20 Years Ago I Happily Cheered On the Iraq Invasion... that was stupid

[gbear]

The two questions I asked before that war are the same I had before we went to Afghanistan: "What would constitute a win?  What are the measurable objectives of the war?" I never got an answer in either war, so I still can't say if we won or lost them.  I will say it still seems pointless to fight without answering those questions, and I hope our elected leaders will learn that before we go to war again.

[tshile]

6 minutes ago, Riggo-toni said:

I don't think so. Ansar al Islam, the Al Quaeda affiliate in Iraq run by Zarqawi, was located in the northern portion of Iraq - just inside the US protected no fly zone, but far enough away from any Kurdish towns to be bothered. The US could have probably taken him out with an airstrike, but that would have meant one less justification for invading and it would have made us look trigger happy. Bin Laden reportedly hated Zarqawi, but Powell's UN speech made him a sort of celebrity, and Bin Laden brought him into the fold. Thus Ansar al Islam became Al Qaeda in Iraq, and would eventually morph into ISIL.

Most people don't realize OBL turned against the US and the Saudi Royal family because he wanted to go into Kuwait and fight the Iraqis, but the Saudis turned him down and went with the American led coalition instead. 

 

3 minutes ago, Captain Wiggles said:

Saddam was an anti islamist and secular leader. If anything he and Bin Laden were on opposite sides of the spectrum. They never had any intention of working together on anything. Saddam embraced western liberalism in a lot of ways compared to neighboring countries. 

 

Hell Bin Laden was butthurt the Saudis turned to America to defend them during the Gulf War instead of his Mujahideen. That's what started his bigly heel turn against the West. 🤷‍♂️

Well. Thankfully while you all were writing this I went and found the report and cited my work so, feel free to check it out yourself. It’s still up on my screen. What I said definitely happened, and it’s definitely in the report, and I gave you the page numbers. 

(The report discusses how the two were at odds ideologically, and goes over how they overcame that)

7 minutes ago, Captain Wiggles said:

Saddam was an anti islamist and secular leader. If anything he and Bin Laden were on opposite sides of the spectrum. They never had any intention of working together on anything. Saddam embraced western liberalism in a lot of ways compared to neighboring countries. 

 

Hell Bin Laden was butthurt the Saudis turned to America to defend them during the Gulf War instead of his Mujahideen. That's what started his bigly heel turn against the West. 🤷‍♂️

go read page 66 on the report. 

Link:

https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

[Captain Wiggles]

15 minutes ago, @DCGoldPants said:

 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/opinions/saddam-hussein-iraq-war-interrogations-george-piro-bergen/index.html

 

This is an interesting read that just came out recently. 

 

Exactly. Saddam admitted aftef his capture  that he feared al qaeda and Bin Laden. Why? Because they were a threat to his authoritarian rule in Iraq. 

 

Saddam likened himself to Stalin. He wanted to replace Islamic religion with himself as the leader same as Stalin did with himself vs the Russian Orthodox Church. Saddam wanted nothing to do with radical islamists.

Edited March 22, 2023 by Captain Wiggles

[tshile]

Just now, Captain Wiggles said:

Saddam wanted nothing to do with radical islamists.

The commission says as much. 
 

Until OBL issued his Fatwa on the US and then Saddam realized enemy of my enemy is my friend etc. 

 

if the commission was wrong so be it - but that’s what they said. 

[@DCGoldPants]

2 minutes ago, Captain Wiggles said:

 

Exactly. Saddam admitted aftef his capture  that he feared al qaeda and Bin Laden. Why? Because they were a threat to his authoritarian rule in Iraq. 

 

Saddam likened himself to Stalin. He wanted to replace Islamic religion with himself as the leader same as Stalin did with himself vs the Russian Orthodox Church. Saddam wanted nothing to do with radical islamists.

 

It was all a shell game that he though he could keep going to Iraq thought he had weapons to fight them, but the US wouldn't. He didn't realize the Neo-Cons didn't care what their intelligence said. They wanted to attack someone after 9/11. 

[Captain Wiggles]

17 minutes ago, tshile said:

go read page 66 on the report. 

Link:

https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

 

American, British,  and Israeli intelligence concluded there was no substantial link between Iraq and Al qaeda working together. Did they have meetings between low level officials? Sure but there was no working relationship between them on anything. 

 

Al qaeda wanted WMDs from wherever they could get them. Saddam had no because he used all the ones he bought from America in the Iran Iraq war and then on the Kurds and his own people after the war ended. He was then unable to produce his own especially with UN weapons inspectors like ol Hans Blix watching his every move. 

5 minutes ago, tshile said:

if the commission was wrong so be it - but that’s what they said. 

 

They were wrong. 🤷‍♂️

[tshile]

1 minute ago, Captain Wiggles said:

American, British,  and Israeli intelligence concluded there was no substantial link between Iraq and Al qaeda working together. Did they have meetings between low level officials? Sure but there was no working relationship between them on anything. 

Did you read the report? OBL was in some of those meetings. 
 

im not qualified to discount the findings of the commission. I’m just sharing them. But you could at least read it before declaring it wrong. 

[tshile]

5 minutes ago, Captain Wiggles said:

American, British,  and Israeli intelligence concluded there was no substantial link between Iraq and Al qaeda working together

Also. This is where choice of words matters. Like I said to @Corcaigh, there’s a difference between operational link, and what I said (that the Iraqis were courting bin Ladin)

 

other intelligence services reporting there was no operational link between OBL and Iraq is consistent with the 9/11 commission reports findings. They say the same thing. 
 

thats different than what I said. Which is prior to 9/11 Iraq was acting courting OBL to set up shop in Iraq. 

[LadySkinsFan]

We should never have gone to war with Iraq. It was Bush 43 doing it for Bush 41. The intelligence  was used to invade and justify to the UN and We the People. Bush 41 administration and the Republicans wanted an expanded war beyond finding Bin Laden and his group and wiping them out. 

 

Eisenhower knew exactly what he was talking about when he gave his speech about the military industrial complex. The Democrats ignored it for the Vietnam War. It had been many years before we were involved in another war and the military industrial complex wanted one to use up all those weapons that money was spent on. 

 

I protested the Vietnam War starting when I was a junior in HS when that Spring of 1968 saw MLK and RFK killed. I've protested a bunch of times when ordinary people were trying to live their lives in peace. 

 

I think we can all agree that intelligence is twisted the way people in power want to use it to accomplish what they want to their ends. I'm referring to Democrats and Republicans, but it's mostly Republicans who want to favor the wealthy and for profit corporations where money can be pulled from the pockets of We the People. 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2023 by LadySkinsFan

[Captain Wiggles]

Traditional gift for a 20th anniversary? China. 🤭

 

 

 

[Bang]

I don't know that what would constitute a 'victory' by our standards can happen in the middle east. 
I supported it and still do support the decision, even if there was a lot to it that could have been better on our part.
 

9/11 demanded a response. A lot of people argued that the problem originated in Afghanistan, so why invade Iraq? 

1.  Afghanistan is landlocked, surrounded by belligerent nations and some of the roughest terrain on Earth. Trying to maintain a large force there would have been suicidal.
2. Iraq has a deep water port. It can be resupplied a LOT easier than Afghanistan. Friendly airfields are not as far away.
3. The "enemy" is not a national force, it isn't even a stable force. It's as loose as can be, completely a guerilla operation, and it's fighters come from all over the region. You can't invade everybody to go hunting for them. So we showed up right in the middle of them, called their mamas fat and dared them to Jihad.
4. We'd fought the Iraqi guard before. They knew who we were and better yet, knew we would treat them humanely if they surrendered without much of a fight like last time.
5. Iran IS right next door, but we're taking out Saddam, someone they hated. There were some brushes, but by and large they stayed out with their military.
6. Iraq also borders Syria. As the war drew on, we managed to create funnels at the border that they would send Jihadist fighters through, and we destroyed them. We killed a LOT of them.
7. We made promises as to our drawdown, and we kept them. Trump then came in and handed Syria over to the Russians, let 5,000Taliban fighters out of jail, and put them back in power.

But "victory"... hard to say. Objectives were completed. The spark of freedom went across the region and was attempted in Egypt, Libya and other places. it didn't work out, but Ghadaffi was also taken off the world stage, and that can't be bad.

There is no enemy to surrender. Disconnected factions, religious zealots.. who do you sign a surrender with? Even if one did, it means nothing to the others. Terrorism is an enemy that isn't beaten in conventional means, it always exists. 

Our way of life has changed forever.

 

~Bang

[88Comrade2000]

Iraq happened because the people in 41’s administration that worked in 43’s administration were but hurt we didn’t go after Saddam in 91 Gulf War.

 

Invading Iraq didn’t make the world safer and it made Iran more powerful.

[Bang]

Which is a strange set of dominos falling, because we didn't go in for Saddam because we wanted to show the region that we would not invade sovereign nations, even to chase who we saw as bad guys. That we'd leave when we promised after defending our allies. And in dong so, we set Patriot missile sites in places that offended Osama Bin Laden, who used it as an excuse to do 9/11, which led to.. 

Sometimes you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I think with Iran we've been hoping that their predominantly younger population gets tired of the Imams. And of course, we've been playing "Who,, us?" games as we disrupt their nuke programs.

 

~Bang

Edited March 23, 2023 by Bang

[Larry]

My perspective in the Iraq invasion, at the time?  

 

1)  It was obvious that the Bush administration was pushing for a war, and that a decision had been made that WMDs, and particular nuclear weapons, were the official justification.  

 

One sign of this was the way every single administration claim was in the form of "and this think could be a lab for producing WMDs, which might produce as much as . . . "

 

Those key words outright tell you that the person speaking is taking our intel estimates, and intentionally picking the most extreme end of the bell curve of the estimates.  That they were cherry picking their numbers.  

 

2)  It was also obvious that every one of them was under orders not to explicitly state that Saddam had nukes.  But to imply it.  Exchanges like "Do we have proof that he has nuclear weapons?"  "Well, I don;t think we should wait until after the mushroom cloud."  

 

3)  But.  My position was also that if the administration had a good enough reason to justify a war, then selling that war to the American people, and the world, was actually a legitimate job of the POTUS.  

 

I believed that Lincoln sold the Civil War to the Union.  And I believe he was right to do so.  I believe FDR sold the US on intervening in Europe, in WW2.  And again, I believe it was part of his job.  

 

4)  And, I stated at the time, that Bush doesn't have to show his reason now, for why he wants the war.  But he should understand that he's going to have to show it eventually.  And it's going to have to stand up to some pretty skeptical jurors.  

 

My analogy was that, if you go and kick in your neighbor's door and kill him, and claim you did it because he was building a .50 caliber machine gun to attack you with, you'd better find parts of a machine gun in his house.  You can't just find some rebar, a drill press, and a BBQ grill, and start claiming that well, he could have used them to build a machine gun, if he only had some lead, gunpower, and primers, that we didn't find.  

 

5)  And that, if we went in there with this notion that we were gonna invade the place, and we'll turn it into a liberal western democracy?  And 20 years later, Disney is going to be building a theme park there?  We should be more realistic, and say that history says what we're a lot more likely to get, is another Shah.  

 

 

[tshile]

Of course part of all that was the issue with Iraq refusing to comply with the inspections they agreed to, etc. 

 

Things in place because Saddam actually used chemical weapons. Multiple times. And while there’s this issue with WMDs and nukes, everyone understood the chemical/biological component of it and it was irrefutable. 
 

In fact there’s a lot of parallels between Saddam and Assad. 
 

add in the OBL connection. That 9/11 had just happened. I think they screwed up with a goal of nation building, and screwed up with how they framed and presented things, but I think that warps how people remember it. 
 

not to mention the *entire* thing became a political football where people took predictable stances on it (after the fact)

[Spaceman Spiff]

I really think that the Iraq War was one of the things that really started a hasty deepening of the divide in this country between right and left...and in turn, alternate realities and people's perceptions about what facts are and what are not facts.  

 

To this day, my right wing father believes that they did find WMDs there.  And he's not alone on that, not by a long shot.  

 

 

26 minutes ago, tshile said:

 

not to mention the *entire* thing became a political football where people took predictable stances on it (after the fact)

 

This.

[PleaseBlitz]

@Larryhas the best analogies. 

[Bang]

1 hour ago, tshile said:

Of course part of all that was the issue with Iraq refusing to comply with the inspections they agreed to, etc. 

 

 

Even worse, how they'd rush in and stop an inspection about to happen, throw the inspectors out of the country, only to invite them back a few days later to a spick and span facility.
Maybe not a smoking gun, but incredibly damning.

 

~Bang

[Captain Wiggles]

Saddam was completely boxed in tho. UN weapons inspectors, no fly zones, various sanctions. No way he was producing his own WMD. Yet after every inspection turned up zilch the Bush administration still insisted he had them. To the point that they alleged Saddam had mobile weapons labs in cargo vans driving around Baghdad. 🤪

[China]

Iraq WMD failures shadow US intelligence 20 years later

 

In his U.S. Capitol office, Rep. Jason Crow keeps several war mementos. Sitting on a shelf are his military identification tags, the tailfins of a spent mortar and a piece of shrapnel stopped by his body armor.

 

Two decades ago, Crow was a 24-year-old platoon leader in the American invasion of Iraq. Platoon members carried gas masks and gear to wear over their uniforms to protect them from the chemical weapons the U.S. believed — wrongly — that Iraqi forces might use against them.

 

Today, Crow sits on committees that oversee the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The mistakes of Iraq are still fresh in his mind.

 

“It’s not hyperbole to say that it was a life-changing experience and a life frame through which I view a lot of my work,” the Colorado Democrat said.

 

The failures of the Iraq War deeply shaped American spy agencies and a generation of intelligence officers and lawmakers. They helped drive a major reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community, with the CIA losing its oversight role over other spy agencies, and reforms intended to allow analysts to better evaluate sources and challenge conclusions for possible bias.

 

But the ultimately incorrect assertions about Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, repeatedly cited to build support for the war in America and abroad, did lasting damage to the credibility of U.S. intelligence.

 

As many as 300,000 civilians died in two decades of conflict in Iraq, according to Brown University estimates. The U.S. lost 4,500 troops and spent an estimated $2 trillion on the Iraq War and the ensuing campaign in both Iraq and Syria against the extremist Islamic State group, which took hold in both countries after the U.S. initially withdrew in 2011.

 

Those assertions also made “weapons of mass destruction” a catchphrase that’s still used by rivals and allies alike, including before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which U.S. intelligence correctly forecast.

 

Avril Haines, the current U.S. director of national intelligence, noted in a statement that the intelligence community had adopted new standards for analysis and oversight.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Larry]

2 hours ago, Captain Wiggles said:

Saddam was completely boxed in tho. UN weapons inspectors, no fly zones, various sanctions. No way he was producing his own WMD. Yet after every inspection turned up zilch the Bush administration still insisted he had them. To the point that they alleged Saddam had mobile weapons labs in cargo vans driving around Baghdad. 🤪

Actually, I remember an interview with one of the weapons inspectors. And his story was that the weapons inspectors were actually finding evidence that Saddam used to have things he was supposed to, but had gotten rid of them. 
 

He told that back during Desert Storm, at one of Saddam's air bases, that the US were under orders to bomb the entire airbase, except building 17. Because that's where his chemical weapons were stored. And we didn't want to cause a spill. 
 

So, when the inspections started, they went to building 17. The only intact building on the base. To find the evidence. 
 

And found nothing. No weapons. No facilities for weapons. No chemical storage containers. 
 

They checked for residue from chemical weapons. They checked for residue from chemicals that might be used to get rid of weapons residue. Still nothing. 
 

And, after several frustrating months, one of their Iraqi handlers quietly whispered that they should check the bombed out ruins of building 16, on the other side of the runway. 
 

Where they found a building, destroyed by the US during Desert Storm. Filled with the smashed wreckage of chemical munitions. 
 

He mentioned that we had proof that Saddam had bought some rockets from Russia, that had a longer range than the rules said he was allowed to have. The Americans literally had the sales receipt from the sale. 
 

But when they went to go see them, they got stalled. And when they did get in, nothing. Not even a trace that they ever used to be there. 
 

So they went to another place. And got stalled. And finally got in. And nothing. 
 

And they would show the Iraqis that they literally had the receipts. And the Iraqis would claim to have no idea about any rockets. 
 

And eventually, after months of nothing, one of the handlers would whisper that they should check a certain place in the desert. 
 

And they go there. And they find...  

 

A bunch of scrap metal, buried in the sand. And they sift through the wreckage, and they find pieces of rockets. 
 

Some of the pieces are identifiable as pieces of the banned rockets. In fact, some of the pieces have serial numbers, that can be traced back as coming from the 107 (or however many it was) rockets on the receipt. 
 

They actually find enough identifiable, serialized, parts, to account for like 105 of the 107 rockets he bought. And a huge pile of scrap that's consistent with rockets, but can't be precisely identified. 
 

In short, what the weapons inspectors were finding, was evidence that Saddam used to have banned weapons. But that he had been trying to get the sanctions lifted, by getting rid of all the records. And even destroying his own weapons. And trying to claim that he never had them. 
 

And that now, he was unable to prove that he'd gotten rid of them. Because he had gotten rid of the records, to try to claim he didn't have any. 
 

----

 

And the weapons inspector's story was that the US eventually ordered the inspectors out, and started an invasion, because the inspectors were slowly finding more and more evidence that Saddam had gotten rid of his weapons. To try to get the sanctions lifted by claiming he never had them. 

[Captain Wiggles]

Saddam certainly had chemical weapons that he bought from the US during the Iran Iraq war. Which is one of the main reasons Dubyas administration was so adamant they would find WMD. Donald Rumsfeld for instance knew Saddam had them cuz he was one of the guys involved in the deal that supplied them. 🤣

 

Also Saddam had to keep pretending he had WMD so countries like Israel, Iran  and Saudi Arabia wouldn't destroy his regime. He was in a totes kobayashi maru scenario. 

Edited March 23, 2023 by Captain Wiggles

[PokerPacker]

18 hours ago, Captain Wiggles said:

Saddam certainly had chemical weapons that he bought from the US during the Iran Iraq war. Which is one of the main reasons Dubyas administration was so adamant they would find WMD. Donald Rumsfeld for instance knew Saddam had them cuz he was one of the guys involved in the deal that supplied them. 🤣

 

Also Saddam had to keep pretending he had WMD so countries like Israel, Iran  and Saudi Arabia wouldn't destroy his regime. He was in a totes kobayashi maru scenario. 

It's funny you reference Kobayashi Maru here, because in that last sentence before it, I was starting to get the feeling of Kirk and company in Space Seed talking about Kahn with a slight admiration while Spock is surprised by their display of romanticism for a ruthless dictator.  And of course the Kobayashi Maru test was then later introduced in The Wrath Of Kahn.

[The Sisko]

 

 

On 3/22/2023 at 3:36 PM, tshile said:

The commission says as much. 
 

Until OBL issued his Fatwa on the US and then Saddam realized enemy of my enemy is my friend etc. 

 

if the commission was wrong so be it - but that’s what they said. 

Even though this seemed to have turned out to be mostly wrong in later reports, I don’t think it was entirely off the mark. Saddam was a Baathist which was a secular ideology that aspired to replace or subsume Islam with Arab nationalism. Part of Saddam’s value to us, aside from serving as a counterweight to Iran, was that like Assad and H. Mubarak in Egypt, he ruthlessly crushed any kind of Islamic extremist movements. However, as someone mentioned previously, after Gulf War I, he was hemmed in by sanctions, inspections, etc. and was worried about losing power in a variety of ways. In addition to playing coy about WMD in an effort to discourage invasion, one way he tried to shore up regional support and probably in an effort to prevent an Islamist uprising, was by cozying up to them. In fact, he changed the Iraqi flag to include the takbir (Allahu Akbar) and started banning alcohol, encouraging the beard when previously having only a mustache was a sign of one’s secular bona fides, and so on. In short, I think he was trying to use the Islamists for political purposes and vice versa, and they came out on the winning end of things. In fact, IIRC much of ISIS was made up of old Saddam era military leadership.

 

On 3/22/2023 at 4:34 PM, LadySkinsFan said:

We should never have gone to war with Iraq. It was Bush 43 doing it for Bush 41. The intelligence  was used to invade and justify to the UN and We the People. Bush 41 administration and the Republicans wanted an expanded war beyond finding Bin Laden and his group and wiping them out. 

 

Eisenhower knew exactly what he was talking about when he gave his speech about the military industrial complex. The Democrats ignored it for the Vietnam War. It had been many years before we were involved in another war and the military industrial complex wanted one to use up all those weapons that money was spent on. 

 

I protested the Vietnam War starting when I was a junior in HS when that Spring of 1968 saw MLK and RFK killed. I've protested a bunch of times when ordinary people were trying to live their lives in peace. 

 

I think we can all agree that intelligence is twisted the way people in power want to use it to accomplish what they want to their ends. I'm referring to Democrats and Republicans, but it's mostly Republicans who want to favor the wealthy and for profit corporations where money can be pulled from the pockets of We the People. 

Well, that and “That man tried to kill my Daddy” causing the well known phenomenon of the political cart driving the intelligence horse. Try reading Legacy of Ashes. The intelligence community had/has a long history of finding “facts” to fit what presidents want.

 

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by The Sisko

[Forehead]

On 3/22/2023 at 2:27 PM, tshile said:

and while I think there’s plenty of criticism about homeland security, I think a lot of people have no real idea how many problems it’s creation fixed. A big reason 9/11 was allowed to happen was because of how disjoint our intelligence and law enforcement orgs were (and some problems there remain still) 

 

There's a lot of truth to this, both how weird everything was set up prior to DHS, and issues it still faces.  When you think about agencies that all have a nexus to immigration, I can't believe the way it used to be set up.  Prior to DHS:

 

CBP was the US Customs Service, the blue shirt guys at international airports and ports of entry.  They were under the Treasure Department.

 

The Agriculture inspectors, who were co-located in the exact same places to go looking for illegal food and other imports were under Agriculture.  These people are sitting 10 feet away from each other and report to entirely different command structures.

 

ICE, who enforces immigration law internally, and the old INS which is now USCIS, were both under the Justice Department.

 

The Border Patrol, who performs the same functions as CBP, just between the ports, was its own agency.  In a lot of their minds they still are, even if they got folded into a larger department.

 

It's crazy to think about how fragmented immigration was prior to the creation of DHS.

 

Now you talk about future prevention.  The CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. and several others all form the U.S. Intelligence Community.  A few years ago, one of the CBP commissioners petitioned to have CBP's intelligence wing included in this group, and I believe it was denied.  You would think if you wanted to prevent another 9/11, it might help to have the agency who is responsible for adjudicating people who fly into the country, clued in on this sort of stuff, but no.