Related Information to Post War Iraq

Post War Iraq - Page 60

There is a big difference between what the inspectors could be certain of in March 2003, and the idea that Iraq posed an IMMINENT threat. The inspectors were still investigating whether Iraq might possess some chemical and biological weapons, but it takes more than mere possession to constitute a threat -- there must also be the intention to use the weapons offensively. The chances were next to zero that Saddam would use them when the inspectors were in his country and while the U.S. was looking for any excuse to invade.

It must be noted that in Gulf War I (when Saddam most certainly had these weapons) he didn't even use them when his armies were being routed during Operation Desert Storm. Nor did he use them in the 12 intervening years before the next war.

Perhaps the most important thing regarding my statement that Iraq posed no imminent threat is that I made it NOW, when we know that Iraq had not resumed weapons production. Last year when it became evident that huge stockpiles of WMD would not be found, the Bush administration itself disputed it had characterized the threat as "imminent."
https://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/st...55E1702,00.html

When writing opinion in a limited space, it is not possible to avoid all declarative statements and to list caveats and qualifiers when making a point. Regarding whether the war in Iraq will make us safer in the long run, I admitted the question is certainly open for debate. However, I stand by my declarative statement that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat at the time we forced the inspectors out of the country to launch our invasion.

Iraq War Post

Filipino truck driver Angelo dela Cruz was freed today after his country withdrew their troops from Iraq under threats and demands from his captors. This unfortunately gives a false sense of security to those who think the militants in Iraq will be as trusting as they were in this situation. A similar kidnapping case involved an Egyptian truck driver who was also held hostage under ransom of $1 million dollars from the transport company, who eventually agreed to pull their trucks out of Iraq for the life of the hostage.

Post War Iraq History & Civil Business Politics

There is a weblog that is becoming a regular feature on the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com. In it, the author is listing "good news" that he has gathered from Iraq over the last couple of weeks. He does the same for Afghanistan.

Go here to read the latest installment:
https://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/2004/08/good...raq-part-7.html

I suggest that you take the time to browse through some of his other entries about Iraq and Afghanistan. Very informative.

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That brings me to another point.

We have frequently discussed the apparent media bias in reporting about Iraq (and Afghanistan). Yesterday, my wife pointed out what is wrong with this bias.

Every day, we hear about more bombings, more terrorist attacks on local civilians, etc. Since our media spend so much time on these negative things, it encourages those who are commiting the atrocities, making it look like they are really successful. The bad thing is, they are successful. Just look at how US attitudes are changing, because of the constant drumming of the "quagmire" mantra. How often do you hear about the good things? Do you think that the "insurrection" is successful?

Iraq is booming. Business is good. People are experiencing the greatest degree of freedom they have had in over 3 decades. Most of the internal security is now being provided by local forces. Education is incredible. They are fielding a winning soccer team, and going to the Olympics! There is a women's sports program now.

It is amazing how much the country has changed in a little over a year. Reading the blogs and comments of Iraqi people living in the country, they are optimistic, happy, and looking forward to a wonderful opportunity.

Yet our media continues to paint a bleak and dreary picture.

The danger is that we are getting a distorted view. Relatively few people take the time to find out what is happening in the world, other than what is reported on the alphabet soup. Even Fox shows the same problems.

Read what Chrenkoff has to say about the happenings in Iraq.

Page 60 Iraq War Post

War is a strange thing. It can be huge, sweeping, tens of thousands of men and machines on the move, as in the actual invasion of Iraq. The U.S. Army is a very impressive sight when it's on the move. And many soldiers in that kind of war don't even see the enemy, at least up close. There's long-range artillery, and the enemy is simply a set of coordinates. Same for the pilots flying close air support. But the other kind of war is very small, very personal. The firefight, in close quarters, where you can see your enemies shooting at you, hear the bullets go by, see your friends get hit. That's a different kind of war.

The news this morning is dominated by reports coming out of Iraq of very heavy fighting in Sadr City and Najaf. The U.S. military is reporting as many as 300 Iraqi insurgents killed. Lest we forget, or get lulled in complacency, there is still a war going on. Certainly the soldiers haven't forgotten. They don't get to. It's hard to remember back some months back to April, when things seemed pretty quiet. Then all hell broke loose. The Fifth Cavalry had just taken over duties in Sadr City, thinking that they would be doing mostly civil affairs work. They were wrong. There was one day, one hellish day of warfare that didn't involve strategy, or the mass movement of troops. This was one nasty firefight in a very small area. Casualties were high, and for hours, one American unit was trapped, the soldiers fighting for their lives.
Ref. Leroy Sievers and the Nightline Staff
Nightline Offices ABC News Washington Bureau

Iraq War Post

I've been trying to figure out where to post this. I think it is particularly important.

First, read all of this incredible essay. It does have a lot to do with why the US invaded Iraq. What is so powerful about the essay is pretty much summed up in these words:

Lots of people say that we shouldn't have fought in Vietnam, that we shouldn't have fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, or Korea. Throughout the essay, Stephen makes a lot of excellent points about the very valid, ultimate reasons that we had to do these things.

Vietnam and Korea weren't so much about those two particular countries, they were merely battles in the huge war of ideologies, the clashes of culture between the (generally) capitalist, democratic West and the (generally) oppressive, communistic East. Ultimately, the West won in 1989.

Now, we are involved in an even greater clash of cultures and ideologies. While we have "won" the war in Iraq, there are still problems going on, as MartinEden and others are so quick to point out. But the war in Iraq is really just a battle. This could easily become a multi-generational war, that we don't have any alternative but to fight.

As Stephen points out in his essay, lots of people say that "GWB went into Iraq without a plan to 'win the peace'". This is true. However, nobody has EVER entered ANY war with any type of plan to "win the peace." That is because it is impossible to "win the peace."

Examples:
WWI - the "peace" led directly to WWII.
WWII - the "peace" led directly to the Cold War.
Civil War - the "peace" led to such things as Reconstruction, the KKK, Jim Crowe laws, lynchings, wars between American Indian nations and the US, etc.

All any of us can do is what we can do. One thing that the US has proven through the decades is that it can stand up. We stand for liberty, for the opportunity of the common man to advance and grow. We stand for the overthrow of despots and oppression. We aren't always successful. We aren't always wise about how we do it. We aren't even always consistent about it.

But we continue to try. We believe in liberty and justice. So, we keep trying to preserve them where we find them, and help them develop where we can.

That is what we are doing in Iraq right now. And, we are being generally successful.

One final thought from Stephen:

That is what it boils down to. Ultimately, we have to fight, the way we are fighting, in order to avoid the alternative. Because we CANNOT give in.

Post War Iraq

The fundamental flaw in Stephen Green's essay is the assertion that we are always helping our own cause when we fight wars -- that even if we don't win, war has positive effects. According to Green, all our wars are ultimately useful and the right thing to do. He doesn't allow for the possibility that when the decision to go to war is based on wrong assumptions and a basic misjudgement of the people we're fighting, the main effect is a tragic waste of lives and treasure.

Vietnam is a case in point. Mr. Green argues that even though we lost, our efforts there ultimately helped to topple the Soviet Union. He also suggests that we could have lost our NATO allies if we hadn't fought in Vietnam.

I find that theory even more flawed than the disproven "domino" theory that got us involved in Vietnam. Our NATO alliance was based on the very real threat of the huge Soviet army on the border of Western Europe, and the findamental struggle between democratic capitalism and communist totalitarianism. That was the geopolitical reality regardless of what we did in Vietnam. The notion that our allies would have dissolved the alliance that maintained their security if we had shown a lack of resolve in Vietnam is a far-fetched attempt to rationalize an irrational war long after the fact. In fact, our NATO didn't support our war in Vietnam.

Our decision to fight in Vietnam was based on a wrong assumption -- that the rest of Asia would fall like dominoes if we didn't draw the line -- and a basic misjudgement of the people of that country. The Vietnamese had already been fighting for 30 years -- first against the colonialist French, then against the Japanese, then the French again. Although Ho Chi Minh was a communist, the movement he led was first and foremost based on nationalism and independence from foreign domination.

Ultimately, the Vietnamese had much more resolve to fight than we had to stay. We lost 58,000 troops, but they endured "rolling thunder" carpet bombing and millions of casualties. We lacked a fundamental understanding of the country and its people. Robert McNamara (Defense Secretary under Kennedy and Johnson) was known as the architect of the war, and he offers 11 lessons that we need to learn from that conflict. They are listed near the bottom of this article:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Art...A/TPColumnists/

Unfortunately we have failed to learn those lessons, and are repeating some of those mistakes and making new ones in Iraq. Stephen Green is correct when he writes that the war on terror is really a war against the ideology he identifies as "Islamism." He even makes the distinction between the Islamism of Afghanistan's Taliban regime and the secular dictatorship of Iraq, yet still says invading Iraq was necessary to cure "the sickness of the modern Arab world."

Mr. Green's theory of Iraq is every bit as flawed as his ideas about Vietnam, and just as lacking in understanding of the people and the situation. If we apply the premise of his essay to Iraq, it was a useful war even if we end up retreating and the "Islamists" gain control. In Green's view all our wars are right, regardless of the outcome.

Nighthawk concludes his post:

I conclude mine:
We MUST NOT give in to the idea that war is always the right solution. We MUST learn the lessons of the past and apply them to the present, so that when we DO fight we are not sacrificing so many lives for a mistaken theory. Fighting and killing is not inherently good unless the outcome is worth the price, and a positive outcome is unlikely to result from wrong assumptions, fundamental misjudgements, or -- as is the case of Iraq -- deliberate deception of the people who must support the war.

Post War Iraq - Page 60

I didn't say that war is always the "right" solution. I said that THIS time it is the ONLY solution.

As long as the Muslim world considers all of us to be "infidels" only worthy of destruction, we must fight. Even if the odds are against us, we must still fight, or we will be destroyed.

I disagree with you about Vietnam. But we will have to agree to disagree.

Most of these assertions have been shown well to be purely matters of opinion. The 9/11 commission certainly didn't support your assertions, neither do the actual facts on the ground.

I believe that the only way to cure the sickness of Islamism is to support liberty, to fight for liberty, to create liberty, wherever we are able. We must fight the despots, those who crush the spirits and lives of their own people. As we do, liberty will spread, as it is now doing in Iraq.

Of course there is a difference between the Islamism of the Taliban and the secular dictatorship of Hussein, but they are related in that they both feed on the backward, oppressive culture of the Arab Muslims. This culture requires light, knowledge, and liberty in order change. That is what is happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More and more information is coming out showing that there was no deception in the reasons to go into Iraq, including more and more ties being shown between Hussein and Al Qaeda (the 9/11 Commission was particularly pointed about this). There is still more information coming out that Hussein WAS actively seeking nuclear materials in Africa.

Sometimes war is the ONLY solution, such as WWII. I firmly believe that Iraq is the best solution available at this point in time in the fight against Islamism.

Post War Iraq Politics Business Civil & History - Page 60

Nighthawk, I know you didn't say that war is always the right solution, but Green's essay essentially tried to make that argument in regeards to every war we have fought.

I also know we will never agree on whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do. I will concede that something eventually had to be done (though not necessarily what Bush did) because the no-fly zones and sanctions were not permanently sustainable. However, Iraq most definitely posed no imminent threat. In the wake of 9/11, with NATO and most of the world on our side, Bush had a tremendous opportunity. Had he accepted our allies' offer to invoke the NATO charter -- whereby an attack against one is an attack against all -- we could have gone into Afghanistan with an overwhelming force that would not have allowed so much of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership to disperse. With our allies' financial help, we could have done a thorough job in transforming Afghanistan from a war-torn country into a stable democracy with a functioning economy.

Certainly some progress has been made, but not nearly what might have been achieved. Al Qaeda and the Taliban still operate, most of the country is ruled by warlords, the heroin trade is in full swing, and there is little security outside of Kabul. How different things could have been! Had we embraced our allies and focused our efforts on Afghanistan we would have strengthened NATO rather than tearing it apart, and we would have been respected and admired rather than feared and despised. We then would have been in a much better position to reach a consensus for a humanitarian solution for the suffering of the Iraqi people and the transformation of that country.

We did not go into Iraq on a humanitarian mission. Congress and the American people supported the war because we were led to believe that Iraq possessed huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, was building nuclear wepaons, and had an operational alliance with al Qaeda. None of it was true, and the available evidence simply did not support the claims the Bush administration was making at the time.

Not only did they decieve the American people, they decieved themselves into thinking we would be welcomed as liberators, that Iraq could quickly be transformed into an American-friendly democracy, and that the effort would largely be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues. They needed this to be true because if the true cost of this war were known it would have been a much harder sell. Their policies were driven not by an honest assessment of the Iraqi threat or by the most expert analysis on what the occupation would entail, but rather by their pre-existing policy agenda. Consequently, they made it much more difficult to achieve their own goals -- if indeed their goal is the spread of liberty.

Most of the Arab world sees our invasion and occupation not as a liberation but as an attempt to dominate the region and control its resources. Western powers have a history of imperialism in Arab lands. The only credibility Bush has in the Arab world is the threat of force, and the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib has convinced the Muslim world we come not as friends but as enemies.

We are going about it the wrong way. Violence is spreading in Iraq, and like Vietnam they will continue to fight us as long as we stay. People want liberty on their own terms, not as it is defined and imposed by an invading army. The "cure" being administered by the Bush administration may very well spread the disease rather than liberty.

Thirty years from now will writers like Stephen Green theorize that it was necessary even if it tragically failed, or will we actually learn the lessons that MacNamara tried to impart to us from the war that ended thirty years ago?