Iraq Was Probably a “Mistake,” Said Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s Defense Pick

Intercept, the ^ | 05 December 2016 | Mattathias Schwartz

[Lorianne]

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense called the 2003 invasion of Iraq a “mistake,” according to a recording obtained by The Intercept.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mattis said, “we will probably look back on the invasion of Iraq as a mistake — as a strategic mistake.”

Mattis was one of the Iraq campaign’s most important ground commanders. He led the 1st Marine Division during the invasion and later oversaw the bloody retaking of Fallujah from insurgents in 2004.

As for the Pentagon’s view on the Iraq invasion at the time, Mattis said this: “I think people were pretty much aware that the U.S. military didn’t think it was a very wise idea. But we give a cheery ‘Aye aye, sir.’ Because when you elect someone commander in chief — we give our advice. We generally give it in private.”

Mattis’s comments came during a question-and-answer session after a keynote delivered last year at ASIS International, a conference for “global security professionals” held in Anaheim, California. A conference participant provided an audio recording of Mattis’s speech exclusively to The Intercept.

[Alberta's Child]

Can you provide evidence for any of those things you've listed there?

I only ask this because it all has a familiar ring to it. We heard it back in 1990 when some Kuwaitis testified to these various "atrocities" that were allegedly committed by the invading Iraqi army. It turns out that some of the worst allegations were made by a Kuwaiti teenage girl who happened to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.

It's amazing how many Freepers who post all over this forum about how much their government lies to them are willing to accept the government story about this sort of thing without questioning any of it.

[backwoods-engineer]

In retrospect and from a strategic (not tactical) perspective, I think he’s right. But there’s no way we could have known that at the time.

[Future Snake Eater]

The virtual extermination of the terrorist network that organized and executed the 09-11 attacks on the USA is what was gained.

That and a $1.50 will get you a coffee. We smashed AQ and several other networks popped up. We smashed some of those, ISIS popped up. Unless and until we destroy Saudi Arabia and Iran, this crap won't slow down.

[Kickass Conservative]

Didn’t say Occupation. Colin Powell stopped Bush from eviserating the Iraqi Military. We looked weak, big mistake.

Saddam did not show up and sign the Surrender Documents. You crush your Enemies, you don’t let the guy who started the whole thing by invading Kuwait get away unscathed.

Saddam would have never survived had he been publicly humiliated by showing up and groveling. It’s an Arab thing.

Come to think of it, we should have pounded them until they turned over Saddam for Execution. His own people would have taken care of it for us anyway had we doled out the proper punishment.

Water under the bridge, so I’m just venting anyway. LOL

[Bob434]

[[Can you provide evidence for any of those things you’ve listed there?]]

Sure- google dot com- it’s no secret- saddam was a brutal brutal man- the media covered his brutality extensively after he was taken down- it was all over the news- it was even reported by the msm- so don’t go falsely accusing us of buying what our government was handing us at the time- news media hostile to president bush were reporting on the issue- Google is your friend- I hope you aren’t going to claim one girl’s testimony caused all testimonies to be false? The news media uncovered the graves- remember? They also found evidence of torture- a lot of evidence-

[FreedomPoster]

And hanging around Afghanistan past the punitive expedition phase, into the meals-on-wheels phase, was similarly a mistake.

[Bob434]

but if we do nothign at all it will increase exponentially as the enemies learn how cowardly and unwilling to fight them IF we go the route of not sending a powerful message that we are noone to be messed with- Bullies keep bullying when the ones they bully don’t stand up for themselves and for the oppressed-

[Alberta's Child]

No, I understand. I'm just trying to figure out if the brutality of Saddam Hussein was any different than what goes on abortion clinics all over this country on a daily basis.

The world is filled with brutal men. We don't piss away thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to deal with all of them.

[Alberta's Child]

I understand. LOL.

[Lorianne]

That’s true, we could not have known all that ensued.
But there was a lot that was known:

Muslims have been fighting Muslims in the region for over 1000 years and counting.

If Sadaam Hussien was such a bad guy and had missile capable WMDs and was prepared to use them ... why didn’t some country WITHIN MISSILE RANGE take him out?

Ditto in Kuwait in Gulf War I. Why didn’t other countries in the region come to the defense of Kuwait? Why did it have to be us?

[ebshumidors]

Anyone with half a brain should have seen right then that the whole “war on terror” was a giant fraud that was perpetrated on the American people by a corrupt, diabolical government at the behest of their Saudi paymasters. FIFY

[afsnco]

Looking at it from a “big picture” perspective, it was a mistake. Hussein was no prize, but he was a strong man in charge of a heavily armed Islamic country and he wasn’t serious about Islam. THAT combination is in our national security interests.

People raised in Islamic countries seem to be incapable of creating a constitutional republic. Instead political Islam will intrude you end up with an Islamic abomination like Iran. So a strong man (like el Sisi in Egypt) who isn’t serious about Islam in charge of an Islamic nation is a great idea.

I realize this is realpolitik in spades, but we’ve got to live in the real world.

[Miguk]

Bob,

Fighting a war (or any war, for that matter), especially in the Middle East, for 'moral' reasons, is not "good enough."

Reports of human rights atrocities had been coming out of the Middle East for decades, and not just in Iraq. And we did nothing. Europe did nothing.

After 9/11, the American people didn't need any further reason to want Saddam dead and buried. Geopolitical excuses, like "Saddam is a foil to Iran," "Saddam, like Tito, keeps a tribalistic Iraq from disintegrating," "Saddam may be a monster, but he's our monster," were no longer good enough reasons to keep him alive.

The First Gulf War (which I supported), was a rousing success, but, as it always seems, America is great at screwing up afterwards. We bloodied his nose, decimated, to a degree, his ability to "export" war, but we left enough of his military intact to remain a foil to Iran and to keep Iraq from disintegrating. Sated our bloodlust, satisfied our sense of moral obligation to the Kuwaitis, and "punished" Saddam for being an evil dictator. Wham, bam, thank you Saddam.

Then 9/11 happens. Revenge, justice, payback, moral outrage are often used as justifications for war, but are, in hindsight, not always the best way to enter a conflict. I supported these conflicts. We bombed Afghanistan into the Stone Age. We achieved a level of success, arguably, that rivaled anything the Soviets could have ever done in their Vietnam-like boondoggle.

We achieved military success, in so short a time, with fewer US casualties. We owned Afghanistan, and no one opposed us, not Russia, China, or Iran. And then we screwed up the afterwards.

Iraq was next. Three weeks, from start to finish. Three weeks the might of the US military conquered a country the size of CA. Could we have done that in 1991, if the political will had been there? And then we screwed up the afterwards.

I am tempted to go on. If and until the United States, her citizens, her politicians and bureaucrats, and her military leaders, are willing to plan (and implement and stay the course), from the get-go, for the afterwards, then the U.S. should stop helping.

We are adult enough to take in the facts, the atrocities, the geopolitics, the "realities" and to make a rational logical decision on whether we should spend our blood and treasure helping, and decide whether we should remain the world's Policeman.

[truth_seeker]

“I’ve wondered if the Iraq invasion wasn’t a way to enclose Iran in a pincer when we eventually entered Afghanistan.”

I remember discussion of that idea, back at that time.

But that presumed we had the strategy, tactics, political will to see it through with enough firepower to conquer, dominate and occupy both places.

It soon turned out to not be our plan. Our plan turned out to be “win the hearts and minds” and rely on (unreliable) local forces.

In hindsight we seem to have learned to not try to conquer/dominate/occupy certain hostile countries, to fight terrorism.

We appear to have NOT learned to import refugees from hostile countries.

[gundog]

To your first point, I think that keeping Iranian forces split east and west... and maybe a force in the south against tha Saudis, would keep them on the sidelines completely. Keeping insurgents out seemed to be impossible.As to the “hearts and minds,” I suppose we figured that Itaqis might prefer freedom to tyranny. In hindsight, Saddam’s methods may have been better suited to controlling a population with deep sectarian differences. Finally, I think Saddam calculated that we lacked the political will to see the whole thing through. In the long run,he may be correct. And allowing potential insurgents into America may prove to be our undoing.

[Bob434]

[[Fighting a war (or any war, for that matter), especially in the Middle East, for ‘moral’ reasons, is not “good enough.”]]

My response was that there were two very valid reason- militarily and morally-

[[her military leaders, are willing to plan (and implement and stay the course), from the get-go, for the afterwards, then the U.S. should stop helping.]]

We were prepared to stay the course until our current president took office-

[[make a rational logical decision on whether we should spend our blood and treasure helping, and decide whether we should remain the world’s Policeman. ]]

Being allies to an oppressed people is not policing- there’s a big difference- nor is going to war after myriad un violations policing- We knew for a fact saddam was using WMDs on his own people- and the atrocities he was committing on his own people were far and above what most regimes do- Again- there were several key issues that led the US to take him out- And morality was just one of those key issues- You will discover, if you read the investigations into wmds that even the investigators knew he had them - read the report- the final decision was a politically motivated one meant to deligitimize bush- the iraqi’s under order by saddam buried their weapons all over the country-

“5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs” were found scattered across Iraqi soil.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/10/16/new-york-times-reports-wmd-found-in-iraq

BOMBSHELL: New York Times Reports WMDs WERE Found in Iraq!

http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/bombshell-new-york-times-reports-wmds-found-iraq/

These were not old antiquated wmds- these were the real deal- soldiers suffered chemical poisonings and burnings from wmds- And these are just the ones that were found-

Further Iraq was required by un resolution 1441 to fully account for and destroy all wmds- they refused-

“My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision. For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war. That regime pledged to reveal and destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Since then, the world has engaged in 12 years of diplomacy. We have passed more than a dozen resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. We have sent hundreds of weapons inspectors to oversee the disarmament of Iraq. Our good faith has not been returned.

The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament. Over the years, U.N. weapon inspectors have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged, and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again — because we are not dealing with peaceful men.

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”

President George Bush

[Bob434]

The dueler report which ‘concluded’ that there ‘were no wmds’ was wholly unaware of the fact that there were later found 500 warheads with sarin gas at 25% concentration levels- Woopsie- such a definitive determination when all the actual facts weren’t known- some as high as 40%- these were not ‘old ineffective wmds’

“The most interesting discovery has been a 152mm binary Sarin artillery projectile—containing a 40 percent concentration of Sarin—which insurgents attempted to use as an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). The existence of this binary weapon not only raises questions about the number of viable chemical weapons remaining in Iraq and raises the possibility that a larger number of binary, long-lasting chemical weapons still exist.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/iraq-had-wmds-after-all.php

The more warheads that were found, the louder the cry of ‘old-useless’ from the left became- they just could not admit that they were wrong about there being ‘no wmds’ so they had to keep trying to diminish how recent or effective the warheads were- but htere became so many of them, and the concentrations were so high- that their lie became obvious to all those who knew these weapons existed- the problem is that the msm buried these reports until the NYT finally came out with their report, refuting the claim that the wmd’s found were ‘not important’-

Everyone knows that Saddam had all the time in the world to move and hide wmds=- even moving some out of country- the left knew it- everyone knew it- there was nothing honorable about saddam at all- he stopped at nothing trying to hide incriminating evidence-

“One of three important questions before us today is how much might remain undeclared and intact from before 1991; and, possibly, thereafter; the second question is what, if anything, was illegally produced or procured after 1998, when the inspectors left; and the third question is how it can be prevented that any weapons of mass destruction be produced or procured in the future.”

You knew damn well saddam was saying “Pay no attention to the voice behind the curtain”- He was juts biding his time and waiting for the right time to rebuild what he had just destroyed- every honest person knew this—

[Bob434]

not to mention the fact that wmds wasn’t even the main reason for going in- infact, President Bush specifically told his advisors and military not to use it as the reason for going in and removing saddam- the msm falsely got the lying narrative out htere that ‘Bush lied about wmd’s in order to get vengence for his daddy’s failed attempt to remove saddam’- Bob woodward- no friend of Bush- looked long and hard for evidence that Pres Bush used the excuse of wmd’s as the main justification ,and he found objective evidence that showed just the opposite- at least woodward was intellectually honest enough to admit this-

[BDParrish]

The war on Iraq was to preserve the petrodollar. Our first war aim was to cancel the oil contracts that Saddam had settled in Euros.

Russia has been working to end the petrodollar system, which is why Hillary and her Saudi Arabian bosses have been trying to start a new war with them.

[FreedomPoster]

It goes beyond overseeing a new civilian government. You’ve got to remove the inimical ideology.

We are not even close to facing up to this issue, in this ongoing war.