[Alberta's Child]

If you have to debunk “war conspiracy theories” ten years after the fact, then you can be sure that the military campaign in question was a complete ‘effing disaster.

[SoCal Pubbie]

There are war conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor right here on this forum, and that was over 75 years ago. I guess WWII was a real disaster.

[shanover]

Iraq was wrong not for the leftist BS but for the same hubris that is the design of the bombing of Syria. It pains me to say that any soldier who is KIA or maimed in the Mideast is in vain. I went to Desert Storm as active Army and then PANG for “Iraqi Freedom” (I knew nobody who gave a rats ass for Iraqi freedom.We just wanted to not get killed on our convoy security operations). The feeling of the soldier is a considerable contrast between the two operations.

[Keb]

Reply to: “If you have to debunk “war conspiracy theories” ten years after the fact, then you can be sure that the military campaign in question was a complete ‘effing disaster.”

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In the real world, the fastest blitzkrieg in the history of the human race was militarily a spectacular triumph, by any serious standards. There have been many criticisms of it. President Bush sent forces in too quickly, and should have given the inspectors more time to search. Not only that, but President Bush sent forces too late, and allowed much of Sadam’s chemical arsenal to be evacuated to Syria. President Bush sent too small a force, and could not control the country. And besides that, President Bush sent too large a force, and this offended the Iraqis. We went to war to seize Iraq’s oil, and we shouldn’t have. Also, we didn’t go to seize Iraq’s oil, and we should have. President Bush relied too heavily on local allies, and they fumbled. In addition, President Bush didn’t make enough use of local allies, and put too much of the load on US forces. President Bush is too short. And besides that, he’s too tall.

(OK, I made up the last two. The rest are criticism actually leveled at President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war.) The mere fact that the criticisms of the war point in all directions, is a clue to the fact that there was no clear-cut flaw in the campaign.

Also, if you mean to talks seriously about it, you do need to acknowledge that President Bush inherited the Iraq war from President Clinton. President Clinton bombed Iraq more or less day-in, day-out, for his entire term in office. He was losing, but he did fire a lot of missiles, and drop a lot of bombs (and dropped a lot of concrete blocks). By the time the younger President Bush took office, the question was not whether to fight the war we had been fighting for the last decade, but rather how to fight it.

It does seem that, when President Bush proposed to win the war we had been fighting for the last ten years (we went to war with Iraq at the beginning of 1991, and never stopped until President Bush won it), all the newspaper editors in the United States suffered simultaneous psychotic breaks, and completely forgot that the war they had been reporting on for the last ten years, had ever existed. The campaign to win the war we had been fighting for the last decade was known as “Preemptive War”. The war he inherited from President Clinton was call “George Bush’s War of Choice”. The strike by the third largest alliance in the history of the human race was “Acting Unilaterally”. Referring to the fastest blitzkrieg in history as “Being Bogged Down in a Quagmire”, was trivial by comparison.

I’m tempted to say “You can’t make this stuff up.” Obviously, I would be wrong, because someone did make this stuff up, and that’s the ultimate proof of feasibility. But anyone who fell for any of this, should take it as a warning. The lies don’t get more obvious. Anyone who fell for any of them, can be sure that the same liars have fooled him about other things, too.