam's regime would continue to resist once he was out of power was enevitable and no matter what was done during the removal could have prevented that.
The United States handed over control of the government to Iraq in July 2004. That is when Iraqi sovereignty was restored. If the newly elected government calls for the immediate withdrawal of all coalition troops, the coalition will withdraw. But there has not been such a call yet as Iraqi's understand the importance of foreign aid in developing the countries economy, military, and governmental institutions. But when Iraqi's feel that such foreign aid is no longer needed, the coalition will leave.
The media has to often only reported the bad news and none of the progress that has been made in Iraq. US military personal serving in Iraq are the ones that talk about this issue the most. I've talked to so many people who describe what they experienced and what they see on US TV at night as being two different things.
The reports about water delivery, energy supplies, the state of hospitals pre-war and post war focus on the Sunni area's as most Kurdish area's had these things in their "protected" zone while many Shia lived in conditions much like that ancestors did thousands of years ago. My best friend was stationed near a villiage at the start of the war where people NEVER had running water, electricity, and they ate and slept with their animals every night under the same roof. Much of the South is recieving services that they never had or have not had since the 1970s!
By the way, post war Oil production in Basra is now way ahead of pre-war levels!
The latest polls have shown that most Iraqi's consider themselves happy and are confident about the future. They support the poltical process and want democracy. New members of the Iraqi military who were members of Saddam's Republican Guard want the Coalition to remain in the country for at least the next two to three years. Most Shia have shown support for the coalition through their actions. The occupation is really only resisted in four of the 18 provinces of Iraq. The Kurds have had a foreign presence on some level ever since 1991.
The sense of crises I've expressed in regards to Saddam's regime is shared by many people from both the Bush Sr. and Jr. administrations as well as the Clinton administration.
Kenneth Pollack( a former national security expert on Iraq and the middle east from the Clinton Adminstration), Colin Powell, and John McCain all agreed with the sense of crises I've expressed, supported military action, still believe three years later that action was indeed necessary, and strongly support the continued reconstruction and development efforts by the coalition military and civilian personal on the ground in Iraq.
As for Iran, despite the threats it poses, lets remember for a second that Iran NEVER launched any unprovoked invasions or attacks on other countries like Saddam did on four different occasions. They never used WMD on the battlefield unlike Saddam who used it more times than any leader in history. Their armor/mechanized forces and air force are only half of what Saddam had in 2003 prior to the invasion. This is not to say there is no threat from Iran, because there indeed is one. But Iran has never been geographically positioned, had the capabilities of or the behavior of Saddam. That may change once and if they acquire nuclear weapons, but it will take more than simply that to make them the threat that Saddam was to the region and planet.
Saddam had to be removed independent of the obvious power vaccum it would initially create in the region. As Iranian leaders watch what happened to Saddam's regime over the past three years, I don't think they sit around thinking they are some how immune to what removed Saddam and his regime. To start with, even in 2003, they only have half of the military capability that Saddam had at the start of the 2003 war. Both the Taliban regime and Saddams regime are long gone and although war is unlikely unless Terhan were to decide to engage in Saddam like behavior, ie invading and attacking other countries unprovoked, the fact remains that given the right set of circumstances, the United States could and would remove the regime in Tehran if it became a necessity. Few if any regimes around the world would ever look at what happened to Saddam and his regime and be imbolden to engage in similar activitiy.
As far as cowing down to US and international demands, Iran has been probably the last country in the world to do so historically since 1979. The resistence over the Nuclear issue would be there with or without the invasion of Iraq.
Since 1945, most US foreign and military policy has been successful in helping to maintain peace and security throughout the world as well as detering certain regimes from engaging in war. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of Communist domination of Eastern Europe, the end of the Bosnian Civil war, the end of the war in Kosovo, securing and developing democracy in South Korea, Japan, Tawain, the removal of Saddam's military from Kuwait in 1991, and the removal of Saddam from power and the establishment of Democracy in Iraq all have shown US foreign and military policy since 1945 to have had more beneficial effects than any other countries foreign/military policy in history.
Vietnam is the only war where US credibility was damaged, and it was damaged not because it engaged and fought the war, but because it withdrew prematurely, essentially abandon South Vietnam to be overrun by the communist leading to the deaths and fleeing of millions of people and a communist dictatorship that has lated to this day.
This is why Saddam in the 1980s would often boast about the weakness of America. He would laugh and say "America withdrew from Vietnam after losing 50,000 men, but I just lost 50,000 men in one battle against the Iranians"! Bin Ladin has sited the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam as a sign of weakness as has his second in command in letters written to Al Zarqawi in Iraq.
If the United States withdraws from Iraq prematurely and it collapses, US credibility will indeed be damaged. But as long as it does not repeat the mistakes it made towards the end of the Vietnam War, it will be strenthened. To remove a regime like Saddam's and replace it with a multi-party democracy in a place like Iraq is simply unprecidented.
The world is better off with the enforcement of the United Nations most serious resolutions after 12 years. When the United Nations threatens the use of military force with resolutions passed under Chapter VII rules, it indeed has meaning and precedent that no violator can ignore. Iraq from the very begining has been a multi-nation operation. The security that the removal of Saddam has provided benefits the entire planet, especially growing countries like India and China who are growing increasingly dependent on the free flow of oil supply from the Persian Gulf Region.
Adjusted for inflation, the United States currently spends only about 2/3s of what it spent on the military in the 1980s and at other times during the Cold War. US military spending compared to other decades since World War II is anything but excessive, it is in fact not enough. If you want a military force that has armor on all its trucks and Humvees in peace time, your going to have to increase the military budget. If you want to make sure the men and women of the United Sates military have the best technology on the battlefield to give them the best chance of survival and mission accomplishment, your going to have to continue and increase military spending in many area's. I find it incredible that someone would call for a decrease in military spending yet at the same time attack shortages that exist in certain area's. If the United States military wanted to be prepared for all the unexpected outcomes and shortages unusual situations in war could produce, it will need to spend a lot more than it does now or even in peace time.
The fact is, heavy military spending in peace time cuts down on the casualties you will suffer in war time. Quality Weapons and extensive training are the only ways one can insure that casualities are reduced in war time. More accurate weapons, better intelligence, means that the probability that the enemy can be found, engaged, and destroyed with minimal or no loss of civilian life, is increased. Wars from the 1991 Gulf War, Panama, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even in the current Iraq war prove this.
The United States currently has the 10th highest standard of living in the world as reported by the United Nations Human Development Index. The idea that military spending at current levels or even reasonable increased military spending is impacting US standard of living is simply false.
The United States did not start the war in Vietnam nor is it at fault for the innocent lives who died as a result of a war waged by a Communist Dictatorship from the North with the support of sympothizers in the South. The United States withdrew all of its combat troops from Vietnam by 1972, and completed a full withdrawal by March 1973. South Vietnam did not fall to North Vietnames agression until April of 1975. The fighting and bloodshed did not stop with the US withdrawal in 1973. It continued. North Vietnam launched its largest military offensive against South Vietnam in the spring of 1975.
The premature US withdrawal from South Vietnam in the early 1970s is one of the saddest and most shameful events in United States history and led to the deaths and desplacement of millions of innocent South Vietnamese citizens. Those who remained have been enslaved and ruled by a brutal Communist dictatorship.
A premature withdrawal from Iraq could be an immediate disaster for both the Iraqi people and the region. It would likely create conditions for a much more violent and destructive war 10 to 15 years in the future. Unlike South Vietnam which was not sitting on or near the majority of the planets energy supply, Iraq is or is in close proximity to such a supply, and any event inside Iraq that threatens the planets energy supply and economic life line will be met with military force. As long as the planet depends on oil from the Persian Gulf for the cheapest form of energy, the importance to the United States and the world of Persian Gulf security will not change.
The United Sates and the coalition have accomplished an enormous amount in Iraq in a very short time. It is debatable what would constitute a premature withdrawal, but I think that at a minimum the coalition should stay in the numbers it is in, for at least another 2 years in order to insure the proper training of the new Iraqi military. I think it will be at least 5 more years before the Iraqi military is capable of handling national defense of the country as well as combating a violenting insurgency within the country, 100% independent of coalition forces. Of course, withdrawals can start well before that time as Iraqi capability increases.
The coalition has spent the past three years building and reconstructing Iraqi Infrustrutre, not destroying it. It has helped the a democratic government develop in record time. It is building a new military that will eventually be able to take over all the military task that the coalition currently provides. Leaving prematurely and allowing all that has been built to fall apart would be a terrible mistake and one that the country and region would likely pay for in an even worse war 10 to 15 years in the future.