Replies

I'll give Paul credit as well, we need to get out of the nation building business

Just curious. . .which of these options on Iraq do you think we should have taken:

Not go into Iraq at all

Go into Iraq and withdraw immediately upon the 'fall' of Saddam

Go into Iraq and withdraw immediately upon the capture of Saddam

Continue fighting in Iraq until the new government is stable

Just curious. . .which of these options on Iraq do you think we should have taken:

I wasn't talking about Iraq, I was talking about all of the money we are throwing around, whether it's to the Palestinians (anybody who thinks at least some of it won't be funneled to an anti-Israeli group is foolish), or Pakistan (nothing like hearing our National Security Advisor admit that the 100s of millions we've spent on Pakistan didn't do much of anything for us and even with all of that aide, we still aren't allowed to go in and look for Bin Laden), and the list goes on (although ironically enough, when it's Christians being slaughtered by radical Muslims in Africa, we turn a blind eye).

As far as Iraq, I'll give you my brief opinion (I don't consider Iraq to be a part of the nationbuilding we are doing elsewhere, but now we have to build it):

I don't think we should have went in based on four reasons:

(In hindsight) the intelligence we had was shoddy and poorly misinterpreted (what you would see would be different than what I would see, and what Joe Blow in the Pentagon sees would be different than both of us).

Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until after the fact. I didn't need to hear it from a Pentagon official earlier this year to know that Saddam might bring in one or two Al Q leaders for meetings, but he would never allow Al Qaeda (or any organization) to organize and operate within Iraq, because that would be a threat to his power, and he dealt harshly and swiftly with threats to his power (witness the Kurds, the Shiites that we encouraged to rise up, etc.).

We weren't finished in Afghanistan.

Finally, most importantly, We didn't have as many troops going in as we needed - even had the Turks allowed the 4th ID to go through their territory, it wasn't enough - large parts of Iraq were never properly "conquered" by us, which helped give them the impression that we weren't as strong as we are. I'm not saying that we needed to go slaughtering people all over Iraq, it's just that we needed a much larger troop footprint, to reassure the locals and and send a message to foreigners that we had all of Iraq covered from top to bottom.

You can only conquer and bargain from a position of strength, whether it was the Japanese or Germans in WWII that knew they had been beaten, or the North Vietnamese coming to the table after we bombed the hell out of them, or the North Koreans/Chinese pushing through a cease fire after we pushed over the 38th Parallel in a big way. Iraqis never felt that, along with parts of the Iraqi military, whom we bypassed as being insignificant for one reason or another, and who would later make up the core of the resistance in the early days before Saddam was capture and before the insurgency became the norm.

Putting aside everything else (as hard as it is for me to lay aside the poor intelligence analysis), the need for more troops from the beginning rests squarely on Bush's and Rumsfeld's shoulders. Post 9/11, when we still had a Republican Congress, Bush/Rumsfeld should have pushed for large increases on the military caps and budgets. It was quiet clear we would be fighting around the world, for long periods of time.

Even after the war in Iraq started, we should have had a large increase in the military. We had a Congress that was willing.

The first President Bush started to gut the military after Gulf War I, and Clinton really got things going, and when you look back at the 1990s, a lot of people that were RIFed out would have been, had they stayed in, our mid-level and upper-level NCOs and Officers. We lost a lot of experienced military personnel due to Bush and Clinton, and George W Bush should have really pushed to bring the military back up to larger levels (including potentially reaching out to those RIFed

Now, because of the piss-poor way in which the war in Iraq was sold to the American people, and because of the piss-poor way in which it was managed (instead of firing the upper civilian leadership in the DoD, CIA, etc., we give them all kinds of medals and praise), we've created a situation where the Democrats are going to pull us out, come hell or high water, and that's going to leave a destabilized Iraq, subject to takeover by Al Qaeda or by proxy Iran. That means, that when all is said and done, by the time George W Bush leaves office, the Middle East will be a much deadlier place, and our enemies will be stronger, because all of the work we have done in Afghanistan will have been offset by our failures in Pakistan, and by our leaving Iraq before they can get their feet under them.

I have to say Iran, North Korea and Syria were/are far more “imminent” threats than Iraq.

Not that Iraq wasn’t a problem, but Iran has been for years a bigger problem. Same with Syria.

Continue fighting in Iraq until the new government is stable

That will never happen, not in our lifetime. And that is why choosing to define victory in those terms guaranteed failure.

We should have gone to Iraq, kicked their butt good and hard, and left within a year, telling them in no uncertain terms "Don't make us have to come back again," or you'll get your butt kicked even worse.