Never Should Have Intervened in the Middle East

[KeithE]

and I’ll add Obama and most Democrats still do not get it.

Over with zero to show for it.

It has further destabilized the region and created ISIS. The trumped up War on Terror will go on forever unless we view intervention as a last resort only when our interests are justified and seriously threatened.

Elect officials who will quickly remove us from Middle East fighting (including the Obama drone strategy) and that clearly see that we need a Department of Defense not a Department of Offensive Intervention every time something does not please our political fancies or limits our companies’ overseas operations.

It has been quiet, so I thought I’d raise a really real issue.

[Sandy]

Everything is political now, so as the GOP has realized that voters have turned away from war hawks, their position has changed. I'm shocked to hear the flip flopping around about W's decision to go into Iraq, though. As the facts have emerged, it was clear that W and his cronie Dick Cheney had planned to go in there for a long time, bided their time, and lied through their teeth when 9-11 gave them the opportunity. Follow the money trail.

Support for Israel is also an underlying factor. We've spent billions dismantling their enemies.

[Tim Bonney]

I can't agree with you more. It was a pointless war. Jeb already has flipped and flopped so many times that now he is setting himself up to look indecisive just when he was the GOPs best hope for a real candidate.

[Dave Roberts]

The Bush Administration was willing to allow policy to be crafted by Paul Wolfowitz, the supreme hawk on Saddam. It's funny how he has disappeared.

[KeithE]

[KeithE]

[Dave Roberts]

The idea of re-invading Iraq is even worse than the first invasion. We failed to build a working government and military the first time. We now have a failing state in Iraq that we created. ISIS exists only in the power vacuum of Iraq where half the country feels cut out of the governing process and in Syria where a crippling civil war has left its own pockets in which no one is in control. Without a working military, another sortie by us would only leave a bigger vacuum with the assumption that we will come dashing every time the central authority in Iraq can't handle its own defense.

[KeithE]

[ET]

[ET]

[KeithE]

Primarily incompetent to fairly assess the intelligence (assuming all had access) and incompetent to judge the outcome of the invasions (not an easy task). But also guilty of reading the political tea leaves during that period. It is not either/or incompetence and lying; it was both incompetence and pandering to voters (not quite lying).

Only Bob Graham (of the quotes you gave) eventually smelled the odor of 9/11 and wrote a book about US complicity in 9/11.

[Sandy]

How about (C) Misled by the faulty intelligence being fed to them by the Bush administration. They all had, as their information source, the CIA reports that were being manipulated by Bush and Cheney. As it turned out on the other side, they, along with their GOP warhawk counterparts, were wrong. They've admitted to that, as the manipulated intelligence was exposed. The hawks are just now getting around to it, even though it must be painful to admit that Bush was wrong.

[KeithE]

[ET]

[Tim Bonney]

Frankly, we've not made a good decision in intervention since before the Korean War. Can we say that the Korean War or the Vietnam War did anything positive for US security and interests?

It is past time for the US to stop playing policeman all over the world.

[ET]

[Dave Roberts]

The greater problem is that we had no exit strategy when we had won the war. It's not so hard to beat up on a second-rate force like the Iraqis. Our problem is not understanding the divisions that exist there and having a plan to bring together a coalition after the war the create a peace. Because Saddam and most of his supporters were Sunni, we assumed that giving power to the Shiites who had backed us was good. Little did we seem to realize that they would ally with their old enemy in Iran. We can "what if" about the Bush era, but it's over. The problem is now trying to get a state that can stand on its own. Seems like we haven't done much to build one other than hand them our tax money in some of the biggest giveaways the world has seen. We didn't get much for our billions given to Iraq.

[Tim Bonney]

ET, I recognize there are reasons to intervene. But all we've done in the Middle East recently is make things worse. We left the vacuum in leadership that allowed ISIS to move in. In many ways things are now worse for Iraqis than they were under Sadaam Hussain, particularly for Christians who are experiencing severe persecution from ISIS.

I think these interventions have gone bad in part because the real reason we were there had nothing to do with helping Iraq or our own safety and security. Bush/Chaney had their own reasons more related to oil getting even with Sadaam.

[ET]

Dave, you're right about the long-existing divisions in that country. I think there's also issues with the culture. I think it was a bit naive for supporters of the war to claim some great "longing for freedom in the human heart" and champion the ideas of Liberty and Democracy in a culture that has no experience with them and the concepts of which are largely foreign. Trying to dump those ideas on them and expect them to take root quickly and blossom into some new way of life for those ancient cultures was a bit too idealistic.

Of course, the same could be said of Obama and Hillary's proclamation of an "Arab Spring". They got Mubarak removed from Egypt and then Gadhafi removed from Libya and neither of those situations has turned out any better than Iraq.

If it's anything that Iraq, Libya and Egypt should teach us, it is that while whoever is in power may be morally objectionable, there's no guarantee that we'll find any success in putting someone else in power whom we find more favorable.

Oddly enough, it would seem that our fellow Christians in both Egypt and Iraq led more peaceable lives under dictators than under the "democratically elected" guys who've shown up in the aftermath.

Timothy, I'm just not willing to buy the "oil excuse". I think that's about as useful as proclaiming "greed" as the reason a corporation does something someone doesn't like. Nor do I think Bush and Cheney were so petty that they would launch a war just to "get even with Saddam".

[Sandy]

[Dave Roberts]

Cheney, of course, suffered a Biden-esque moment when he predicted that the fall of Saddam would bring $1.00 a gallon gas to the US. Even if oil was not a factor, he made it appear to be one. There is little history in the Middle East or North Africa of democratic institutions. That is a Western idea that has little in common with the culture of the region.

[Sandy]

I don't believe there was ever any intention of bringing the ideas of liberty and democracy to Iraq. From the information that has been leaked out regarding the Bush administration's planning for the Iraq invasion prior to 9-11, the intention was to militarily occupy the country indefinitely. Greg Palast, writing for the BBC, is probably the best expert on "war for oil" and that's his general assessment.

There are lots of local interests involved which contribute to the problems. The most logical solution, which satisfies the American concept of "self determination" that was originally set down for the region in Wilson's fourteen points at the end of WW1, would be to create countries that have common cultural, language and religious heritages. You'd have the Baghdad region under Shi'ite control, the eastern provinces under Sunni control, and an independent Kurdistan in the north. Of course, US ally Turkey wouldn't stand for an independent Kurdish state, and Israel would never go along with an independent Sunni state. And then there's the problem of a Shi'ite controlled state bordering Iran. The only people whose interests would be served in such a way are those who live there, and when have they ever counted in the decision making process?

[ET]

[ET]

[Sandy]