Posted on 07/06/2021 4:59:28 AM PDT by RandFan
... But when it comes to the Iraq War, it must be said that Rumsfeld made a host of bad decisions. Instead of planning for the worst, he almost seemed to plan for the best — a quick war with as few troops as possible.
The worst decision — the one that gave rise to others — was to go to war in the first place, though he was just one of several people atop the George W. Bush administration and in its orbit, starting with the president, who made that blunder.
The decision was based on the assumption — and that’s all it was — that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president, wanted the world — and those who threatened his power internally — to believe that he possessed them, when he did not. He fooled us all.
In retrospect, it is stunning that it happened. We see now that the emperor had no clothes. Why did we not see it then?
We — and I mean, first off, we in the press — were blinded by post-9/11 anger and groupthink. We were awed by the gravitas of those making the false claims. Every Western intelligence agency says it’s true, so it must be, right?
The claims might not have been lies, in those cases when those who uttered them believed them to be true. But top U.S. officials, including Rumsfeld, knew that the evidence they touted as certain was really just an educated guess.
For example, a 2002 report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Rumsfeld read but never shared outside the Pentagon said of Iraq’s WMD: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns... We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program.”
(Excerpt) Read more at rollcall.com ...
Has the overall threat level gone down since we removed Saddam?
No, it hasn’t. We take out one “threat” and three more pop up. The ME is bottomless pit of threats and it will be for as long as the people living there subscribe to that murderous ideology that masquerades as a religion.
There’s no objective measure you can use that shows the situation was improved by removing Saddam.
None.
L
I hypothesize that the Iraq War was not a war of occupation or total destruction but a geopolitical war meant to block Iranian terrorism from expanding into Iraq, thus threatening Saudi Arabia (an ally). WMD’s were just a contrived justification for that war. I also hypothesize that 9/11 was contrived by the Saudis and Israel to provide a “Pearl Harbor” justification for war in the Mideast. I am not keen on justifying the Iraq War, but that war needs to be seen as serving geopolitical ends. The Viet Nam war was the same: a war to block Communist expansion (via Domino Theory) into Southeast Asis. Contrary to everything we read on the Right and Left, the VN War was a success in protecting Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, from Communist Chinese expansion. Now Biden just wants to hand over Taiwan?
Whether Saddam actually had chemical weapons ( which i believe) and hid them/moved them, or the weapons didn’t exist (so, explain that to the Kurds), SADDAM believed he had them at his beck and call, and intended to use them (explain that to the Kurds).
I am an intelligence cynic. I don’t believe what we are being told now, any more than I believe what we were being told then.
Gulf of Tonkin, pick your start story, it all serves purpose of someone with an agenda.
Of course Bush was wrong because the intelligence was wrong. We were told that, too. So, exactly who was lying when(not then, when)?
“...a quick war with as few troops as possible.”
It’s good to have a dream
To antiBush sour grapes anti Arab conservative purists, your post is just an irrelevancy
That was the spoken assumption. Iran was the real target. Remember, GWB said this was going to be for the long haul. Saddam was still in power. We had the no-fly zone to deal with. Look at a map of the region. You can't solve Iran until you solve Iraq. Of course that strategy could not be put on the front page of the NYT. This is supposition on my part, but it sure makes sense.
Condi Rice and GWB were peddling dire warnings about nuclear weapons. You must have forgotten about the yellowcake and aluminum tubes. All bogus, as I was convinced at the time. It was a dangerous time to be a Freeper with his head screwed on straight.
I wish we’d known then what we know now about the deep state.
There was a good case to be made for invading Iraq in 2003, and you are right that has been forgotten.
The problem was with the execution of the war, which Rumsfeld was the most to blame for. He made two disastrous assumptions:
1) The USA had solved the problems of Vietnam. We now had precision bombs! An all volunteer military! No insurgent group could hope to stand up to the might of the American military. It is telling that no one who had served in Vietnam seemed to believe this, only those who had been on the Washington side like Rummy.
2) Everyone wanted to be us. The fall of Communism and the Latin American dictatorships showed that everyone in the world wanted to live in a western democracy. The problem is that wasn’t the case in the Muslim world. The people of Iraq (and Afghanistan) had no desire for what we were giving them.
the march of folly is caused by pursuit of policy contrary to long run self-interests
“ I hypothesize that the Iraq War was not a war of occupation or total destruction but a geopolitical war meant to block Iranian terrorism from expanding into Iraq, thus threatening Saudi Arabia (an ally).”
How did that work out?
L
As someone who knows more than one person who left pieces of themselves in Iraq I find your barely comprehensible responses irrelevant.
There’s absolutely no objective measure anyone can use to say that the situation in the Middle East was improved in any way by removing Saddam.
None.
The entire Region, Israel excepted, is a nightmare clown car of murderous savages who have been killing each other for the last thousand years. And they’ll be killing each other for the next thousand years no matter what we do.
Trump had the right idea. Declare victory and GTFO. Then make America energy independent so we have no need to do any business with them at all. Let them eat their oil.
And make it clear that if they screw with us again we reduce their sand covered crap holes to radioactive rubble. And then we will do nothing. No “nation building” no aid no nothing.
That’s the way to deal with them. Anything else is a fools errand.
Not one more drop of American blood or nickel of American treasure.
L
We only got better in our abilities in the intervening years. Our forces started the war March 30, 2003, and Saddam was captured in December of that year. Why did we need the draft, again, Renfrew? The war was amazingly short, from that perspective.
We did have the issue of spanning out and getting other splinter groups, but all wars have that. The country was devoid of competent leaders and didn't have a decent direction for its future, but it got all the oil profits it ever wanted to fund itself back, along with tons of money from us.
Additionally, it doesn't much matter if the country squanders its chance at a decent future, if we took out the crud that led it to its sick demise of decades of Hussein rule. Our goal was to take out Saddam and we did that in spades.
Stupid article.
First and I will stand by this no matter how many freepers rant at me now (most supported it then, though):
Every, and I mean every, intel agency on earth—Russia, Israel, France, England, Australia, Japan, China, Egypt, Jordan plus our own said there were WMDs in Iraq. The UN said it. Mubarak said it. King Hussein of Jordan said it.
Any president in W’s shoes right after 9/11 would not only have been impeached & removed but JAILED for not taking action in such circumstances. It doesn’t matter that in retrospect they were mostly wrong (most analysts think the WMDs were moved to Syria, where they HAVE been used). The point is, right after 9/11 the possibility that terrorists could either extract WMDs from Saddam voluntarily or steal them easily was just too great a threat to ignore.
Second, had Rummy insisted we leave without nation buildling, I will remind everyone that up to that point-—when we took Baghdad-—it was the least costly war in American history and our forces had moved faster and captured more territory than Patton’s 3rd Army did. The nation-building was the problem, not the military advance.
Once Saddam was captured, it should have been “mission accomplished.”
“The decision was based on the assumption — and that’s all it was — that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.”
So do a lot of other countries like China and Russia. These geniuses didn’t pick a fight with them. Iraq was checkmate to Iran and said geniuses gave us the menace of Iran today. Well done nimrods.
We were told that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction”. So Iraq had to be invaded and occupied. Okay. But it would seem to me that the Bush administration would have moved Heaven and Earth to give us 100%, irrefutable proof that those weapons existed. (Not just some guy told some other guy that he saw a weapons truck go into Syria.) Irrefutable proof of WMD never materialized.
But let’s say that those WMD did exist. Is there mere existence enough to start a major war, and throw an entire region into turmoil?
After all, North Korea definitely has WMD. And they are definitely troublemakers. So why not invade North Korea too if that’s all that matters.
So the military intel was either incompetent, or they lied to us. No wonder nobody trusts government.
I believe Romney was heavy influenced by the likes of Wolfowitz (supposedly the expert) that were convinced of widespread support of the US invasion by the Iraqi populace. There are many reasons to believe such, and in fact it may have gone a lot better had we not made some crucial mistakes like dis-banding the Iraqi armed forces, intel service etc. early on (Paul Bremmer).
Romney said it best with his statement that you go to war with the Army you have, not wish you had. The DoD had gone through an era of post Cold War draw down under Clinton. Defense spending was at its lowest since WWII (as a percentage of GDP) with the Army down to 475,000 active duty personnel (smallest since WWII), a ready reserve that only exists on paper, units not deployable, etc. When we went into Iraq we went to war with an Army that simply didn’t have the size to maintain the required personnel footprint required for a sustained operation of that magnitude. Dreams of 300,000 troops in Iraq in order to meet the “troop to task” requirements such as General Shinseki briefed to Congress were mere political games because it wasn’t realistic. But of course Shinseki was rewarded for his loyalty with a position as the head of the VA once Obama took office.
The maximum we could put in theater was about 130,000 - 140,000 sustained because you also have other missions such as in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sinai, Korea, etc. One needs to realize that in order to sustain troops in a theater long term, you can only deploy about 1/3 of the troops since one unit is recovering from a deployment, while another is preparing to deploy, and the third is deployed. Trying to push harder than that “burns out your force.” It’s not a lack of “knowing better,” it’s just a lack of capacity.
***Romney led the DoD through one of the hardest times in history as far as defense/national security is concerned.***
1. Inheriting a depleted armed forces after years of personnel and budget cuts 1990 - 2000.
2. A DoD that was still structured, equipped and trained for a Soviet/Warsaw Pact threat and not all ready for what it was facing in what was to become a massive guerilla war.
3. 9-11 and the call for “immediate” action, giving him no time to prepare unlike WWII where we knew we would eventually go to war and were getting ready...
***When we went into Iraq, regardless of what was officially given as a reason or in the MSM, part of the idea was to “take the fight to the enemy.”*** The idea is if you plant a US flag right next to the shrines in Karbala where Mohammed’s grandsons are buried, you’re creating a giant shit magnet that will attract the bad guys to fight you there, and that it did!!! The rest is a reciprocal argument, i.e. no AQ in Iraq as the MSM pointed out. Who cares, once we went there, shitheads from Chechnya, Sudan, even from Europe and North America went there to fight us. But in Iraq we could execute this battle using the full force of our intel and DoD, not impeded by Constitutional rights of citizens etc. Would you rather fight this war in the streets of New York or Baghdad?
We didn’t have a 100% accurate read, and that is never the case. But post 9-11 we had a poor read because even your national intel assets had experienced massive budget cuts and a decline, withdrawing from places like Afghanistan post 1989. Romney didn’t have the benefit of the best intel read.
Romney was handed a shit sandwich. He handled it extremely well. This nation can be thankful we had him! He did the best possible given what he had to work with and I hardly doubt we can even imagine anyone doing a better job, without 20-20 hindsight.
Glad to know we were “legally” entitled to make a huge mistake costing millions of lives and up to a trillion USD.
> So the military intel was either incompetent, or they lied to us. No wonder nobody trusts government. <
There is, I think, a third possibility. The intel folks could have correctly reported to Bush that there was a SMALL chance that Saddam still had active WMD. And that was enough for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
I suppose we’ll never know what really happened. But someone certainly has blood on their hands.
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