Where Iraq got away from us

[LuckyTheDog]

I've been thinking about this a lot...

We WON the war. But then we got greedy. Bush decided he needed to tear down the government there and do some nation-building (though he had no plan and no clue about what he wanted to accomplish). That's when the Iraq war turned into a fiasco of Biblical proportions.

Disbanding the army was a bone-head move. Sticking around without first securing the weapons now being used against us also was a VERY bad idea.

Clearly, we never should have invaded in the first place.

But if Bush was bent on doing it, then he should have thought through the consequences and had SOME plan, based on SOME concrete goals. It seems he figured he could just go in with guns blazing and wait for "God's will" to fall into place.

Our goals could have (and probably should have) been limited and cynical:

--To depose Saddam and his psychopath sons.
--To kill them or haul them off to the Hague.

Beyond that, we should have just handed the keys to the Iraqi army, declared victory and started executing a pre-planned exit strategy.

[endarkenment]

1. Sorry but where we went wrong was when we invaded Iraq.

We had no right to do that. You may not like Saddam and 'his psychopath sons' but that is not a legitimate reason to go to war, committing an act of aggression that by our own standards and by international treaty is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and by the standards of the nuremberg tribunal we established after WWII, a capital offense for those responsible.

It was wrong from the start.

[LuckyTheDog]

2. Like I said

Like I said, we NEVER should have done it.

But the point was that, even if it was inevitable that we would do it, there was no reason for it to have turned into such a bizarre, tragic, nation-building quagmire.

Plus, if the goal was supposed to be to "enforce UN resolutions," then the UN should have been brought in very quickly and Saddam should have been turned over to UN authorities.

The Iraq was was a very, very bad idea that was compounded by being executed in a terrible way.

And, oh yes, I totally agree that, at this point, it is Bush and Cheney who need to be handed over to the Hague.

[NNN0LHI]

3. Try to reason that out with some kid who had a smart bomb dropped onto...

...his fucking head the first night Shock And Awe began.

Don

[LuckyTheDog]

4. Yep

Plus, the lack of a UN resolution specifically authorizing force made the war illegal.

That's not because (as the right would assume) I think the U.S. "needs permission" from the UN to use force. Not at all.

But in this case, UN resolutions were used to justify an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation -- and act that is clearly against international law except under extreme circumstances.

You can't have it both ways. If you want to invoke UN resolutions as your excuse to invade, then you have to close the loop. You have to get the UN Security Council to sign off on the use of force.

Otherwise, the war is nothing more than an aggressive act. And, unless your actions can be justified as an act of national self defense (hard to do in this case) you have committed a WAR CRIME.

But my OP was looking at a more narrow issue which was: "OK, if we WERE going to attack Iraq, did it HAVE to become a quagmire?"

[htuttle]

5. We never 'won' the war -- We just declared that we had 'won'

To 'win' a war, the other side has to stop fighting.

Hussein's strategy to deal with a US invasion, after getting his ears pinned back in Gulf War I, was to have the Iraqi army fade away quickly and mount a protracted guerilla war. There are NUMEROUS reports from before the war detailing the steps Hussein seemed to be taking to go this route. And he did. As far as many members of the Iraqi army are concerned, the war is far from over. We were just told it was over to get Bush past the election.

It was never winnable, as far as I'm concerned. There hasn't been a successful occupation of a country by a foreign state since the invention of the RPG (that I can think of), especially when large segments of an army (or 'former' army) participate in the resistance.

[LuckyTheDog]

6. In a narrow sense we had "won"

Within weeks, Saddam was out of power and his army was defeated.

But, to do it, the U.S. had to take an illegal action and kill a lot of innocents. That was bad enough. We then made it worse by engaging in an un-doable nation-building project and getting into an un-winnable war with the insurgency we thought would never emerge.

We could have avoided the war we are in now by not invading in the first place.

But given that not invading was not an option, then plan B could have been to hand the keys to the Iraqi military -- and then get the heck out of Dodge rather than engage in a guerrilla war.

Would that have been cynical? Yes. Awful? Yes. But once we decided to invade, the "moral options" bus had already left the station. And then, the issue became how to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot. Bush chose the worst of a set of bad options, I think.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. "We WON the war."?? Whatever, did we "win"?

The military beat the crap out of Iraq's wrecked army. Unfortunately, that does not win a war. Anymore than beating the crap out of the VC and NVA won the war in Vietnam. Or the Brits beating the crap out of Washington.

Battles don't win wars. Body counts don't win wars. Tonnage of bombs dropped doesn't win wars.

The "war" in Iraq was lost the moment the first GI crossed the border.

[LuckyTheDog]

9. See my response to htuttle (nt)

[Yupster]

8. To me, I first smelled trouble

when I saw the initial looting going on.

When people were ripping up the electrical wires and basic stuff like that I thought, "uh, oh - this could be really bad."

[LuckyTheDog]

10. It was Vietnam II after that

Clearly, our leaders had no idea what they were doing. They never anticipated the aftermath.

They either:

--Thought "God's will" would just fall into place after the fall of Saddam or...

-- They WANTED anarchy and chaos to hide the fact that they were stealing with both hands.

[endarkenment]

11. Try B: they wanted exactly what they got.

Remember that they ENCOURAGED the looting and chaos? The PNAC plan calls for permanent military bases in Iraq in order to control the mesopotamian oilfields as we enter the oil war end game. Quite simply they had done the analysis and decided that any peaceful outcome would end with their being politely asked to get the fuck out of dodge. So....

[LuckyTheDog]

12. You might be right

The only other option is that they REALLY ARE stupid enough to have made all those "bad" decisions.

[Bridget Burke]

13. And war's drain on the economy....

Gives them a good excuse to dump all those social, environmental, educational projects beloved of Pointy Headed Liberals.