But dood, he tried to kill my dad!
This is what optimism looks like in Iraq:
Asked point-blank whether the United States is winning in Iraq, Abizaid replied: “Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we’re winning the war.”
And here’s the wikipedia definition of quagmire:
a foreign military campaign in which there is either no foreseeable possibility of victory or the objectives are unclearly defined, and at the same time no clear exit strategy has been formulated in the absence of victory.
Feeling safer yet?
September 20th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
I felt safe the day that the Clintons left office.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
I remember reading a comment over at Knoxviews about Iraq…
“We have now been at war in Iraq for longer than the US was at war in WW2.”
September 20th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
How long did the US occupy Japan after WWII? (Occupation ended April 1952)
How long did the US occupy Germany after WWII? (1949)
There wasn’t much an insurgency, but then we didn’t firebomb or use nuclear weapons against Iraq.
Quagmire, maybe. Can we afford to leave? No.
September 20th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Ah, because wikipedia is such a trustable and unbiased source…
September 20th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
How long did the US occupy Japan after WWII? (Occupation ended April 1952)
How long did the US occupy Germany after WWII? (1949)
You would imply that we have “won” the war in Iraq. FYI-I was for the war until I found out I was lied to. Now its FUBAR and a quagmire yet no one in the administration will admit it. W and Rumsfield are no different than McNamara was in Vietnam.
September 20th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Er, lied about what? The WMDs (we have captured no less than 600 chemical weapons shells at this point)? The transmission medium (see Project Babylon?
September 20th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
How did we “lose” in Iraq? From what I’ve seen, we’ve pretty much accomplished our original military objectives: Saddam removed from power, a democratic government installed, and Iraq’s WMD status finally known.
(Incidentally, one could easily say we’re still “occupying” Japan, Germany, and Korea since we still have roughly one hundred thousand troops stationed in those countires. Dear G-d, when will World War II finally end?)
And how were you “lied to”? George Bush said the same things in 2002 that Bill Clinton said in 1997: Saddam is a threat to the US, he refuses to give up his WMD, he has ties to terrorists. Don’t you remember the buildup to Operation Desert Fox in December, 1998? You remember, when we were on the “brink of war” with Saddam?
The only difference that I can see is that George Bush was actually serious about going to war with Iraq, and Bill Clinton was just “wagging the dog”.
That, and the fact that Bush has an “R” by his name, and this is an election year.
September 20th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Nylarthotep, CH…umm, how many of those 100,000 troops in Japan, Germany and Korea are being killed by an insurgency every single day? And how much control does said democraticalyl elected government have over the country?
gattsuru..glad to see the wet dream continues. Just keep repeating that we found WMDs.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Er, lied about what? The WMDs (we have captured no less than 600 chemical weapons shells at this point)? The transmission medium (see Project Babylon?
I guess you forgot about C Powell showing sat pics to the UN re: WMD trucks and storage sites. They found a bunch of old leaky rockets buried in sand.
The only difference that I can see is that George Bush was actually serious about going to war with Iraq, and Bill Clinton was just “wagging the dog”.
bleeech….that one has been hashed over a million times. Then again there are quite a few of the 101st fightin’ keyboard brigade members out there in blogger land who can find no wrong in W or Rumsfield and how the war is being conducted.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
To me, the point here is not whether Bush lied. Every government has lied in the runup to every war ever fought. If you believe the things your government tells you about justifying war, you’re naiive.
The point here is that Bush has embroiled us in a pointless waste of lives, money and goodwill by starting a never-ending sideshow in a guerilla theater of war. Meanwhile, America’s ports go unsecured, we never finished the job in Afghanistan, Bin Laden is free, Iran is unfettered and North Korea never got solved. It was the wrong war at the wrong time against the wrong country.
But putting that aside, it doesn’t matter how or why America got into Iraq. The question is how to finish the job and get out. There are no honorable exits and I have no confidence in this administration’s ability to manage things to success.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Not many now. But interestingly enough, the Korean War isn’t officially over; a peace treaty has never been signed. Furthermore, South Korea wasn’t always a stable capitalist democracy. For quite a while it was a repressive military dictatorship that we supported (and that includes every Democrat president since Truman) in order to maintain stability on the penninsula. And it wasn’t very nice there for our soldiers back then, either; over the years there have been hundreds of US servicemen killed in Korea by anti-American South Koreans, or even in border incidents with the North Korean Army which still occur on a regular basis, although now mostly involve Korean troops since the South Korean Army has taken over most of the border areas from the US.
(Which reminds me of the fact that Okinawa is still not completely “pacified”; violent assaults on US troops still occur there every now and then.)
How is that false? We have found hundreds of WMD-containing artillery shells in Iraq; one was even fashioned into an IED that (thankfully) didn’t do much damage. Of course, the naysayers claim that these shells “don’t count” because they’re from old stockpiles, but that’s not the point: There were WMDs in Iraq, and we found them. You can argue that it’s due to incompetence or oversight and not some grand terrorist plot, but you can’t argue that they weren’t there.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Captain Holly,
Nobody argues the stockpiles weren’t there. The argument is that those stockpiles don’t vindicate Bush’s claim that Hussein had a WMD program justifying invasion. Did anybody seriously doubt there was *some* mustard gas *somehwere* in Irag? None of those old stockpiles had anything to do with Powell’s smoke and mirrors UN speech.
BTW, Captain, did you celebrate talk like a pirate day?
September 20th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Cap’n Holly and gattsuru et. al.:
Yippee. We found long-since abandoned chemical munitions that had previously been openly declared anyway. No secret anything, and certainly nothing coming within three continents of the “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” rhetoric we were fed.
Claiming that we found WMDs in Iraq is rather like claiming that Geraldo found evidence of contraband in Al Capone’s vaults. Legalistically true, in a Clintonesque-parsing kind of way, but nothing close to what people were led to expect or believe.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Arrr, that I did, matey.
And I fail to see how that translates into “Bush Lied”. If you will remember, everyone, including the Russians, the French, the Chinese, Saddam’s Arab neighbors, his own generals, the Clinton Administration, the CIA, and even most Democrats (prior to 2004) were certain he had stockpiles of WMD, ready for use. Our troops were wearing chemical gear when they crossed the border because all our intelligence sources said they would likely get hit by chem weapons the minute they stepped foot in Iraq.
Remember George Tenet’s “It’s a slam-dunk” comment? If you were the president, and your CIA director tells you in no uncertain terms there are massive WMD stockpiles in Iraq, wouldn’t you take him at his word?
Where I would fault President Bush is that when confronted with this massive demonstration of incompetence he chose to “forgive and forget” instead of clean house at the CIA. That is hurting us today in our dealings with Iran, because even though everyone in the world agrees Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons there’s still that nagging doubt the CIA might be wrong yet again.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Uh, what?
The 1.77 tons of enriched uranium had been declared. It was still illegal, with that whole ‘didn’t allow UN inspectors near it for years’, but I guess that doesn’t matter. But when were the 600 chemical weapons shells declared? OPCW had no record of them, and even the United States provides records of what we’ve got to those folks.
Is your arguement that the only weapon that counts is a working multi-kiloton nuke? Causes that’s a hell of a long way to move a goalpost.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Two upsides:
-a quagmire never tried to ban my guns
-our soldiers wont have to walk very far to get to iran
September 20th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Ah, the Iraq debate. Not had one in a while. Good on BH for bringing it up. I support it. My thoughts:
We were mislead but only in terms of degree.
The war has been a mismanaged clusterfuck.
What was to be a month’s long operation has turned in to years.
It’s not as bad in Iraq as the press makes it seem (i gathered that from a few acquaintances who were there and returned) but it’s still bad.
There were WMD and we’ve not found them all.
Make no mistake, the war was a display of power. And that’s why I supported it.
There is no exit strategy and an exit doesn’t seem viable for years.
My $0.02
September 20th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
gattsuru:
Causes that’s a hell of a long way to move a goalpost.
Hey, it was the administration and its defenders that moved the goalpost from “mushroom cloud” to where we are now. This would hardly justify an invasion, especially not when we learn stuff like this.
You can dance all you want, but the fact remains that the rhetoric of the administration in the run-up to the war turns out to have been risibly overblown. No stockpiles of anything, and certainly nothing that posed any threat to the US.
But hey, if you’re not big enough to admit you got sold a bill of goods, that’s not really my problem.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Uncle:
It’s not as bad in Iraq as the press makes it seem
Depends who you talk to, and where in Iraq they were. There are some who return and say it’s not as bad as the press paints it, and others who return saying that it’s actually far, far worse.
There were WMD
As you conceded above, not anywhere remotely close to the quantity and type were were led to expect. And remember, if you will, that the administration (in particular, Powell) spoke is if they knew exactly what Iraq had and where they had it. It was that certitude (now known to be completely false) that helped sell the war to a great many Americans.
the war was a display of power
If that’s the case, it’s going even more poorly than I thought. Sure, we’ve shown that we can blow shit up from the air, but haven’t controlled much else.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Well, yeah, i did say we were mislead.
Mark my words, one day that’s all it will take. Bad things are afoot, it’s only a matter of time.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Uncle, I don’t think you can ever do it all from the air, not without hitting a fuckton of unintended targets. If you’re waiting for the tiny flying robots that will target baddies by the chemical signature in their breath and kill only them, keep dreaming. Not going to happen any time soon.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
I made no such distinction. I just fear that the shit will hit the fan one day.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
We have an exit strategy: We win, they lose, we leave.
BTW, the Allied occupation of Germany did not end until after reunification, 1989ish. There were still US, British, french and Soviet occupation sectors until then.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Guy, that’s a great exit. Too bad that exit is a tiny, unmarked locked door in a dark room filled with poison gas. Care to tell us how we’re going to get there from here?
September 20th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Tgirsch, last I checked, every time the idea of “mushroom cloud” was brought up, it was in reference to what we couldn’t wait for, not what we expected to find.
What we expected to find was prepared chemical weapons (wow) and a transport mechanism. As I’ve noted, we’ve found both.
September 20th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Brutal Hugger says:
“To me, the point here is not whether Bush lied.”
I agree.
Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but since you have asserted that Bush lied, please tell us where, specifically, is the lie?
It seems to me that one of several things may have happened, which probably include:
1. Bush lied (your pronouncement and the party line);
2. There was faulty intelligence, but no lie by the President;
3. The weapons were moved to Syria (I guess we will find out when we get to them);
4. Discerning, from satellite pictures ,whether Iraq’s missiles were “old leaky rockets buried in sand” or fully functional and deployable chemical warheads was an imprecise science, at best.
If Bush didn’t lie, and 2, 3 or 4 were possibilities, the question then becomes, do you:
1. Trust Saddam (given his track record of using chemical weapons and ejecting weapons inspectors);
2. Trust the UN (given its track record of accomplishments, which, at the time, primarily included siphoning off the “oil for food $ to Kojo and other UN operatives and affiliates): or, 3. Assume the worst and take action to remove Saddam from power?
As an aside, I think that it is safe to say that any intelligence obtained from an agency which would send a former ambassador (e.g. Joe Wilson), and not a spy, on an intelligence mission may well be guilty of producing bad intelligence.
I don’t pretend to know the answer to Hugger’s question.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:11 am
The point here is that Bush has embroiled us in a pointless waste of lives, money and goodwill by starting a never-ending sideshow in a guerilla theater of war.
That is the single most stupid statement I have ever seen as regards the war on terror or the war in Iraq.
I will not go into the reasons why it is so stupid because everybody not stupid already knows and anybody that believes it isn’t capable of comprehension. I just wanted to note it.
MY $.02
September 21st, 2006 at 6:30 am
The point here is that Bush has embroiled us in a pointless waste of lives, money and goodwill by starting a never-ending sideshow in a guerilla theater of war.
Why is it a waste of blood and treasure? I would state that it’s not. The middle-east has been stuck in the dictatorship mode since the colonial powers released their control. Those countries have stayed outside the world mainstream and have made no moves toward modernization or joining the globalization of the modern world. There also has been an increase in radicalism in many of those countries that has come to bring violence outside of the region. If by spending our blood and money to produce stabilization of the region we can bring about increased security for ourselves and the world, then it was well spent.
As to the war being mismanaged, show me a war that didn’t appear that way while it was in progress.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:12 am
Nylarthotep, CH…umm, how many of those 100,000 troops in Japan, Germany and Korea are being killed by an insurgency every single day? And how much control does said democraticalyl elected government have over the country?
You apparently missed my statement Manish. I’ll quote again.
There wasn’t much an insurgency, but then we didn’t firebomb or use nuclear weapons against Iraq.
In fact, WWII was quite close to total war. The US and the allies essentially destoyed the infrastructure, cities and very large portions of the population. The people in many cases had difficulty surviving, never mind forming an insurgency. The US attempted to harm as few civilians as possible in Iraq and the insurgency is thriving due to that. Occupations in Japan and Germany were enforced to ensure that the remanents of the country wouldn’t come back as something worse. Same thing is happening in Iraq. Only difference comes to when and how you choose to stomp on the malcontents and interlopers.
September 21st, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Guy:
[Lumberg]
Yeah, uhh, could you bee a weee bit more specific on what actually constitutes us “winning?” That would be grrreaaaaat.
[/Lumberg]
gattsuru:
last I checked, every time the idea of “mushroom cloud” was brought up, it was in reference to what we couldn’t wait for, not what we expected to find.
Context, man, context. The nuclear threat was floated as being close at hand and a reason why it was important for us to take military action right now. Which would have been a justifiable argument if Hussein had been within, say, a year of achieving nuclear capability. As we now know (and as most intelligence agencies even knew at the time), he was nowhere near that close, and in fact wasn’t even as close as the far-off estimates of most intelligence agencies.
But even more specifically, the context was essentially “Hussein is close to obtaining nukes and will give them to the people who committed 9/11.” This was always an absurd proposition, recognized as such by people in the know even at the time.
And guess what? Without that nuclear aspect, and without the attempts to tie everything to 9/11, the American public never gets behind the war effort, and the AUMF never gets passed. Go in front of the American public and tell them you want to invade because there are abandoned 15-year-old chemical munitions buried in the desert, and see how much support you get. Remind people that we know they’re there because we helped provide them 20 years ago, and then see how much support you get.
You can continue to insist that there were WMDs in Iraq, and this would be technically true. But you cannot reasonably deny that there was nothing at all like what we were led to believe, and that what little was there posed no reasonable threat to the US. Not unless you’re full to the eyeballs with Kool-Aid.
The bottom line is the neocons in the administration used 9/11 as an excuse to sell this war, which they’d had a hard-on for since the mid-1990’s, and possibly even longer.
chris:
As far as “what to do,” you missed option 4: Trust no one; keep the troops staged nearby and ready to move in, and allow the weapons inspectors to do their thing. At the first sign of malfeasance, you pull the inspectors and move in the troops, who are conveniently (yet safely) camped out right next door. If you truly believe the country has WMDs and that those WMDs pose a threat, that’s the sensible course of action.
Nylarthotep:
The middle-east has been stuck in the dictatorship mode since the colonial powers released their control. Those countries have stayed outside the world mainstream and have made no moves toward modernization or joining the globalization of the modern world. There also has been an increase in radicalism in many of those countries that has come to bring violence outside of the region.
This ignorance of recent middle-eastern history is frankly stunning. The prevalence of dictatorships in the region, and the increased radicalization of the populace there, have mainly been directly because of and in response to Western intervention in the region, not the absence thereof. The US, in particular, helped the Taliban come to power in Afghanistan, because they were fighting an enemy we considered more dangerous, the USSR (and helped them stay there because they were fighting the opium trade). The US helped Saddam Hussein come to (and retain) power because he was fighting an enemy we considered more dangerous, Iran. And now the US is helping an Shi’ite Islamic theocracy come to power in Iraq (and, by extension, increasing the influence of Iran) in the name of ridding ourselves of an enemy we thought was more dangerous (but was in fact a paper tiger), Saddam Hussein. At what point do we learn that the unintended consequences of our meddling have almost always historically been worse than the problem we were trying to fight?
The people in many cases had difficulty surviving, never mind forming an insurgency.
You can’t draw such comparisons between the German and Japanese populations, and middle-eastern populations. The people of Iraq are used to hostile conditions, having been conditioned to deal with them for the last 20 or more years. This was not the case for the Germans or the Japanese in WWII. Also, the Iraqi people are much more heavily armed, often by outside forces trying to gain influence. So the comparison, I’m afraid, is complete crap.
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:04 am
@tgirsh
This ignorance of recent middle-eastern history is frankly stunning. The prevalence of dictatorships in the region, and the increased radicalization of the populace there, have mainly been directly because of and in response to Western intervention in the region, not the absence thereof. The US, in particular, helped the Taliban come to power in Afghanistan, because they were fighting an enemy we considered more dangerous, the USSR (and helped them stay there because they were fighting the opium trade). The US helped Saddam Hussein come to (and retain) power because he was fighting an enemy we considered more dangerous, Iran.
How is the statement about dictatorial regimes in the middle-east ignorant? It is in fact true. The fact that the US and other western powers assisted some of these dictators doesn’t negate that they existed.
Your statement on the US aid to the Taliban is in fact quite ignorant in itself. The Taliban didn’t come to power until after the Russians had left and the US stopped providing assistance to the Afghan resistance. Or did you miss that decade of civil war in Afghanistan? Remember the “Northern Allaince?” The Taliban and various tribal groups continued in fighting up to the AUMF for Afghanistan when the US alligned with the Northern alliance to remove the Taliban.
As to the rest of the statements on the various dictators, No shit. The US chose the various dictators as alliances that they considered beneficial in a war against the cold war advisary. Many of those choices were wrong. But then, what would have been the effects of not taking a hand in the region where the Soviets were trying to assert control? Especially with considerations of the US need for petroleum. Fights are chosen as they can be won, and the dictators in the middle east were sadly a neccessary evil at the time. Now they can be supplanted to insert governments that are more willing to join the world as civilized societies. You fight your fights as you can. I disagree that what you call meddling is worse historicaly than the problem we were fighting. That is sheer supposition since history only leads to one future. If the US hadn’t “meddled” in the middle east what would the results been? Who can say for certain.
As for the harsh conditions that the Iraqi’s are “used” to, that is fascinating. There were no harsh conditions in Post-WWI Germany? Maybe the depression and the fact that their economy was destroyed meant that they were living the good life. And Japan, at a war footing for decades at that point with a societal norm for stringent control and had been living with extreme lack of resources for much of the war. I’d say your lack of historical perspective on this makes your claim that the occupations are not comparable as complete crap.
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:02 am
Chris,
I won’t say much about the ‘Bush lied’ debate. Frankly, it bores me to discuss something that I’ve discussed so many times before and I don’t think has much relevance. So here’s my piece on it, take it for what you will.
Perhaps the clearest outright lie was his statement that he didn’t have a war plan on his desk when (and Woodward’s Plan Of Attack made this clear) he did in fact have one on his desk. So that was a lie wherein he pretended there was room for debate when in fact there wasn’t. Woodward makes clear that while telling the American people he was being reasonable, his administration felt internally that they *had* to invade no matter what.
So that’s a straight out lie. As I’ve said, it was a transparent lie, and only fooled people naiive enough to believe the man.
The other two big lies in the campaign for war were the Hussein-Al Qaeda link and the insistence that Hussein had WMD that posed an immediate threat to America. You obviously don’t see an attempt at intentional deception, and that’s fine. I disagree.