Duh, I think everyone pretty much knows that now...
No probably to it. We should have went into Iran per the Bush Doctrine of fighting terrorism. And I speak as someone who was there before it all started on “A” Day.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Never try to give Savages with no Honor the gift of Freedom.
Hussein had been in violation of the Ceasefire Terms which ended the first Gulf War for years while the feckless Bill Clinton made only token efforts to enforce. Something needed to be done.
So mistake? No.
Is this controversial?
4,486 dead U.S. soldiers and $1,700,000,000,000 tax dollars for what, exactly?
It wasn’t a “mistake” at all. It was a deliberate f#%&-up.
Somebody had a “LBJ Jumbo Vietnam” complex.
And it’s NOT funny.
People died as a result.
We can blame the Bushes for the ridiculous, costly move to take out Saddam Hussein who safeguarded Jews and Christians and made life a living hell for the mullahs in Iran. Because of this senseless action the blame for the screwup in the middle east goes to them, as well as to the fool who followed them.
It's well and good that Trump owes the Bush dynasty absolutely nothing.
“we will probably look back on the invasion of Iraq as a mistake — as a strategic mistake.”
OK...at this point in time that would merely make him appear to be a Master of the Obvious. And I mean that as no criticism of MadDog whatsoever. Just that the nation-building exercises of the Neo-Cons and For-Purchase Leftists have been pretty readily discredited at this point.
The mistake was actually letting Iraq enshrine Islam in their constitution.
The purpose of the war was to make it a secular democracy that could be prosperous and would blunt the force of the most aggressive Sunni Islamists (including Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers originated). Saddam was doing his own version of a secular but nominally Islamist (Sunni) state, but it’s so difficult - because Islam is also a political system - that I think it had escaped even him. His Baathist party was based on a somewhat syncretist version of Islam and the reason that he was so oppressive (other than the usual dictator’s arrogance) was that neither side wanted to join the party.
The Iranians are mostly Shiites, so we backed off on taking down Mookie in Iraq because it was mistakenly thought that we could benefit from a Sunni-Shiite face off.
And in any case, by then, the Dems (who had suddenly decided that Islam was just the coolest thing going) had totally worn Bush down and this was really his biggest mistake.
The war was fought well and we won in very difficult circumstances. As usual, it was the peace that was lost. We should never have gotten involved in Islamic politics and simply should have imposed a non-confessing state. Also, Muslims only respond to dictators and autocrats, and had no respect for us when we started trying to be subservient to supposed Islamic sensibilities.
We should have adopted the model we used in Germany after WWII.
GW Bush left a pacified Iraq solidly on that path as he left office in 2008, but to get there would have taken an American troop presence of about 20,000 stationed there for a generation - just like it took with Japan .
A side benefit would have been a strong US military presence in the region to act as a stabilizing force.
Had Bush cut a deal for American development of Iraqi oil infrastructure to pay for the coast of liberation and to fund the transformation and development of Iraq the world would be a much better place.
Lots of missed opportunities
Given the way that the Iraq operation has played out over the last 8 years, the outcome has certainly been negative and should be considered a mistake in hindsight after 8 years of Obama chaos.
The 2016 hindsight view after 8 years of Obama is much worse than the hindsight view at the end of 2008, which was filled with promise of brighter future that was broken by one Barak H Obama
Iraq was even more of a mistake because there was no plan for “what happens afterward.”
It was the invasion and handling of Iraq that made me conclude that GWB was essentially an inept moron. Time has not diminished that view.
Now we just go in a blow shit up and kill a few people and not finish the job. Iraq could've been won, we would have had to kill lots of people and probably kick Iran's and Syria's ass as well maybe even Pakistan. But it could've been done. But lots of people would've died including many so-called civilians. But that is the way of war. In WWII entire cities and towns in Europe were wiped off the map which killed multitudes of civilians.
I say no more half-assing. If you go in, go in with everything and kill people and break things until they give up or they all die. Then take over and see to it that the country is reset for all there that allows people a free and productive life without human rights violations etc. If you are not willing to do that then stay home and let it be.
correct. finally, we got someone who knows what he’s talking about.
Good to hear him speaking the truth.
Too many idiots in the general public and on this forum think that the Marshall Plan was not a situationally possible innovation but an appropriate model for the aftermath of wars in general.
Having invested themselves in that utter stupidity they find it hard to swallow their pride and admit that not only were they terribly wrong, they were wrong in a way that wasted thousands of lives for no possibility of gain.
A lot of back and forth here on this, but in my view, yes it was a mistake, but the more important question is why did we make that mistake. I think it’s the false assumption that it’s possible for us to have “friendly” relations with Arab-Muslims in that region. It’s not ever going to happen. They will either fight us honorably like ISIS, or they will make us think that they are our friends, and then stab us in the back, like Saudi Arabia. The sooner we understand that, the sooner we will be able to formulate a rational foreign policy.
Don’t agree. The public doesn’t know how much NBC was recovered and either destroyed or neutralized.
There is no such thing as weapons that are old or abandoned and still can kill. The NY Times admitted they were there. Here’s an NCO that was involved:
“Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.”
This second article displays that when the US was unable to secure these known weapons, and the insurgents got to them, it painted two pictures, one, Iraq knew they were there, and they used them.
The first was munitions that had been sealed in bunkers at Iraq’s Al Muthanna weapons complex by U.N. inspectors during the 1990s. The inspectors destroyed enormous quantities of chemical weapons at Al Muthanna between 1992 and 1994, including 480,000 litres of live chemical weapons agent, but some could not be incinerated because it was too dangerous to move it. The U.N. and U.S. knew these chemical weapons were there, Saddam Hussein knew they knew, and there was no way for the Iraqi military to access them without the world immediately finding out. But after the invasion the U.S. failed to secure the site, and insurgents broke into the bunkers to retrieve some of the munitions. This is well-known to anyone who follows this issue closely.
I am almost amused at the inability, or dishonesty, of the media that can’t put two and two together. But they can understand the gullibility of a public that hasn’t figured out either’s stupidity.
red