Iraq: The Bush Legacy

Yeah, because that stopped Al Qaeda in their tracks, didn't it?

 

In the late 1990s.. 1997-1998 Saddam was begging the US and the UN to lift sanctions on oil related things. His reserves were in terrible shape and destined to be ruined forever.. He wanted Haliburton to come in.. repair and update etc. The cost would have been less than 20 billion dollars.

 

The cost would have been Saddam rebuilding his WMD stockpile and becoming even more a threat to his own people, the region and the world. A cost two administrations and two congresses said we could not afford.

 

and you and your ilk were wrong to call democrats traitors and cowards who opposed the invasion of Iraq for exact those reasons.

Saddam may have been a bad guy, but he kept AQ out of Iraq. He kept sunnis and shiites from wholesale slaughter against one another, and he kept Iranian regional hegemony in check. If we had concentrated on finding and neutralizing Islamic extremists instead of overthrowing secular ba'athists, we would be in MUCH better shape today.

 

No we wouldn't have the same outcome and we are not the British and this is not the early 1900's.

 

Absolutely true!

Even David Frost's famous Nixon interviews contained a brief discussion of the folly of western nations getting directly involved in Middle Eastern politics.

Up until 2002, the lesson of history had been the disasterous Suez Crisis of 1956.

Kissinger aluded to it on interviews as well.

But that was apparantly before Boy George and Dick Cheney's time.

 

You lost that option in 1998 and again in 2003, it was the official policy of the United States that Saddam should be removed from power.

Not a scintilla of evidence to support that conjecture.

Saddam could not be allowed to remain in power under his own devices.....PERIOD. So how were you going to remove him.

Even if you left him in power how were you going to prevent him from rebuilding his WMD, which he had every intention of doing and had the material necessary to do so hidden from inspection. How were you going to prevent him from furthering his ties to terrorist groups and aiding a abetting them? How were you going to prevent him from the mass murders of his own citizens and his unstoppable desire to expand his power?

 

Really?

Explain that!

We had 141,000 troops in Iraq in 2006, and the country nearly dissolved into civil war then.

Now the talk radio right is bellowing the talking point that if only "Obama" had negotiated a SOFU (which the Iraqis didn't want) and left 15,000 troops behind, all would be hunky dory in Iraq today.

The idea is idiotic on its face!

But then, the spin line is coming from the very same people who promoted the war in the first place.

Now that the predictions of their more knowledeable critics are coming to pass, the only thing they can do is make up spin lines, pander to the Obama haters with baloney, and cringe.

This is the outcome of Mr Bush's war. It was predicted (but not by anyone who ever appeared on Fox Noise), and it has come to pass.

And the absolute LAST people anyone should take seriously on this is anyone from the Project for a New American Century (or the false fronts it has morphed into) the AEI, or the Bush adminstration.

This is the playing out of the biggest foreign policy disaster in US history.

 

The Muslims in Turkey do it. They have a Democracy.

 

I guess we all know Mr. Robert Gates ...

If I'm correct [and if my memory doesn't make me malicious jokes] Mr. Gates became Defense Secretary under Bush administration in 2006 and [how was this possible?] he accepted to serve again as Defense Secretary also under Obama administration until 2011.

Ah ...

So, let's make a sports analogy. A guy buys a football club with a coach, that guy doesn't change the coach. Should we infer that such a decision is an implicit acceptance of the tactics and strategy in managing the team of the former and confirmed coach?

So, what are we talking about?

Is there here someone who wants [really?] sustain that President Obama, as President of the United States had no possibility to change Mr. Gates and the US military policies in Iraq?

Are we joking, or what?

Obama agreed on that policy and on that general strategy. Period.

And after 2011? Did Obama changed the trend? I don't think so. On the contrary, it seems that this administration enjoys the change of regimes in some Arab states, regardless the kind of extremism which take over the countries ...

 

how in the world can you make such a baseless, unprovable prediction?

 

Right lets blame Bush for what's going on now. But these people aren't Iraqis. They don't act like Sunnis. Many of them came down armed by Obama from Syria. Iraq has asked for 4 months for air support from us and Obama has done nothing but let them go from town to town and take them over. If Iraq falls, it will be Obama's fault.

 

Of course!

First you dodged the question (same question from two different people).

They you made up some other nonsense (or maybe one of your talk radio friends fed you the spin line).

Sorry, but what is now ISIS, has been operating in Iraq since at least 2006. It is the Sunni insurgency against the Shia government we installed in Baghdad.

It expanded into Syria and fed the civil war there, but it did not come from Syria.

That's a domestic right wing myth.

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/06/analysis_isis_allies.php#

You've moved from making completely baseless claims to making things up.

 

The same way Margot2 could and Iraq had been moving in the right direction before Obama surrendered and I have no reason to believe that would not have continued with a strong US presence there and in the rest of the world.

 

This will be Obama's legacy.



Iraq: Images of Iraqi men being rounded up at gunpoint, beaten, herded into lorries and shot dead in a ditch in the desert by a row of masked ISIS fanatics sent shockwaves across the world

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at the time, all the righties were saying that Obama was only following Bush's pre-determined timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. I guess the talking points have changed now, eh?

 

Iran was obviously ecstatic when American blood and two trillion dollars of US taxpayer money offed the Sunni dictator next door and facilitated his replacement by a fellow Shia thug, subervient to their agenda.

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Of course, a part of that agenda was Maliki's telling the Bush to screw to the delight of the Iraqi people. He capitulated in their SOFA.

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As the Bushies absconded, they asked the new dictator politely if he would please end the sectarian strife the fraudulently-pretexted invasion had unleashed (It did succeed in virtually eliminating the ancient Christian community, of course) by welcoming Kurds and Sunnis into his regime.

He didn't, and the predictable consequences have ensued: Angry Sunnis forming an alliance with their wacko birds.

Iran has a clear interest in stabilizing their co-religionist in Baghdad's repressive regime, but that vision of power-sharing amongst Iraq's sectarian factions is a pipe dream

The dynamics that the Bush set in motion, the ones his Daddy had warned against, have legs.

 

He certainly did not follow any previous precedent but ignored his military advisers that Iraq troops were not ready and announcing ahead of time giving Al-Qeada the go ahead.

 

Read up on the history of Iraq.

 

The righties are furiously talking out of the other sides of their mouths now.

They are cheering that Iran (the country they wanted to bomb as late as three months ago) offered to send troops to defend the Shia government the Bush team installed in Baghdad.

Now, they're trying to blame the President for a withdrawal timetable that Bush negotiated, and which they have shouted about for four years.

Right wing hypocricy and historical revisionism is always ridiculous, and a clear indication of thier parochialism., but now it's especially ludicrous!

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That would require a considerable lenthening of the attention span of the average listener to conservative right wing talk radio.

 

LOLOLOL.

 

I did not see Margot2 make that claim.

What she has said, was that we were better off with Sadaam, who knew how to keep a lid on these forces, than we are now in the vacuum we created with Mr Bush's war.

That's obvious to everyone other than the right wing in the US.

But, of course, the fact that the war Bush wanted in Iraq was a fool's errand was obvious to most people all over the world, except the right wing in the US, too.

And it's turning out the way a lot of people predicted it would too.

I predicted this in 2003. I suspect taht Margot did too.

 

Iraq troops would NEVER be "ready" to defend country to the detriment of their sect. That's what smart folks tried to tell you yahoos before we invaded in the first place. Obama was dealt a busted flush.... Bush saddled Obama with a no-win Iraq thanks to Cheney, Wolfie, Perle, Rummy, and the rest of the PNAC gaggle of idiots.

 

Yes.. everyone knew that ultimately Iraq would deteriorate into sectarian fighting and chaos.

Iraq could be producing 7 million barrels of oil per day and rising if they could get their act together.

All those years after Bush declared "mission accomplished" and flew onto the aircraft carrier their oil production was at an all time low.. and we couldn't even control the highway from the airport to Baghdad. I stopped counting acts of sabotage about year 5 into the war and it was 600 at that time.

We didn't "win" anything.. We just got a lot of boys killed or maimed and spent 2 trillion dollars.