Running from the Iraq War
So the new thing among Republicans is to criticize our involvement in Iraq and our war against Saddam Hussein. Jeb Bush spent the whole week walking back from his support of his brother’s decision on Fox News earlier. Of course, Rand Paul is against anything that makes sense. Lindsey Graham, who voted for the war, still owns his vote. On the other side, of course, is Hillary Clinton who says that she was for the war in Iraq before she was against it. Bernie Sanders has always been against the Iraq War.
The candidate that gets my vote will not equivocate on the Iraq War. That war should have been fought and there is no way around that. In my opinion, it was fought 12 years late – the politicians and the hand-wringers should have let me go to Baghdad in 1991 when I could see the city from where we ended the Gulf War. But between those years from the premature end of the 1st Gulf War until the march to Baghdad in 2003, Saddam Hussein had paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel encouraging terrorists in Israel.
When the UN put a no-fly zone in place to protect the Kurds and Shi’ites from Hussein, Hussein’s Army took pot shots at US and British aircraft enforcing the mandate. When Hussein wanted to get his political way, he would rattle his saber at Kuwait again, causing Bill Clinton to deploy US troops to the region to line up on the Iraq-Kuwait border with the prepositioned equipment that the US taxpayer was funding.
The Iraq Intelligence Service had been caught trying to plot the assassination of George HW Bush. It was discovered that Abu Nidal, the founder of Fatah of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, wanted for terrorist attacks in 20 countries, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people, was found hiding out in downtown Baghdad for a decade or so. Despite reports to the contrary, al Qaeda was operating in Iraq before the US invasion.
Despite other reports, there were indeed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that news has been allowed to dribble out in the last few years. But, more importantly, Hussein wasn’t cooperating with UN inspectors who were trying to disarm Hussein in that regard. Sanctions against Iraq, much like the sanctions against Iran these days, were impacting the people, but not the government royalty.
You can argue all day about how the war in Iraq was fought and I’ll agree with you, mostly. But to say that war wasn’t worth the costs is to forget the lessons of Iraq. In 2006, George W Bush taught us that you don’t stop fighting a war just because people get mad at you. You fight it to a successful conclusion – and then you honor your commitments to security.
The insurgency in Iraq hoped that the US would leave Iraq due to the political pressure their insurgency put on the politics in the US. The last thing they expected when the Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 was that Bush would double down in Iraq with the “Surge” – that’s what broke the back of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Strength is what wins against those people, not ambiguity.
What caused the rise of ISIS was the fact that the Obama administration sent the message that they weren’t interested in the Middle East. They rushed for the exits from Iraq so they had a campaign slogan for the 2012 elections. They watched North Africa burn without so much as raising a finger. When ISIS took Fallujah, the Obama Administration promised support to the Iraqis that they never delivered until Mosul fell six months later.
Like I said, you can complain about the way the war was fought, but you can’t dispute the fact the war should have been fought. So, 2016 candidates, please, don’t make me vote for Lindsey Graham.
Category: Terror War
^^^^WORD^^^^
What he said….
Agreed. I followed the run-up to the second Iraq war, and I was very well aware that our choices at the time were bad, worse, and unthinkable. Bush chose “bad” — “to grasp the nettle” is how the Washington Post described it. Obama chose “worse” — ostentatiously withdraw, create a vacuum, and destabilize the entire Middle East.
Yeah, we knew that invading Iraq would ultimately require stationing troops there long-term: that happens to be what worked in Japan and Germany, as opposed to what failed in Afghanistan.
And, there were plenty of warnings about what failure to put the SOFA agreement into effect would ultimately yield.
Ah, but Barack Obama was just so much smarter than any of his advisors, and he let them know it.
Well said Jonn. Thank you.
It is good to hear a veteran’s perspective rather than another talking head on some news program that has never wore the uniform. I am not sure who I like yet in this field of candidates. Unfortunately none jump out at me. I do believe that Jeb Bush just did not hear the question but anticipated what he thought would be the “Iraq question”. I am not sticking up for him, I was watching the live interview. Right now I am just hoping that someone that can defeat the queen gets the nomination.
One such talking head is Laura Ingraham, who said this about Jeb Bush, but could also be said about those of us who agree with Jonn Lilyea’s article above:
http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/05/11/laura-ingraham-there-has-to-be-something-wrong/203601
Or… we’re basing our views… that’d we’d order the invasion knowing what we know know… on the facts as they relate to the geostrategic and asymmetrical warfare threats that we’re dealing with.
With all the disclosed secret shit we know now it’s pretty clear Bush was right. When you suffer from Bush derangement syndrome though you live in a fantasy world and can’t acknowledge simple facts.
Yep, that’s my take.
And at the same time the press asks Killary about her latest pantsuit combination and how world leaders will interpret her choice of color as being forceful or just feminine.
The GOP is playing right into libs hands by even qualifying such stupid questions.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see it either.
We need leaders in this GOP, not more ?RINO’s.
Jeb, Rand, and Lindsey. Just think about that for a moment. Good Gawd. Spare us from these assholes.
Bush was right. Ramadi has fallen. Thank you, bodaprez, you piece of imbecilic bull crap. This one is YOUR legacy, asshole.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/contested-iraqi-city-of-ramadi-falls-to-islamic-state-group/ar-BBjSCLd
What’s a bodaprez?
“Barack Obama da Prez”
Agreed. Then again, this is the same group of republicans that have folded like a cheap suit every single time Obama said “I want”. They are also the same group that just about unanimously gave Obama the trade bill he wanted. When it is a historical fact that every trade deal done since World War 2 has turned out less than stellar for the American worker. What are we now, arsenal of the service economy? What would be with a trade deal like NAFTA with South East Asia?
It is not Reagan’s republican party anymore.
nowadays it is in contention to be “the best party money can buy”. Its competition, needless to say, sits across the aisle. So far the contest is a dead heat.
My issue with the way things are being presented is they are asking candidates to use hindsight to make a determination on a decision for which hindsight was not yet available. Simply put, using today’s knowledge to make a past decision. I would say, were I in their position, that I would have prosecuted the war differently than it was done, but given the same knowledge as the leaders had AT THE TIME, I would have made the same choice. Trying to use hindsight for making a decision where such information was not available is not only nonsensical, but it borne out of ignorance and/or intellectual dishonesty. Being one of those who had to carry out the orders when the war in 03 was declared, I do not regret the CiC’s decision to go to war, though I do believe that the conduct of it, or rather its prosecution, had gone a bit differently. I agree with you Jonn, because they couldn’t do what needed to be done when you were in, people like myself and our battle buddies had to do what should have been done long before we were required to be the ones to do it.
” … given the same knowledge as the leaders had AT THE TIME, I would have made the same choice.”
BINGO!
The corollary to LastBrotherHome: you cannot compare the Iraq-in-a-Box of 2003 with Iraq today, say “we were better off then” and conclude Bush made a bad choice – you have to compare Iraq 2003 with WHAT IRAQ WOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE ABSENCE OF THE WAR…the world is not static! He wasn’t staying in that box! Sanctions were crumbling…the best option would have been helping strengthen Iraq once the war was won after the Surge, but that wasn’t in the cards after 11/4/2008…
Hey, who remembers the Clinton ad from the 1992 election that asked “Saddam Hussein still has his job, do you still have yours?” There’s no doubt that had Bush not ordered US troops into Iraq in 2003 that the Democrats would have made an issue of his failure to do so in the 2004 election, because that’s how politics works.
The very same people who are pissing and moaning about Iraq post invasion would have been pissing and moaning about how Saddam was slaughtering his people and allowing them to starve and the US is sitting on its hands and doing nothing.
So the bottom line is that nothing Bush could have done WRT Iraq would have made the left happy. And as for the war itself, I think it was inevitable after the 1991 Gulf War – it was a war that WOULD be fought, the only question was when and I think Bush was right to fight at a time of our choosing rather than at a time of the enemy’s choosing.
Oh and one final note: Funny that actors like George Clooney are so anti-Iraq-war. I seem to remember he made a film called “3 Kings” which basically castigated the US for NOT finishing the job we started in 1991.
There were plenty of mistakes that were made in Iraq, plenty of things that-if we had it to do over again-we would do differently. But choosing to fight in Iraq (or, more to the point, to focus the efforts of our fight against Jihadism in Iraq)? No, that was the right decision every time. The enemy has a center of gravity. Something or some place that is important to him. For Jihadis Iraq-where Baghdad was home of the Caliphate for centuries-is as good as any other (except Mecca, which would have been foolish to attack both because the Saudis had their own issues with Jihadism to work out and because every Muslim would have seen such an attack as a provocation, not just the radicals). Fighting in Iraq carried a number of advantages: we had an administrative and logistics center right next door in Kuwait from which to prosecute the war (Afghanistan is at the end of the longest supply line in U.S. history and landlocked with no real U.S. allies close by), the difficult terrain in Iraq are the cities and we can employ many of our advantages there more effectively than in Afghanistan where the difficult terrain is the mountains that stretch into a different country-Pakistan-which we are forced to deal with in an entirely different manner than Iraq’s neighbors due to the issue of their nuclear weapons. And it was cheaper to fight in Iraq (stories in Army TImes and Stars and Stripes had numbers that demonstrated that supporting a soldier in Afghanistan was about 50% more expensive over the course of a year than in Iraq). I was in Kuwait supporting the drawdown in Iraq in 2011 and we convoyed up there often. There was not much violence and the country seemed stable. Now, Maliki was not the right choice to carry forward the progress that we had made and he deserves the lion’s share of the blame for what happened. But, I do not believe that the country would have devolved into chaos like it has if we had been willing to make a long… Read more »
Running from the War – as we’re seeing – is a slap in the face to Veterans of the wars. We have politicians who will NEVER say “The reason we have so many deaths on the highways is because people CANT DRIVE worth a shit”, yet will say “Those veterans who died and injured? Yeah – Oops! They went over there based on a lie, for stupid reasons”
Pandering. It’s ALL Pandering. I’ve not met a politician who would honestly take a position that wasn’t first polled among likely voters.
And that’s the crux of the problem – WE (the collective voters) are IDIOTS and we elect people willing to use our idiocy against us.
“Lie, cheat, and steal, and kill but promise free stuff in a nice soothing voice? You got my vote!” – The Average American Voter.