Posted on 07/17/2017 5:43:41 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran. A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border.
And that’s not even the half of it. Across the country, Iranian-sponsored militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by Iran’s leadership.
When the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were poured into the cause. From Day 1, Iran saw something else: a chance to make a client state of Iraq, a former enemy against which it fought a war in the 1980s so brutal, with chemical weapons and trench warfare, that historians look to World War I for analogies. If it succeeded, Iraq would never again pose a threat, and it could serve as a jumping-off point to spread Iranian influence around the region. In that contest, Iran won, and the United States lost. …
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Well Bush said it was a Religion of Peace and just don’t worry and go to Disney World and keep spending your money. What we did in Iraq was fighting for Iran against the Sunni Iraqi minority. As soon as we allowed the Iraqi’s to put in their Constitution...
“NO LAW SHALL CONTRADICT ISLUM”....IT WAS A LOST CAUSE.
If we were two Iranians sitting down in 2002 concocting a strategy to make Iran a dominant force in that region, we couldn't come up with a more effective plan than the one implemented by that retarded baboon in the White House at the time.
The US didn’t hand the country over, an employee of the Muslim brotherhood who made pretend he was our POTUS did. And the left constantly celebrates him but you’ll be damned if any one of them can name one good thing he did for the USA. Liberals celebrating him like he’s Sidney Poitier from the movie “To Sir with love”, good God that one took the cake. Yes, the American people were just a bunch of unruly students until the dear leader corrected their ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTDeHuasdNA
As I recall it was Bush II who got us in there because, well, we’re “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”, no...”we’re spreading democracy”, no...Sadaam’s a bad, bad guy and - we don’t like bad guys!
Bush talked tough, but put the American police state on overdrive with the creation of DHS, TSA, and who knows what else.
Then proceeded to take away the rights of honest, law-abiding Americans that continues to this day.
All this with the blessing of the Republican party and most ‘conservative’ pundits.
Iraq had nothing to do with flying planes into the Twin Towers.
Bush and the Republicans gave 0bama this on a silver platter.
Troop pullout, primarily. Open support of “Muslim world” before that. And ultimately the JCPOA after that. That man did a lot of damage in his eight years. much of which is not openly discussed even now.
Saddam Hussein lost that long-running border war he had going on with Iran, which had begun in earnest after the Shah was deposed and the Islamic Republic of Iran proclaimed the moral superiority and authority of the Shi’ite faction of Islam.
Iraq is almost inevitably headed to division into the three countries. This was strongly suggested by that great theoretical thinker, Joe Biden, in an op-ed in the New York Times in 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/opinion/01biden.html), which shows what a great statesman he is.
[A]fter the United States’ abrupt withdrawal of troops in 2011, American constancy is still in question here — a broad failure of American foreign policy, with responsibility shared across three administrations.Obama’s culpability is indicated, but glossed over, and the other two administrations are not mentioned by name and no specifics are given.
Iran has been playing a deeper game, parlaying extensive religious ties with Iraq’s Shiite majority and a much wider network of local allies, as it makes the case that it is Iraq’s only reliable defender. …
> What we did in Iraq was fighting for Iran against the Sunni Iraqi minority. <
Yep. Bush 2 didn’t plan it that way, of course. But that’s how it turned out. And it’s a bit disingenuous of some conservatives to blame this on Obama. Obama made a bad situation worse. But it was a bad situation because of Bush.
Blaming Obama for the Iraq mess would be like blaming Nixon for the Vietnam mess.
“Iraq belongs to the Arab League, not to Iran,” said Sheikh Fadhil al-Bidayri, a cleric at the religious seminary in Najaf. “Shiites are a majority in Iraq, but a minority in the world. As long as the Iranian government is controlling the Iraqi government, we don’t have a chance.” …So not even Iraqi Sunnis have their own identity; they think of themselves as a collective, part of an Arabic Sunni Caliphate. And that is always based on terrorism. Even Saddam, as a national-socialist Ba’athist, thought collectively and of course well beyond his own borders; he was no stranger to helping out the “Palestinians” among other terrorists.
The first four years were run by seasoned old hands , but in Bush's second term they were ousted for a team of Bush cronies who were not up to the job.
Bush’s failure to secure a long term status of forces agreement for our troops was a fatal flaw, as was making the Iraqi government independent from American occupying forces.
We wet in, destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure and military , threw the government into chaos, destabilized the region and the, delivered Iraq into the hands of our mutual enemy.
Bush won the war but refused to win the peace
Iran has won the peace.
Nixon never sought to enable communist Vietnam to weaponize itself. (He did, however, enable Red China at the expense of Taiwan.)
Obama directly facilitated the transmutation of “Al-Qa’eda in Iraq” into ISIS/ISIL/IS/DAESH. Iranian domination of Iraq greatly expanded as a direct result of Obama’s actions, the same Obama who opposed the troop surge. Iranian power was increased directly because of the illegal JCPOA.
> Bush won the war but refused to win the peace <
Excellent observation.
Not without Obama’s help, though. His “peaceful” overtures helped Iran’s belligerence too.
You are correct, sir. Done by our ever patriotic Americans at the DOS.
A bit of a stretch, but okay.
Even so, it does not excuse GWB and his NeoCon nutjob Republicans for their role in opening up the hornet’s nest over there.
We’re still wasting untold amounts of American blood and treasure throughout the ME, as I’m sure you know.
Christians are still being killed and driven out of their land. Americans have few, if any, rights left.
I have no intention of excusing them. It’s a continuum between that administration and Obama’s.
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