Most people on the left are quick to condemn Bush for the Iraq fiasco. Others feel that proper decisions were made but based poor and inaccurate intelligence. Maybe in a decade or two we will know the truth.
In any case we went to war and won … sort of. If we had really won, the middle-east might look quite different from it does today as it descends into chaos and westerners are targets like never before. It is in effect, the crusades in reverse.
Assume the Iraq war was a mistake, was wrong, was based on a lie if you will, but even if that be the truth, the current Administration had an obligation to finish the mess and certainly not make things worse. In reality Obama’s obsession with getting troops out of Iraq has made things worse and the gains made with great sacrifice meaningless. Success is not merely getting away with something, it is doing so with a positive outcome. Does anyone believe the state of the middle-east and its negative impact on all of us is better than it was at the start of 2009?
You would think the Administration would have learned a lesson, but by all accounts the same short-sighted naive approach is being followed in the fight against ISIS. Our world is a messy place filled some scary and dangerous people who have the ability to wield great influence. Relying on the “not my yab, man” approach does not work. The next time we elect a President we need to look for a historian instead of a lawyer or academic.
After the pro-Western government of China was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan in 1949, when the Communists took over mainland China, bitter recriminations in Washington led to the question: “Who lost China?” China was, of course, never ours to lose, though it might be legitimate to ask if a different American policy toward China could have led to a different outcome.
In more recent years, however, Iraq was in fact ours to lose, after U.S. troops vanquished Saddam Hussein’s army and took over the country. Today, we seem to be in the process of losing Iraq, if not to ISIS, then to Iran, whose troops are in Iraq fighting ISIS.
While mistakes were made by both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, those mistakes were of different kinds and of different magnitudes in their consequences, though both sets of mistakes are worth thinking about, so that so much tragic waste of blood and treasure does not happen again.
Whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place is something that will no doubt be debated by historians and others for years to come. But, despite things that could have been done differently in Iraq during the Bush administration, in the end President Bush listened to his generals and launched the military “surge” that crushed the terrorist insurgents and made Iraq a viable country.
The most solid confirmations of the military success in Iraq were the intercepted messages from Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq to their leaders in Pakistan that there was no point sending more insurgents, because they now had no chance of prevailing against American forces. This was the situation that Barack Obama inherited — and lost.
Going back to square one, what lessons might we learn from the whole experience of the Iraq war? If nothing else, we should never again imagine that we can engage in “nation-building” in the sweeping sense that term acquired in Iraq — least of all building a democratic Arab nation in a region of the world that has never had such a thing in a history that goes back thousands of years.
Human beings are not inert building blocks, and democracy has prerequisites that Western nations took centuries to develop. Perhaps the reshaping of German society and Japanese society under American occupation after World War II made such a project seem doable in Iraq.
Had the Bush administration pulled it off, such an achievement in the Middle East could have been a magnificent gift to the entire world, bringing peace to a region that has been the spearhead of war and international terrorism.
via Who Lost Iraq? – Rasmussen Reports™.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Mr. Quinn – you typed all of that tripe to say nothing at all! Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the Riech-wing military industrial complex. Perhaps you weren’t listening? Anyone with half a brain understands that George Dumbya invaded Iraq on totally false pretenses because his daddy didn’t like Saddam. Dumbya said, “Yes Daddy” and wasted thousand of lives and trillions of dollars to create complete chaos in the Middle East. And now Teapublican candidates for president want to do it again. Both Bush and Cheney should be prosecuted as war criminals. Vote Teapublican if you want another no-win war and another recession.
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Again you miss the point. Blame Bush if you like, so be it. But that’s in the past over and done.
Obama wanted the job knowing the state of things in 2008 and promising to get our troops out. Fine, then what is our strategy?
Can you tell me we are better off and the Middle East is better off under Obama’s leadership and strategy? What is our strategy? Don’t keep telling about history, tell me about today and where we are going. Anyone who keeps blaming his predecessor is no leader.
And by the way, do you dispute any of this?
A reason for invading Iraq was the overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, in the media, and among the public — for reasons well beyond WMD. In October 2002, both houses of Congress passed 23 writs justifying the removal of Saddam, an update of Bill Clinton’s 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid were among those who not only enthusiastically called for Saddam’s removal, but also warned of intelligence estimates of Saddam’s WMD arsenals.
Pundits on both sides, from Thomas Friedman to George Will, likewise supported the invasion, which on the eve of the war enjoyed over 70 percent approval from the American people.
Bush, in that regard, had achieved what Clinton had not on the eve of the Serbian War — he had obtained a joint resolution of support from Congress before attacking, and had taken nearly a year in concerted (though failed) attempts to win U.N. approval for Saddam’s removal. Had Bush not gone to Congress, had he made no attempt to go to the U.N., had he had no public support, or had he been opposed by the liberal press, he probably would not have invaded Iraq.
While the Bush administration might easily have cited the persuasive writs of the bipartisan resolutions — genocide against the Kurds, Shiites, and Marsh Arabs; bounties for suicide bombers; sanctuary for terrorists; attempts to kill a former U.S. president; violations of U.N. sanctions and resolutions; etc. — it instead fixated on supposedly unimpeachable intelligence about WMD, a “slam dunk,” according to CIA director George Tenet, a judgment with which most Middle Eastern governments and European intelligence agencies agreed.
This concentration on WMD would prove a critical political mistake. Note in passing that the eventual public furor over missing WMD stockpiles (although there is solid evidence that Saddam was perilously close to WMD deployment) did not fully develop with the initial knowledge of that intelligence failure, but only with the mounting violence after a seemingly brilliant victory over Saddam.
The missing vast stockpiles of WMD then became the source of the convenient slogan “Bush lied, thousands died.” Yet had the reconstruction gone well, we would surely not have heard something like “Bush lied — and so there was no need, after all, to depose Saddam and foster consensual government in Iraq.”
The Bush administration apparently believed that, without the worry over WMD, the other writs would not generate enough public urgency for preemption, and thus it would not have invaded Iraq.
Note that when Barack Obama talks of “red lines” and “game changers” in Syria that might justify U.S. preemptive action, he is not referring to 70,000 dead, the horrific human-rights record of Bashar Assad, Syria’s past effort to become nuclear, or even the plight of millions of Syrian refugees, but the supposition that Syria is planning to use chemical or biological weapons — a crime Saddam had often committed against his own people, and one that inflames public opinion in the West.
As a footnote, we will probably not know the full story of WMD in the region until the Assad regime is gone from Syria — although we are starting to hear the same worries about such Syrian weapons from the Obama administration as we did of Iraqi weapons during the Bush presidency.
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The only fact in your Reich Wing diatribe is, “Bush lied – thousands died”. The facts are abundantly clear. Review history. Republican administrations result in unwinnable wars and economic recessions. Democratic administrations result in peace and economic prosperity. You are “pitching shit at the tide” with your defense of obvious Republican war criminals in the Bush administration. And, George Dumbya’s Reich Wing Supreme Court appointments are “the gifts that keep on giving” – i.e. Citizens United, Voter suppression, et al. This is a sickening situation to be sure. Surely you can comprehend what is happening in this nation? Perhaps not? But do try.
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Here you go Wilson. Hot off the presses.
U.S. ADOPTS NEW ISIS STRATEGY IN IRAQ “In a major shift of focus in the battle against the Islamic State, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province and send 400 American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi.” [NYT]
I guess our strategy is going back into Iraq. Do you think our new base will be a target? 😉
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