Posted on 05/22/2015 7:20:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti–Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in free fall.
It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.
Note: “were,” not “are.”
We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama’s steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America’s standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It’s a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?
First, the question is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war — the basis for going to the U.N., to the Congress, and, indeed, to the nation — was Iraq’s possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War. No WMD, no hypothetical to answer in the first place.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
You can trace the chaos in the entire Muslim world back to 1003.
I wouldn’t trust Krauthammer with a bubble pipe.
Facts are facts and he is engaging in wishful thinking. Has Odimwit “screwed the pooch”? (A fave phrase of one of my fave Prosecutors). Absolutely. But so did Bush. We should neve have invaded Iraq. It utterly destabilized the Jenga tower that is the Middle East. Iran and Iraq had kep each other at bay for many years. In one fell swoop. Bush took a natural predator out of the mix.
Bush and ODimwit share the blame on this one.
The removal of Saddam was a risky surgery that required extensive follow-up and specific treatment. Had it been handled right, it would not have been an issue. Now that Obama failed, you say we should not have done the surgery. I say we should have done the follow-up right.
“We should never have invaded Iraq.”
I disagree. We should have invaded Iraq. In 1991. We had everything in place to not only defeat Iraq, but also Iran if we had the inclination.
That was our window of opportunity and we blew it because of a reelection which Bush lost anyway.
The premise of the question is wrong. If we had known for a fact that there were operational nuclear weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the Iraqis of course we would not have attacked Iraq.
There was information, subsequently verified that Iraq was purchasing yellow cake (remember the 500 tons of yellow cake shipped to Canada?).
But nuclear weapons are not the only "weapons of mass destruction", chemical and biological are also in that category. Saddam had already used chemical weapons against his own people so we knew he had them. So we did find the makings of weapons of mass destruction. Yet the common knowledge is that there were no such weapons.
There you go. I love the Jenga tower reference.
This is exactly what we got involved with ... God forbid that our leaders pick up a history book and read about the history of the region ... the sectarian bloodthirsty nature of the religious civil war that has been ongoing for centuries upon centuries.
But we were going to come in an “win the peace”. Kumbaya all around. JOKE!
What follow up?
Sit over there and babysit these people for the next 1,000 years? Because that is what it would take to have “peace” in the region.
Meanwhile our young men and women would get blown to bits on a regular basis by constant insurgencies. All for Sunni vs Shia.
My answer would be: If I knew in 2003 that the American people would elect an inexperienced President who would throw away any and all gains our brave men and women in uniform had made in the region, then of course I would not have invaded.
If the U.S. had left troops in Iraq after 2011 then we would now be shipping tens of thousand more soldiers and Marines back into the theater, because the same corrupt regime would have been in power all this time, the Iraqi army would still have shown itself incapable of whipping a sick cat in battle, and we would have been forced to fight their war for them. I guess that’s what Krauthamer wants.
The premise "knowing what we know now" is speculative pipe-smoking. What we "know" now appears to be a mishmash of media distortions and historical misrepresentations judging by the comments I'm reading on such an ordinarily informed place as FR. Do we "know" Saddam had no WMDs? We do not, for he did. Would GWB have sent the 3d ID in knowing that the WMD development programs were moribund? Probably not, but in fact he did not know that then and we do not know it now, all the "Bush lied, people died" huffing and puffing despite.
Would a quasi-stable police state (it wasn't, actually, but that's another argument) under Saddam be preferable to ISIS? It is, after all, largely the same people. My issue isn't so much with that as with the sheer impossibility of the question: would we have toppled his government knowing all the possible consequences and in possession of knowledge that we still do not have categorically? Anyone with an answer to that one either possesses an infallible crystal ball or is fooling himself.
Bush certainly tried to keep things going on track in Iraq, but the left (the Dems and many in the GOP) wouldn’t hear of it. Not only did they want to get out, but they didn’t want any US “interference” in the Iraqi government.
Letting them enshrine Islam in the Iraqi constitution was a serious mistake, but Bush had already been made to back down (remember when they had to change the name of the first military campaign after 9/11 from “Infinite Justice” to something pretty bland) and he got no support from anybody, even in his party. Remember “Cowboy Bush,” by any chance?
I have always felt Bush’ main failure was that he was simply too much of a gentleman. He never held grudges, never made his own case against the unfounded attacks of the press and the left, and sort of relied on virtue to be its own reward. So they (including the RINO anti-Bush wing of the GOP) tore him apart and left all of his projects without support.
Incidentally, Saddam was basically a secularist dictator with a Muslim glaze, so to speak, but the Baath party had Sunni roots and evidently many people from the old Saddam regime are now turning up in the upper-echelon ranks of ISIS, not as fighters but as administrators and planners.
“Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?”
And what exactly do we know now? We do not know that Iraq never had WMD and we do know some were found.
Never see this in LameStream press.
The U.S. agreement to pull out of Iraq was not the doing of Obama. It was an agreement signed by Bush and Iraq in December 2008. Per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_U.S._troops_from_Iraq#2008_U.S..E2.80.93Iraq_Status_of_Forces_Agreement) -
“2008 U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement
In 2008 the American and Iraqi governments signed the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, after being sought by the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government. It included a specific date, 30 June 2009, by which American forces should withdraw from Iraqi cities, and a complete withdrawal date from Iraqi territory by 31 December 2011. On 14 December 2008 then-President George W. Bush signed the security agreement with Iraq. In his fourth and final trip to Iraq, President Bush appeared in a televised news conference with Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to celebrate the agreement and applauded security gains in Iraq saying that just two years ago “such an agreement seemed impossible”.”
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