Iraq - Still, In Fact, Going On

I understand the scorn. It must be difficult to come to terms with the fact that you enthusiastically supported something that turned out to be a major crime against humanity.

But, you see, this is not a conversation. It's not even an argument. It's just two people standing back to back shouting at opposite walls. We never get anywhere, Droid.

Britain in ruins. Your brothers, friends, uncles, aunts, parents - dead, radicalised, tortured, turned into refugees. No place or person untouched by war and conflict and still no end in sight.

15 years later cheerleaders for war & citizens of an aggressor state claim 'there's not even an argument'.

You would think youd have the common decency not to comment, or, at the very least, say something meaningful.

The first step to redemption is admitting your mistakes.

Alright, then. I think that after the invasion the US made a fatal error in declaring an Occupation and handing over the reigns to Bremer. The direct follow-on on from this was the disbanding of the entire Iraqi army and the simultaneous alienation of the Sunni Tribes. An insurgency, that had been initially generated by ex-Ba'athists and national and international jihadis was given the environment in which to thrive while at the same time Iran was able to support and direct the now powerful Shia parties. In this situation, the US military was clueless. Clueless, rather than malign. And so on.

Lots of connecting events between the Allied invasion and the massive death toll being counted by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, but I don't feel like you're very interested n them.

craner said:

Alright, then. I think that after the invasion the US made a fatal error in declaring an Occupation and handing over the reigns to Bremer. The direct follow-on on from this was the disbanding of the entire Iraqi army and the simultaneous alienation of the Sunni Tribes. An insurgency, that had been initially generated by ex-Ba'athists and national and international jihadis was given the environment in which to thrive while at the same time Iran was able to support and direct the now powerful Shia parties. In this situation, the US military was clueless. Clueless, rather than malign. And so on.

Lots of connecting events between the Allied invasion and the massive death toll being counted by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, but I don't feel like you're very interested n them.

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So, essentially, you don't see that the aggression itself was morally wrong, it was just badly executed?

And despite the hideous legacy of interventions, the universal claim that they are motivated by benign reasons and the consistently predictable consequences that litter history, Iraq could somehow have been different?

That morality has ever played a part in decisions to invade other countries?

That, given the chance, you would support the war again?

I didn't (and don't) see it solely as an "aggression" - there was a whole raft of arguments making a case for 1) a preemptive strike and 2) a humanitarian intervention. The regime change argument was more complicated than the "WMD" reduction eventually presented (for which Bush and Blair were both at fault).

Would I support the war again? In the exact same circumstances, I would have to say yes; in the same circumstances, but with hindsight, I definitely wouldn't support such an invasion with that particular administration in charge. The principle of regime change, though, in the case of that Iraqi Ba'athist security state, I would continue to support. I was never in favour of the occupation administration that eventually transpired.

I've sort of done this before.

Naivety, stupidity, dishonesty, wishful thinking, seeming total lack of historical knowledge or precedent. The lack of remorse is the icing on the cake.

Youre bordering on psychopathy here. You don't seem to understand that Iraq was full of real people with real lives, hopes, dreams and desires.

I presume everyone's in agreement that Bremer's policies helped fan the flames of insurgency in a big way. However, Craner I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on how successful a (realistic) counter-insurgency could have been.

This is an interesting discussion about whether the US should abandon counter-insurgency all together given its history.


Friedman proposes achieving the desired ends with special operations which have narrowly defined, conventional aims:

https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/end-counterinsurgency-and-scalable-force

Yes, Droid, I am an evil and stupid psychopath.

I presume everyone's in agreement that Bremer's policies helped fan the flames of insurgency in a big way. However, Craner I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on how successful a (realistic) counter-insurgency could have been.

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No idea, I'm no strategist. I do think, however, that the way the insurgency gathered momentum and spread, and the particular decisions made by Bremer and his advisers and the circumstances directly caused by them, meant that the Americans were doomed whatever they did. I mean, one of the things they did was to sack Fallujah, but that had nothing to do with the Shia militias that were slowly colonizing important sectors and (by 2006) government posts and were equally responsible for the carnage.

I don't know if anyone's read Emma Sky's book yet. I haven't, but I plan to. It will shed a lot of light on what went down with the US Generals, I expect.

More deflection.

You must surely know that your arguments dont even begin to hold water. They were wrong then and they are wrong know.

And just look at the historical record. Practically every Western intervention of any scale was 'benignly motivated' and practically every one ended in disaster for the population at the receiving end.

The possibility that Bush and Blair, a cowboy and a messianic cynic could have bucked the historical trend and might have been motivated by moral reasons... the very idea... its beyond fantastical.

And youd do it again... astonishing.

Iraqi families sell organs to overcome poverty

"I would tell my son to collect waste bread from the street and we would eat it, but I never asked for food or money."

Facing such poverty, Ms Hussein was driven to make a huge sacrifice.

"I decided to sell my kidney," she said. "I could no longer provide for my family. It was better than selling my body or living on charity."

The couple approached an illegal trader to sell their kidneys, but initial tests proved their organs were not healthy enough for transplant.

Disappointment followed, and the couple considered taking a desperate solution.

"Because of our miserable conditions we even thought of selling our son's kidney," Ali said, angrily, while pointing at his nine-year-old son, Hussein.

"We would do anything but beg. Why on earth were we in this position?"

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36083800

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The Bush administration's rhetoric and the neo-con literature that informed it both portrayed regime change in Iraq as the precursor to regime change in Iran and Syria. As such those two regimes began aiding the insurgency (apparently even it's Sunni component) to bog the US down in Iraq. That's a large part of the insurgency that can't be blamed on Bremer.

Maybe if they had cooperated with Iran in the same way they had done in Afghanistan (which Iran had offered) things might have been different.

The world's so much easier in counterfactuals.

The law wasn't launched purely for moral reasons, but for security reasons, too. The corruption of the WMD argument obscured the actual argument which was that nobody knew what the state of Saddam's weapons arsenal was because the UNSCOM inspectors kept getting kicked out and, besides, the intention to procure WMD had to be presumed.

The humanitarian intervention argument was separate to this, but was another strand that was rather buried by Blair and the neoconservatives, although it was a central factor in their thinking.

Here's an amusing / appalling talk by Peter van Buren about his time in Iraq as an FSO:

craner said:

The law wasn't launched purely for moral reasons, but for security reasons, too. The corruption of the WMD argument obscured the actual argument which was that nobody knew what the state of Saddam's weapons arsenal was because the UNSCOM inspectors kept getting kicked out and, besides, the intention to procure WMD had to be presumed.

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Laughable.

The humanitarian intervention argument was separate to this, but was another strand that was rather buried by Blair and the neoconservatives, although it was a central factor in their thinking.

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Youre a regular comedian.

Firstly, according to Amnesty, the number of people imprisoned or executed by Saddam in the years leading up to the war were in the low hundreds - consistently lower than regimes supported by US/UK.

Secondly, the idea that any great power goes to war for 'humanitarian reasons'... its just ridiculous.

The fact that youre clinging to this stuff... its almost clinically delusional - but of course, there's no way you actually believe any of it.

That's a fair argument, sadmanbarty, and I'm not blaming the insurgency solely on Bremer; it's not even like there was no valid argument for de-Ba'athification, because there certainly was. I remember there being quite a lot of controversy about Iran's offer of assistance in Iraq when Ryan Crocker brought it up in a New Yorker piece a couple of years ago. I'd have to dig that up, though. From what I recall, it wasn't quite as straightforward as all that.

But the fact is, Iran was pouring people across unsecured borders almost as soon as the US tanks had started to roll, and it's reductive to pin that down to "neocon literature", particularly when there were only a handful of them talking up the permanent revolution argument anyway (and when the State Department was making cooing noises about Iran being a legitimate democracy).

droid said:

I mean, you havent actually got an argument here other than 'waugh, Noam Chomsky' have you?

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To be fair to craner, droid often dismisses links as "garbage" without further elaboration, or sometimes "The author wrote something else I disagreed with, ergo it's garbage".

craner said:

In this situation, the US military was clueless. Clueless, rather than malign. And so on.

Lots of connecting events between the Allied invasion and the massive death toll being counted by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, but I don't feel like you're very interested n them.

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And to be fair to droid - come on, going in with guns blazing like that and no real clue as to what to do next bespeaks a callousness that borders on complete disregard for the people of the country. You surely don't have to be some Harvard politics/sociology wonk to spot that demobbing a huge army of fanatics, humiliating and executing their beloved leader, impoverishing them and denying them jobs and instituting a government dominated by their enemies but not actually disarming them would lead to ISIS or something like it.

I also don't see there that there's a huge amount of point if debating whether the death toll has been over a million or 'merely' in the several hundreds of thousands, or dividing it up into deaths directly caused by Coalition military action, the subsequent insurgency and general lawlessness or resource shortages and infrastructure breakdown caused by war. And we know that Saddam had fuck-all to do with 9/11 - that was such an obvious myth that even Bush Jnr dropped it pretty quickly - and that there was no WMD threat to any NATO members. It's been an unmitigated disaster.