StrategyPage's Top 10 Myths of the Iraq War
Scott Kirwin
See how many your Liberal friends have fallen for.
My personal favorite:
7-Iraq Is In A State of Civil War. Then so was Britain when the IRA was active, and so is Spain today because ETA is still active. Both IRA and ETA are terrorist organizations based on ethnic identity. India also has tribal separatist rebels who are quite active. That's not considered a civil war. This is all about partisans playing with labels for political ends, not accurately describing a terror campaign.
with respect I think this pretty grossly misunderstands the issue. comparing the ETA to, say, the Mahdi Army is pretty weak tea. I can't comment on whether Iraq is or isn't in a civil war because I'm not there, but Maliki at least has said that, which is about as straight from the horse's mouth as you're going to get. But in any case equating Baghdad to Barcelona is about as strawy as a strawman gets.
With this level of thinking, it is no wonder we are losing Iraq.
I'd think you'd be happy about that Mike, since you've been opposed to the war all along.
What about the other 9 myths?
Most of the 'sectarian' suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi nationals, sent to Iraq by Saudi leaders, a fact that the war's supporters and detractors consistently ignore..
Agreed. I think a better analogy would be the Balkans. Would we have characterized Yugoslavia ca 1991 as being in a civil war?
But there again comes the question of scale. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority of Basques supported independence - which corresponds to the hey day of violence in Spain. While the violence in Barcelona and Belfast today is much less, I believe people have forgotten how bad both of those cities got at the height of the violence.
Were they as bad as Baghdad today? No, but neither is Baghdad as bad as Sarajevo was 15 years ago.
Didn't think so.
Hmm. I think I'd call that Intifada.
Being opposed to a war doesn’t mean that I want the US to lose. I just think the war was the largest strategic error in recent American history. I think by now the so called “Global War on Terror” should have been over. The terrorist leaders should have been captured or killed, and the idea of the 9/11 kind of terrorism should have been recognized as an insane, immoral strategic folly.
The Iraq invasion handed our enemies a false propaganda bonanza that they will be exploiting for years to come. We have people around the world saying the Iraq invasion ex pos facto justifies 9/11 and Bin Ladden was right about the US wanting to occupy the Middle East and seize Arab land for the oil. Instead of being over, the GWOT will now be a generational struggle which will take tens of years to be over and may well kill hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent people around the world over the next one or two generations.
Having made the great strategic error of invading Iraq, we then compounded it with a criminally incompetent occupation. Now we have asked our soldiers to fight a last ditch, desperate battle to restore order in Baghdad so we can install an Iranian trained government in Iraq. I hope we win that battle, because losing it would be very, very, very bad for us, while winning it is only very bad for us.
What about the other 9 myths?
Of course, you cannot see any of that. You actually believe this non-sense, and that is why we are losing.
War is a very blunt instrument. When you start blowing things up, it is hard to predict where the pieces will land or how much work it will be to put things back together. Sometimes you can never put them back. The idea that war would be a good instrument for spreading democracy in a land like Iraq is just insane.
John, you've seen these links so often, I thought you had them memorized too..
The Washington Post reports on the fact that most suicide bombers are saudi...
MSNBC reports catches Saudi govt. officials encouraging young Saudis to go to Iraq..
and Investors Business Daily explains why Baker, Bush &co. ignore this...
Mideast: Missing from the Baker report's 79 recommendations for stopping the violence in Iraq is perhaps the most obvious one: getting our "ally" Saudi Arabia to stop funding the insurgency there.
The 160-page report reveals on page 29 that the Saudis are backing the Sunni terrorists who are killing U.S. soldiers next door. But then it never returns to the subject. Poof! It's as if it were never mentioned.
"Funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia," the report says, almost as a footnote, even as the kingdom pledges cooperation with U.S. military operations in Iraq and the broader war on terror.
It's odd that the Iraq Study Group, led by Bush family friend James A. Baker III, fails to follow up on such an outrage. It's worth noting, however, that Baker's Houston-based law firm represented Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan in the $1 trillion lawsuit against members of the Saudi royal family filed by relatives of 9/11 victims. Sultan eventually was dismissed as a defendant.
Riyadh insists it knows nothing of such payments to Iraqi insurgents. But the Associated Press reports that boxes of cash collected from Saudi mosques and charities are being trucked and bused across the border into Iraq.
In one recent case, $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. Last month the U.S. lost an F-16, possibly to such a missile. It went down over western Iraq.
The kingdom's denials ring hollow against another little-reported fact: Most of the foreign fighters captured or killed in Iraq hail from Saudi Arabia.
The statistic was never mentioned in the Baker report. But it's well known among U.S. military and Iraqi officials who have complained about the steady supply of jihadists coming from Saudi.
After U.S. officials took the issue up with Saudi officials last April, the Saudi interior minister allowed that some Saudi youth were being lured to fight in Iraq (by Saudi clerics, including the chief justice of Saudi's sharia court, according to Senate testimony last November). He made overtures about building a fence along Saudi's frontier with Iraq. The oil-rich kingdom still has not built the fence.
But it has released another 29 former Gitmo detainees from jail. We agreed to hand them over into Saudi custody, and the Saudis thought it would be a nice gesture to spring them during Ramadan last month.
Just in case you missed the most important bit, here it is in bold:
The statistic was never mentioned in the Baker report. But it's well known among U.S. military and Iraqi officials who have complained about the steady supply of jihadists coming from Saudi.
Mikeca
Where were you living in the 1990s? Do you think 9-11 was a one-off?
How about the first attack on the World Trade center in 1993? How about the bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996? How about the attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998? The USS Cole in 2000?
These are all isolated instances to you, aren't they? No connection whatsoever...
9-11 wasn't a single "folly". It was a strategic act.
As for the rest of that paragraph, I'm sure you support the Bush administration's use of wiretaps and oversight of SWIFT bank transfers, right? Those are the kind of things that allow us to capture the terrorists.
But you don't, because you want us to lose.
The only place Islamic radicals seem to be doing well is amongst the Left wing, Mikeca. They're pretty much being wiped out in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan and yes, Iraq.
Do you realize that your argument is in essence, "they hate us for what we do." That's a dressed up version of a battered wife thinking that her drunken husband beats her for wearing too much makeup, for forgetting to iron his socks, for... whatever.
But I can't convince you that they hate us for who we are - not what we do - and have for much longer than we've been in Iraq.
As for Iraq, I want them to go there. I want every single Jihadi with a nit to pick with the USA to go there and take it up with the first American they meet.
Why? Because the Americans in Iraq are much better able to defend themselves than those of us over here. My stepson, a Marine who's been there twice, is a much better shot than I am (though I won't admit it).
Right... And freedom just spontaneously erupts on its own with no bloodshed.
History is written in blood, and no people, no nation has ever become free without paying a price.
Stability in the Middle East is an oxymoron unless you are satisfied with the status quo: monarchies, dictators and religious zealots exercising power over tens of millions of people.
I don't think the status quo is worth keeping, and if that means smashing a few glasses with baseball bats, so be it. Will things get worse? Perhaps, but they also might get better.
A true liberal would welcome the change, a conservative would oppose it. So I guess Bush and those of us who support him are the radicals - just better dressed and clean-shaven ones.
Woohoo!
In Palestine we have Hamas and Fatah armed groups roaming around and shooting one another whenever they want, since there are no U.S. troops or Palestinian troops stopping them. In Palestine we have skulking terrorists planting roadside bombs and sending suicide bombers against each other and against Israeli targets.
So, are both in a civil war? Neither?
People who think Iraq is in a state of "civil war", let's say your right for the sake of argument. Now then, what's your point?
People who don't think Iraq is in a state of "civil war", fine, but why are you spending your time trying to argue the point? What's the difference if it is?
What am I, 11 years old? :)
Iraq = Civil War
and
Civil War = None of Our Business
And from there, it's just a short hop to:
Iraq = None of Our Business, Let's Go Home
That's what they're really arguing. "Iraq = Civil War" is just laying the groundwork for that argument.
I'm really curious to learn what someone could possibly reply to that :)
Many outside the US saw our refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty as a catalyst to 9/11.
Many outside the US secretly think (but don't say) that Uncle Joe Stalin could have handled geopolitical strategy with more skill than the running dog capitalists in the US.
Many outside the US think that the fact that Americans live and breathe is a catalyst to tragedy. They'll say these things no matter what we do.
Wow! What alternate universe do you live in.
Right... And freedom just spontaneously erupts on its own with no bloodshed.
History is written in blood, and no people, no nation has ever become free without paying a price.
Exactly. Freedom and democracy are not gifts. The US army cannot create a liberal democracy in Iraq by force of arms. It is the Iraqis themselves that must create that democracy. If Iraqis are not willing to fight for their liberal democracy, then it will evaporate as soon as the American forces leave.
Before, they were saying that our intervention in the Balkans caused 9/11.
Before, they were saying our war with Saddam in the early 1990s caused 9/11.
Before, they were saying our intervention to help Afghanistan throw off the Soviets caused 9/11.
Before, they were saying our infuriating the Iranians caused 9/11.
Now, it's our presence in Iraq that causes terrorism.
Guess what? It's always our fault. That's just how it works.
Guess what? They'll always blame America first. It's just how their thinking works. They just get mad when you point this out to them.
And that caused 9/11!
That will make America a fascist McCarthyite state, and put us on the slippery slope toward totalitarianism.
Exactly. Freedom and democracy are not gifts. The US army cannot create a liberal democracy in Iraq by force of arms.-mikeca
Come on Scott, have you not learned the lessons of Germany, Italy, and Japan? Japan's doing so badly no one is even worried about them buying the whole US economy out from under us anymore.
Exactly what actions do you imagine could have accomplished that?
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.