Posted on 04/27/2015 7:35:18 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Edited on 04/27/2015 10:05:42 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The first time we hadn’t been attacked and there was no threat.
Well, we shouldn’t have gone in then and let them have Kuwait.
If we bailed out Kuwait, we should have told them in exchange to drop the Islamic form of government they had and stop treating women like second class citizens, we should not bail out any government that would still have a good portion of their population living in the stone age.
So which is it.
We should have invaded Iraq the first time or we shouldn’t have defended Kuwait?
Make up your mind, you don’t even make sense.
As I stated above it may well be both their faults in varying degrees. However, Obama was CIC since 2009. He could have insisted on changes to the withdrawal if he had listened to his military advisors. I believe Bush, like most, thought after seeing the "purple fingers" that democracy would actually take hold.
I think we were all naive and some still believe Muslims actually want true liberty. I now believe like Rand Paul, many need to be ruled by authoritarianism, within reason. Hell, we're sorta allies with Saudi Arabia, one of the most intolerant and misogynistic cultures on the planet.
The leader of the free world of a country that kicked Iraq's butt would certainly have the power to re-negotiate. The problem with Obama's promise to follow Bush's withdrawal year was to specifically and publically state how many were leaving on a given date and from what region. Bush may have originally agreed to 2011, but Obama gave the radicals a future battle plan. No wonder ISIS popped up so quickly. They had common knowledge intel to formulate their strategy and recruitment.
We bailed out Kuwait to save Saudi more than anything and we would never dictate those terms to them.
I wasn’t agreeing. I prefaced the sentence with “Well”....
More’s the pity.
I believe we had to. But worth it is tough because getting out of these wars is done so badly.
The terms of the agreement weren't the problem. 0bama didn't get the agreement because it was too much work to bother pursuing it.
Toppling Saddam created a power vacuum in a volatile region which benefited Iran and Islamofascists. It was a dumb move, Paul is right.
In our insatiable lust to police the world we so often harm our own national self interest (e.g. Iraq, Libya). I’m curious to know where Cruz stands on this issue because anyone who agrees in hindsight that the Iraqi invasion was a good idea is not fit to be president.
I agree on all points.
Amen brother
Goetz Von Berlichingen
A freeper whose writing skills and thoughtfulness I admired as much as yours or Ohioan or nathanbedford quit the forum over his disdain for the runaway enthusiasm for the Iraq War here
He was mocked but given hindsight today democratic nation building only works where it’s wanted with a shared tradition of civility or that nation is on its knees utterly humbled
Prepared to be led out by its master to a better path
Years ago I had the belief that the ‘world’ should have let Iraq and Iran slug it out. Of course the Saudis royalty had a feeling such would spill over to their oil empire and control of holy sites. They sucked the Bush family/interests into the quagmire by using the oil game. I have no respect for the Bush family as to this matter.
There was never the goal, of supplanting a western “idea,” of some sort of democracy, in the mid-east. Your words betray you. By the by, there is no known working “democracy,” working anywhere— much less, in the west. Perhaps, Germany and the failed Euro-cracy come close.
At that point, I suspect an awful lot of Republicans began to wonder if the U.S. was on the wrong side in the first Persian Gulf War all the way back in 1990.
In retrospect, a better idea would have been to give Saddam to understand that he could not only overrun Kuwait but also Saudi Arabia, as long as gas stayed reasonable, and no nukes were involved.
The Royal Family would have high-tailed it to Switzerland, as Saddam fed the religious police through his wood chippers.
Result: secular Iraq, secular Kuwait, secular Saudi Arabia!
And AQ would still be hiding out in the mountains of Pakistan, not threatening to take over Iraq, having morphed into ISIS.
And then there's Libya. ISIS in control! An unforced error, if ever there was such!
Unfortunately Rand and others are / were right.
I specifically recall Bush senior deliberately leaving Saddam in power because foreign policy experts feared deposit him would leave a “Power Vaccum”.
Nature abhors a vaccum, and Isis has gladly filled it.
*I did and kinda do still support our reason for going into Iraq based on WND cat n mouse game and Saddam sending convoys of it into Syria.
Saddam killed 600,000 during his reign of tyranny.
However Iraq has once more proven caution that we should avoid foreign entanglements, and middle east scorpion nests.
d@mned auto correct - regarding: deposit, meant to say depose.
“There was never the goal, of supplanting a western “idea,” of some sort of democracy, in the mid-east. Your words betray you.”
Well actually your words betray you, and reveal you to be an ignoramus.
Perhaps you should begin alleviating your benighted condition by considering the words of John Hinderaker over Powerline, who unlike me was and is a big fan of Dubya:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/08/the-fate-of-democracy-in-iraq.php
“This brings us back to 2003, when the U.S. led an international coalition to topple Saddam Hussein and lay the foundation for Iraqi self-rule. I supported the effort, mostly on the ground that we needed to find a long-term solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism. How could we, over time, change the Arab states so that they will not endlessly breed violent, disaffected young men who are ripe for radical political action? One theory was that the dysfunction of Arab governments was an important contributor to the social and political pathologies that gave rise to terrorism. Perhaps if Arab governments became democratic, young people might turn their energies in a more constructive direction and over time, political liberalization might lead to cultural reform. President Bush articulated this objective in a series of excellent speeches.”
Now maybe if you had paid attention to Dubya’s “series of excellent speeches” back when he was making them you wouldn’t be making foolish comments about his supposed lack of a democratic objective today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.