You don't have to profess ignorance of the remaining 40 just because you haven't been there. The person I responded to made a snarky comment about whether U.S. troops were greeted as liberators. I was there, and we WERE greeted as liberators by much of the people. Your, and the other poster's ignorance shows when you buy into the bullshit professed by the NYT and CNN.
The problem was after Jan/Feb 2007 when everything started calming down, the U.S. lost the political will to continue to fight. No commander (at least in Al Anbar) wanted to rock the boat. The ROEs were garbage and the U.S. refused to go after the ISIZ, which had went underground to less overt activity. The abrupt withdrawal and 0bama, McCain et al misadventures in Syria led to ISIS sweeping both countries.
I spent much of my adult life fighting in that shithole. I've lost a good number of friends, and several more (including myself) are permanently maimed and wounded. I've seen first hand the press blatantly lie (I was is in the wounded overflow at Bravo Surgical trying to explain to pissed off wounded Iraqi soldiers why an "American" press would lie and say we were shooting women and children). I certainly don't agree with the way much of the war was executed from armchair politicians in DC, or from political military commanders in theater.
You can armchair quarterback all you want to. You can criticize whether we should have invaded or not. You can criticize the execution all you want. That's your right and your opinion. I certainly don't have an issue with someone having an opinion.
But, when someone parrots blatantly false CNN talking points as truth, I'd say that's pretty ignorant.
I suspect that the Christian population of Iraq that has left the country since the US invasion would have a different opinion. In 2003, the Christian population was 1.5 million, now it is estimated at 500,000.
I agree that's a travesty. It's what happens when you focus too much on nation building and expecting Jeffersonionan democracy to spontaneously spring into existence in places like Iraq and other such happy horseshit rather than targeting terrorists.
For instance, why was there even a discussion over SOFA and protections of U.S. military members in Iraq? Why were "we" so damned worried about being seen as occupiers when we had mass quantities of troops occupying the country?
Why did we not continue clearing cities post-Fallujah? Those cities instead needed to be cleared, and/or re-cleared after the major withdrawal. All of these actions (refusal to continue to prosecute the kinetic aspects of the war, followed by withdrawal) lead to increased suffering, higher death tool, and more destruction of Iraqi civil infrastructure. Some of that could've been avoided if we would've stayed out of Syria. OR, if instead of arming "rebels" we would have attacked strategic terror strongholds in places like Dayr Azur.
My points still stand that a sizable portion of the population was grateful we ousted Saddam, and were going after the terrorists. Also, much of the populace did not want us to leave because Iran and AQ would take over and the country would descend into chaos. That is all indisputable fact based on first hand accounts. Everything else is opinion.
So you had ISIS develop as a Sunni insurgency after a Shi'ite-controlled government was elected in Iraq, and now that ISIS has been scattered you have Shi'ite militants having their way in Iraq.
The end result at the start of 2020 is that we have pissed away thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars (if not more) on an invasion and a stupid "nation-building" campaign in Iraq that has gained the average United States citizen absolutely NOTHING since 2003.
This isn't "armchair quarterbacking," either. This has all unfolded exactly as some of us predicted right here on Free Republic back in 2002 before the whole fiasco began.
And it ain't because we're terribly smart, either. We just smelled a rat and knew damn well that we should never get behind a U.S. government initiative that involves draft dodgers sending someone else to fight a war in some Third World sh!t-hole.
Dick Cheney himself had it all figured out years earlier when he explained why the U.S. didn't invade Iraq in 1990 when he was the U.S. Secretary of Defense ...
"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right." -- Dick Cheney, C-SPAN interview, 4/15/1994
What changed between 1994 and 2003? Nothing, except that in 2003 Dick Cheney was now working for a U.S. president whose own family had been owned by royal families in the Middle East for years. And he was paid handsomely by U.S. contractors who stood to make a ton of money from the hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. government was preparing to spend over there.
For instance, why was there even a discussion over SOFA and protections of U.S. military members in Iraq? Why were "we" so damned worried about being seen as occupiers when we had mass quantities of troops occupying the country? Why did we not continue clearing cities post-Fallujah? Those cities instead needed to be cleared, and/or re-cleared after the major withdrawal. All of these actions (refusal to continue to prosecute the kinetic aspects of the war, followed by withdrawal) lead to increased suffering, higher death tool, and more destruction of Iraqi civil infrastructure.
You have to remember that by 2007 the political situation had changed here completely in the U.S. And that had nothing to do with media bias here, either. The Republicans were thrown out of power -- first in 2006 (in Congress), then again in 2008 (across the board in both Congress and the White House) -- on their own merit. By that time, the mood of the voters in this country was soured by political stupidity in Washington that was audacious and breathtaking. The same elected officials in the U.S. government who were pissing away thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in Islamic sh!t-holes halfway around the world were also clamoring to grant blanket amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens here at home.
I knew the party was facing a disaster sometime in 2006 when I stopped by a local convenience store on a Saturday morning. After making my way to the front door past a horde of swarthy Latin Americans waiting for contractors to hire them, I noticed the headline of a local newspaper announcing the funeral services for a local U.S. service member who had been killed in Iraq a few days earlier.
At that point I was pretty certain that Osama bin Laden would have gotten more votes than George W. Bush in my town, if there was a presidential election at that time in mid-2006.