Posted on 06/08/2015 11:15:40 AM PDT by jazusamo
I fail to see the down-side to either of those.
The Democrat Party nominated and elected Obama. He was never capable of being successful in this job.
The fault lies with the Democrat Party.
Obama.
The only way to win the peace following a war is to leave an overwhelming military force in place for many, many years after the war is over. History repeatedly proves this fact. That is why Germany, Japan and South Korea are now peaceful, free and democratic countries and why South Vietnam no longer exists and Iraq and Libya have fallen into anarchy.
I am not saying that Iraq would now be a peaceful, free and democratic county if we had maintained large military bases for decades after the war was over. I am saying that there was no possibility of Iraq being a peaceful, free and democratic country if we did not.
The next time this country decides to nation build somewhere else, we need to either commit to a decades long occupation up front or stay home.
With a) we’d be backtracking on decades of foreign policy in the region and opening it all up to God-knows-what fallout. Not to say it would be the wrong answer, just an unpredictable one that we spent years and many billions of dollars trying to avoid. Who wants to be the guy who makes that call?
With b), you don’t s**tcan a long-time ally and NATO partner to get back at some thugs in pickup trucks.
The fact is that we left Iraq in great shape to protect itself, but they folded immediately, and, as usual, blame us for their problems. I saw that behavior daily on my foot patrols, now here it is at the national level with their PM blaming the U.S. for not “doing more to stop ISIS.”
In short, to hell with those people.
That was the doings of Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military. Later, with George W. Bush, it was again Colin Powell, this time as Secretary of State, who lost Turkey as a key staging base to the north of Iraq just weeks before the beginning of military operations. This caused a last-minute redeployment of assets to the south to Basra, opening up the north for Saddam to flee and transport his WMD to Syria.
If Colin Powell hadn't blown it in Turkey, Iraq's forces would have been trapped between a northern and southern front, and hostilities would not have dragged on as they did.
-PJ
We wouldn’t really be sh!t canning any long time ally.
Just some folks who tended to side with whoever we were fighting when it has mattered.
I still remember Turkey’s actions during the 90-91 war, so you are going to have to find a different middle eastern power to claim as our ally.
Wouldn't that be preferable to explaining how we're going to devote more trillions and God know how many lives to propping up the corrupt and brutal regime that's running Iraq now? The one who destroyed their own military and whose own people won't fight for them? Admit the mistake and cut the loses, don't go running down the same doomed path.
With b), you don’t s**tcan a long-time ally and NATO partner to get back at some thugs in pickup trucks.
Every day in many ways Turkey under Erdoğan shows that they are not the ally they once were, and are in many ways working against our interests. So if the relationship is dead or dying it was Turkey that did it.
Despite the mistakes that were made in Iraq, it was still a viable country until Barack Obama made the headstrong decision to pull out all the troops, ignoring his own military advisers, just so he could claim to have restored "peace," when in fact he invited chaos and defeat.
Well, if pulling out the troops was the act which lost Iraq, he's blaming the wrong president. It was Bush who signed an agreement with Iraq in December 2008 - The U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement - which committed the U.S. to withdraw troops by 12/31/2011.
The kids loved us and admired everything American. You may have read that Iraq was one of the biggest markets for the film American Sniper, reportedly because it demonstrated in unmistakable terms the US was able to get rid of the bad guys.
With time those kids would have as quickly as kids can grow, transitioned from a narrow tribal mentality and would have claimed their future as individuals. In the interim, it was our challenge to provide a reasonably stable and healthy environment that nurtured that process.
We did not start the Iraq war. Saddam did in 1991 with his invasion of Kuwait. The invasion of 2003 was a continuation of that same war brought about by the refusal of Saddam to adhere to UN resolutions agreed to by him at the time of the “truce”. The only thing debatable is whether or not The US should have been enforcing UN resolutions.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it’s easy to argue that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a big mistake in the sense that Saddam kept a lid on the radical riff raff throughout the region. But we’d need a parallel universe to know what would have happened if we had left Saddam alone.
I don’t remember Bush claiming that Saddam had anything to do with 911. The WMD issue was just one point in the list of reasons, not the MAIN reason we invaded. I think that and “BUSH LIED” is all Mother Jones leftist horse s..t.
The real mistake Bush made was volunteering the US Military to enforce the dozen or so continuing resolutions of the world’s most worthless body...The United Nations...against Iraq.
Bush intended there to be a contingent of US Forces remaining in Iraq indefinately to guard against such as ISIS.
Obozo lost the war with his eagerness to claim the victory for himself by pulling out completely.
When it comes to that part of the world, we tend to take what we can get. Regardless, it’s still a shift that makes things unpredictable. Governments don’t like that, so they don’t tend to do it.
I say the preferable option is more or less what we’re doing now—mostly nothing. Some intel/airstrikes. I would say no more free weapons to the IA, though that would invite Iran to start supplying them with weapons which would further codify that incestuous relationship.
That whole region is a disaster.
“The buck stops here” said Truman. Obama said “I first learned it on TV like you did.”
Powell was a poor Secretary of anything but as I recall, after Desert storm Powell resigned saying he was encouraged to testify at the UN on “fauly information” . He was lied to in order to get him to testify that Sadaam had “mobile labs” They gave him a picture to display at the UN which depicted what turned out to be a weather balloon truck. He lost all credibilty forever and was humiliated so he resigned. No one has heard of him since that trick was played on him. It was bad and it was not fair to the man.
At least one of the three might have been functional.
Here’s an outside the box answer:
Iraqis.
Haha. Yes, I just posted that.
Saddam had it right, the only way to keep order over there is to crack skulls.
Let’s add that we bombed the carp out of Germany and Japan. The citizenry paid a heavy price for their adventurous leadership. They had little taste for a repeat.
But today’s precision strike tech, coupled with an abject fear of collateral damage, leaves the civilian population comparatively unscathed. There is no lesson learned.
You're awfully nice to Obozo ..... Read up on PSD 11 (still secret) and Obozo's systematically throwing people to the jihadi wolves, and you'll see his motives in Iraq differently.
Iraq had to come apart, to make Obozo's story come together, that the US had lost a "war of choice" and that "it was Bush's fault". We were always going to lose, you see ..... Enlightened Dear Leader simply got us out just in time!
</off 'Rat hokum>
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