This one is a political comic and I am going to talk about military politics.
I wrote in my blog, over a decade ago, that the Iraq invasion following 9/11 was a fucking horrible mistake, and I still feel that way. Yeah, yeah, Saddam was a warlord who hated America, blah blah. WTF was he going to do with that hatred? Fire a SCUD into the fucking Atlantic and whine about it? The dude, with all of his hatred, had no resources to really attack us. He was a tiny fish in a big bowl, and he posed NO significant threat.
How did I get to this view? I read a lot. Sure, armchair it blah blah blah, but I wrote an article for the HuffPo about Scott Ritter over a decade ago (sadly, now eaten by the sands of time and the intertrons). I did a shit-ton of research on UNSCOM, and on what Iraq was doing before 9/11. UNSCOM found no weapons that Saddam could use to attack us. None. And they tried really fucking hard.
Another good source is this book right here, which is a thrilling read. The author was a man who really and truly believed Saddam would gain a powerful nuclear bomb, making Iraq a nuclear power. And yet, reading that book, Saddam had no way to bomb the USA, even if he HAD a big fucking warhead.
The Iraq invasion cost us thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. And it was a mistake. So we pulled out, and now all the local sandbag warlords are scooping up power. So what should we do?
I say? Stay the fuck out of it. Not our circus, not our monkeys. Yeah, we kinda helped create the problem. But how big of a problem is it, really? Oh noes, TEH TALIBANS MIGHT GAIN POWER. Big fucking deal. They still, can’t hit us with their 7.62 x 54r automatic weapons. They’ll fire RPGs to the west, and they’ll hit the ocean.
But Biden… this fucking guy. This fucking guy. God. STOP GIVING HIM A PHONE OR A MICROPHONE, PEOPLE. HE’S AN IDIOT.
Yup. That’s why we shouldn’t worry about Iran developing nuclear weapons, either. Because they have no delivery systems which could reach US soil.
And we have no assets or personnel anywhere except on US soil. None in the Mideast, certainly. Or Africa. Or Europe.
Nor do we have any allies anywhere. I mean, fuck Israel. And Turkey. And Egypt. And the Saudis. And the Gulf States. Let them all become one big fanatical Islamic Caliphate. What could happen?
That’s not imminent threat.
You can’t go invading people because you don’t like them, the way they do things, or what they say.
ANZUS begs to differ on the allies thing.
Though I don’t want our soldiers over there because i feel that we can’t do anything if this sh*t happens this soon after we leave. Let the bastards kill themselves off. Treat it like the Ukraine for all I care. We spent enough aussie lives and enough of their people and this still happens…
What’s the point?
Not sure what you mean by “the allies thing”. I’m talking about leaving allies of the US to hang in the wind by effectively letting the jihadis do whatever they want so long as it is not a direct threat to the US itself. You OK with Israel being destroyed and swallowed up into a Caliphate run by mullahs? Not to mention moderate countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Oman and Turkey. Let alone considering that once done in the actual Mideast the jihadis would probably not be done. We’ve already seen the disease spreading into south Africa, north into the -stans and east into Asia.
You said that the US had no allies. I listed an agreement which stated that the US has allies.
Do I want those countries to be taken over? not really. Though I think Israel can handle their own shit most of the time.
What I don’t want to see is a needless war (termed as a peacekeeping mission) in a country that is beyond our help these days. We tried.
You need a new sarcasm detector. All of those countries he listed are allies.
I give Israel even odds against any 3 islamic nations in the region at once. Any takers?
That’s a pretty serious sucker bet, seeing as how they’ve already done it.
“they have no delivery systems which could reach US soil”
Iran doesn’t have shipping containers? That’s news to me.
To quote: ‘You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” – but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line”!’
Maybe we shouldn’t worry about Iran getting nuclear weapons because A) They haven’t invaded another country since… Anyone? Bueller? Longer than the US has been a country? And we haven’t invaded anyone in *checks calendar* Oh. It’s still measured in days. Well.
Oh! But how about this: There is LITERALLY NO EVIDENCE that their nuclear program is for anything other than power. Read the reports, not news propaganda, and you’d know this.
Or this: We ALSO have nuclear weapons. The difference? We’re the assholes who USED them. Why? Because we had the only ones. That’s how it works. Now that more than one party has them, nobody will use them. Same reason nobody shoots up gun shows.
On the flip side, if I were in Truman’s shoes, I’d have used them too. The last I looked, they were still issuing wounded / KIA Purple Heart medals that had been made for the invasion of Japan.
They didn’t have to do EITHER. Japan wanted to surrender, despite what’s taught in public school these days. We just wanted to show Russia we had a new toy. Yeah, that worked great. 😛
No, some in the Japanese government wanted to surrender, while others were perfectly willing to kill those that would surrender. It was due to nuclear bombs (death without glory) that the anti surrender coup de etat didn’t have broader support in the army.
The message is distorted by omitting WHO the “some” are, on either side of that debate.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
I agree. Saddam was blustering and rallying his people about how great their country and how he was going to attack the united states.
And GWB fell for it. This is like Saddam and GWB playing poker, Saddam goes all in saying he has a royal flush, and Bush who has four queens (Not realizing that Saddam CAN’T have a royal flush due to having all the queens) instead of calling the bet, decides to have all his secret service goons take him in for interrogation for cheating and later puts him in prison for having a better hand. Not to mention saddam never wanted to play poker with his dad, jerk
Also, one problem history has proven time and time again, if you are going to do a pre-emptive strike. have a plan for what is going to happen after you win. It was estimated they were going to need over 100,000 to maintain order of the country after the power structure and the Ba’ath party were taken down.
and then people were surprised when a civil war broke out between the Kurds, Shi’ite and Sunni’s
I thought it was 500,000 that the generals said we’d need … and 100,000 that Rumsfeld told them to say we’d need, and he fired the ones who told the truth and kept doing that until the most senior remaining officer said he could do it with 100,000 in order to keep his job and get his pension.
It was all front-row stuff. Anyone who’s played Age of Conquerors knows you need to send in Monks to heal units and Villagers to build stuff if you want to hold the land behind your advancing army and that keeping the supply lines open to send replacement units up to the front requires you to hold that land (or build another whole army to escort to reinforcements from home to the army already out there) but apparently Dubya and Cheney never played AoC.
Interpreters, engineers, experienced peacekeepers, medical personnel? Nothing like enough. Instead of showing up, kicking out Saddam’s people, sorting out the sewers, the water supply and the electricity, repairing the bridges we’d bombed, building a new clinic and fully stocking the school’s library, we showed up, kicked out everyone who was supposed to be maintaining law and order, collapsed the sewers, blew up the water purification plant and the substation, demolished what was left of the bridge, chucked everything out of the school into the overflowing sewage in the street to make room for us to use the school as a base for a week and then fucked off and left them in anarchy and rubble.
Normally, I’d give you a hard time about citing a computer game as a way to guide real-world policy, but in this case, you’re pretty much correct.
Yes, have a plan. Or else just leave a smoking crater. Which we, being us, are incapable of doing.
I’m uncertain about whether or not airstrikes without a ground presence would be ineffectual. They seemed to do the trick in Libya, although of course there the jihadi boot was on the other foot.
Personally I think Bush was gulled into believing that Saddam had or was developing WMDs. I also think it didn’t take much to gull him, because he was willing to believe it. ( Rather like Democratic voters in 2008. 😉 )
Is it perilously close to Godwin’s Law to invoke Neville Chamberlain? Isolationism and appeasement tend to work out even worse than getting involved early in stupid conflicts.
Poor comparison. Iraq was a proxy cold war combatant that was abandoned when it became expedient.
And none of that provides a real example of imminent threat. To justify a preemptive war, the threat must be real, immediate, and capable of reaching the attacking country. Iraq just wasn’t in that position, at that time.
Perioculy close, and not the same thing at all. Invoke nevile as much as you want Regarding the situaiton in russia tho. To be nevil, you actualy have to be scared of the fucker you;re appeasing
Ya can’t just throw it all on Joe, now. Barry is backing Joe’s play. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2014/0612/Obama-hints-at-military-action-in-Iraq.-Are-airstrikes-the-only-option-video
Sorta like how some people will throw in with a friend in a bar fight even if they deserve to have their asses kicked for picking a stupid fight… Some friends will let you learn the lesson, some gotta learn it WITH you.
Local problems do not stay local. And if left to fester, they metastasize. As we’ve seen, to our sorrow and rage. I would think you’re smart enough to remember this, Mssr. Grant.
Walking away before left us this mess… And you want us to walk away again? Hmmm. So who’s children will be left to face the problem next time? Maybe yours. OK, I get it – Leaving problems for our children to solve is the American Way(tm). But do you *really* want to contribute to that tradition?
Bottom line: Whatever the reason, right, wrong, or a mix of the above, We Broke It. We are responsible to putting things back into a semblance of order. Or, you can join with the current Administration; admit incapability and incompetence and irresponsibility, and let the mess to fester and ferment.
America has a very bad history of only entering wars if it’s profitable to us…
Can I just point out a couple things: No, Iraq couldn’t have attacked us directly. Instead, they could have attacked (and crippled) us economically and morally by loading radiological weapons (AKA: Dirty bombs)/persistent nerve agents/regular bombs onto trucks or their own civil aircraft and taking out Saudi (with the 24th largest world military) and Kuwaiti oilfields. I don’t know about you all, but I’d prefer not to pay $8.12 a gallon for 87 octane like the UK does (Quick estimate, quadruple the litres to get gallons and double the pounds sterling to get dollars.) and/or consign the Israelis to the burn pit for simply existing. Iran is much the same way, and add the religious angle into it: They’re Sunni and have no love for the Shia. They also have no love for the Israelis or the US. (“Death to America”/”the Great Satan/the Lesser Satan” etc.) Let us not forget that Iraq had the 4th largest military in the world going into Desert Storm, and we didn’t do nearly as much damage to it as we could, or should, have in ’91. The Iranians currently have the 8th largest military in the world. Care to imagine how large it’d be if they moved into Iraq and started drafting people?
As to other motives for Iraq: Have we considered how often Afghanistan was in the news during 2005 compared to Iraq? It wasn’t. Now, how many combat deaths have occurred in Afghanistan since we pulled out from Iraq? A lot more. We tied up Muslim extremists in a two-front war. Kinnison: You want to talk about “falling for it”? We couldn’t, and can’t, threaten Mecca. But that was one of the concerns of the extremists.
As to TMD’s statement about it being a cold war proxy and not immediate, credible and real, I’d say being able to make oil go up $10/bbl ($17.14 in July 1990 -> $27.32 in August 1990, and thence up to a peak of $36.09 in September 1990) with minimal effort (IN A MONTH.) is extremely damaging, credible and real. If Saddam were to have wised up, and continued on to seize or even threaten Saudi Arabia, oil would have hit $500/bbl. Remember that OPEC sets the prices and a country with a larger share of the oil can influence the other members a hell of a lot more. Just because he didn’t in the intervening years doesn’t mean he never would have.
Our economy is a global one. Like it or not, if the fires aren’t put out early our house is put at risk. Just because it isn’t our circus or monkeys doesn’t mean we have to, or even should, allow our neighbors’ monkeys to throw their poop at us and their circus to keep us awake.
Saddam, evil fuck that he was, kept the lights on, the schools running, and the water clean. Iraq under Hussein may have been a bloody dictatorship, but at least it was civilization. And even with the people completely under his thumb, Saddam could not successfully build a nuclear bomb. Not one that could attack his neighbors, CERTAINLY not the USA.
Now? Iraq is a shattered shell of what it was 20 years ago. The people taking power here sure are skeery, booga booga, cuz they’s moozlims and AL QAEDA TALIBAN TALIBAN OMG SKEERY. You think these penny-ante warlords stand half an ass’s chance of creating WMDs to attack neighbors? Really? With what? I’ve heard of beating swords into ploughshares, but I’ve never heard of beating old-assed AK-47s into nukes. We’re not talking about a major, organized army, here. We’re not even talking about Saddam’s Republican Guard. We’re literally talking about the military equivalent of a street gang. Last time I checked, the Latin Kings weren’t considered a global military threat – and at least THOSE guys can afford cars and guns that were made more recently than 1988.
Oh, c’mon…
“…At least the trains ran on time.”
Tell me that was troll bait.
It was a perfectly legit point. Before we went stomping in, the strongman had shit under control. Are you arguing that, since we killed him and destroyed his country and killed hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, Iraq is better off?
Hundreds of thousands? Are you quoting Lancet?
It’s a pretty shitty point, not legit, actually. And that has no bearing on how I think or feel about involvement in Iraq. Grant makes a lot of good points, that was not one of them.
Fuck the Lancet. The numbers are right here. Cited, even.
Before we invaded, yes, Iraq was nobody’s idea of a vacation destination, but was reasonably secure and self-sufficient. Now it’s a pestilent shithole as a direct result of the unjustifiable US invasion. Junior is a war criminal and everyone who persists in supporting this fucking massacre is an accomplice after the fact AFAIC.
Are you aware of the origin of the phrase “at least the trains ran on time”? It’s about the fictional benefits of facism. It’s a shit point to make.
I suppose North Korea should be left alone, right? Hey, the peasants are in line, right?
Jesus, one would hope that a fan of a comic that supports firearm rights would understand the reasoning for those rights. Protection from tyrannical government.
Well, a penny-ante organization that wasn’t a major, organized army managed to fly a couple of planes into a skyscraper and the Pentagon…
Wait a tic.
> The Iranians currently have the 8th largest military in the world. Care to imagine how large it’d be if they moved into Iraq and started drafting people?
This is about as likely as me farting pennies into the wind, and the coins piling up into a perfect likeness of Mel Gibson. I dunno if you ever heard about it, but the Iranians and Iraqis don’t like each other. They would have to attack, conquer, and enslave the Iraqis in order to “draft” them – and keeping that in mind, seeing as they’re already balls-deep in bed with Syria, Iran doesn’t need to spend the time, blood, and money on Iraq.
> Just because he didn’t in the intervening years doesn’t mean he never would have.
Your conjecture is fascinating in just how extreme it is. How much farther down your hypothetical timeline do we go before the world is the one shown in Mad Max?
In boring, regular reality, the majority of OPEC supported Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and it DID cause a HUGE price jump in oil. All the way up to almost $25 a barrel! MY GOD! HELL AND MAYHEM! WE’D HAVE DIED! NOOOOOOOOOOwait a minute.
Most Americans think OPEC is vile and money grubbing and evil, and them dirty ragheads would love to make oil $1000/barrel. Here’s the problem: We’re addicted to oil, and the House of Saud is addicted to Cash. Major cash. And if you price oil to where other nations can’t afford it, you make no cash.
I hate to say it but the Iranians and the Shia Iraqis are working together. Iran has some of their best special forces in Iraq right now. It’s the same unit that helped to keep Assad in power in Syria.
If the largest threat they pose to us is their ability to manipulate the cost of crude oil to the point where it’s detrimental to our lives, wouldn’t it make the most sense to remove our dependence on that resource? Instead of looking at the short-term or even mid-term consequences, can we please engage in a long-term thought exercise? Are we really going to keep meddling in everyone’s affairs in perpetuity like some kind of battered wife? Concerning ourselves with their petty and deep-seated animosity toward one another — an animosity that was born long before the United States got involved — will only serve to further entrench us in their fucked up squabble.
They have all the oil? So let’s stop relying on oil. Spend even a fraction of the military budget to engage in that affair into R&D/Infrastructure in home-grown and renewable resources. China spent $10 billion on Solar Research and another $90 billion into development for the infrastructure to manufacture Solar. Could you imagine the jobs that $100 billion in R&D/Infrastructure would produce for us? Could you imagine if each household could easily produce 5KwH of their own? Once Energy costs trend toward zero, the relevance of these people and their petty religious squabbles will be non-existent.
We only care because they have a resource we need, and let’s stop pretending it’s about anything else.
Afghanistan: job 95% done.
Taliban: 95% annihilated.
“Fuck that. That’s boring. I want something spectacular that’ll look good in election year. Let’s pull msot of our overstretched militaries out of Afghanistan, have them camp in Kuwait for a few months while we make up some bullshit about WMD and try to convince the public Saddam had something to do with 9/11, lose a few soldiers to heat-stroke because they’re wearing full NBC kit even though there’s no NBC threat and then invade Iraq as late in 2003 as we possibly can without sandstorms fucking things up for us. That ought to get “Mission Accomplished” fresh in people’s minds when campaigning starts. Win!”
Several million more people pissed off with us, the whole world feeling less sympathetic in general, Israel given an even more explicit carte blanche to “pre-emptively” round up Je*ahem* Palestinians, drive them into a ghe*ahem* refugee camps and build more solo*ahem* settlements in the West Bank, not to mention firing white phosphorus shells at Gaza’s main hospital …
… London and Madrid, the largest cities in the two nations that joined the USA’s “Coalition of the Willing” for that invasion, both getting hit with mass-casualty attacks on their public transport systems …
… our soldiers spread and stretched even thinner than before and fighting a larger number of enemies in a much larger area …
… and “the enemy” had all of Iraq to use as a training ground for how to kick our arses in Afghanistan, where we no longer had anything like the numbers and assets required to prevent them doing so.
Great plan. Really.
I saw a youtube comment recently from someone who said we invaded Iraq to make sure nothing like the London bombings could ever happen again. Depressing stuff, deluded ignorance on that scale, isn’t it?
My only quibble here is the comment about no NBC threat. When you’re talking about a country that was known to have chemical weapons at one point, and had even used them on its own people, I think that’s a credible threat unless you’re damned sure they don’t have them anymore. (Which I strongly doubt anybody was sufficiently sure of. If they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, they probably would’ve claimed a different reason to invade. Instead, I think the administration took intelligence that said “well, we don’t know they don’t have them” and chose to interpret that as “they probably have them”.)
Still doesn’t change the fact that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
You might want to remember that WE were killing THEIR kids through starvation at the time.
One thing that has been dismissed about why we invaded Iraq was the economic threat. The Iraqi Dinar is on the same paper used by the US government printing paper. As well as when they were our “allies” under Reagan and Bush Sr. had gotten access to the Swiss Printing Presses that the US Mint use to make money. In fact 3 separate CBS shows helped to explain indirectly the “ECONOMIC” threat of Sadam in that his ministry of foreign intelligence had been printing fake US dollars in Iraq and shipping them to the USA.
Katie Couric’s “Behind Closed Doors” had a Secret Service Special which dealt with finding and discouraging counterfeit operations. The SSA talking with her literally let the cat out of the bag in 2003; when he said that the fake currency was coming from the Middle East and they had been upping their investigation. This was about 3 weeks before they sent in SSAs to Iraq after the troops got to Saddam’s Palace. They recovered the Swiss Machines, but not all the printing plates.
CSI:Miami also explained how the Iraqi Dinar was the common element for printing funny money and they did a whole running story arc on it and that the money was traced back to domestic narcotics and various political groups that are non-exactly US friendly. The funny thing is that the SSA had advisors on the show and listed in the credits at the end.
60 Minutes did another investigation on the Iraq war following the “Mission Successful” BS that was pushed on us by the Bush Jr. error of leadership. They happened to let it slip they got the Swiss Printing machine and still had a successful mission without finding the other WMD. People forget that MONEY is the most powerful WMD of all because it can destroy entire countries if printed in large quantities and wipe out a nation’s economic strength. Our government was in real bad straights over this issue and that the search for WMDs of the military kind never really existed. However, they could have been purchased and used abroad in America because of funny money thanks to Bush Sr. and Reagan’s action which Jr had to clean up as a result.
“CSI:Miami also explained…”
Leaving Afghanistan with a weak unstable government is what led to the Taliban taking control there.
Don’t forget that weak unstable government only existed because the only stabilizing factor in the region was killed.
Which is why it might be a good thing to try and find a replacement.
Or a good time to start not fucking with other countries, because we clearly suck at it.
Oh, no – we’re VERY good at fucking with other countries. And once upon a time, we were very good at un-fucking them, too.
We’ve abandoned the lessons we learned in the wake of WWII, unfortunately.
We’re so good at it that we managed to turn Afghanistan into cavemen who were still able to cause 9/11, and pit Iraq and Iran against each other so that they still remember primarily that we’re the ones who screwed them over? WW2 isn’t a much better example. We STILL haven’t felt good enough to remove our troops from Korea, Japan, Germany… I’ll presume we have some in Italy, too.
Oh, no – Afghanistan isn’t what caused 9/11 – It’s only where those responsible went to camp. And it’d have been a fine refuge for them even before we got involved. 9/11 is a result of other interventions (for which we do have some large culpability).
Iraq was originally fucked up by the British, French, and Russians (hint: Look up “Mandate Era” and “The Great Game”).
US troops in Germany have nothing to do with having failed to rebuild – Ditto Japan, and ditto Korea.
I have just developed a great disregard for your knowledge of history and geo-politics.
It’s common knowledge that Osama was trained by the US to overthrow an empire, in defense of Afghanistan, when the Soviets were occupying. And he did it again, when it was our turn. There’s a well-deserved nickname in “graveyard of conquerors”.
“Iraq was originally…” ok, but “he did it first” isn’t an excuse. Hint unneeded.
“US troops in Germany have nothing to do with having failed to rebuild” Who mentioned rebuilding? If you’re mischaracterizing my arguments, it’s no wonder you think they’re the wrong ones.