The five year anniversry

[Strike For The South]

of the war in Iraq was yesterday.

[Fragony]

That would make today the day after

[ICantSpellDawg]

I have been trying to think about this as simply as possible.

If there had been undisclosed chemical or nuclear arms or development of arms (as nearly every international intelligence agency had believed at the time) would the conflict have been worth it?

Would much if anything of what has happened on the ground in Iraq been different?


My answer is Yes to the first, No to the second. What do you think?

[Vladimir]

Dear God! When will the bloodshed END? Bring our troops home!

Sorry, a little preemption there.

[Fragony]

What do you think?

I think the intel was right, chemical we know of, and nuclair arms are small they can be everywhere. We have seen the silo's, we know there was a nuclair program.

[Vladimir]

More preemption for the Bush lied, people died crowd. Conspiracy theories don't survive truth.

Read it, I did. Great fun I tell you.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Based on the intel we made the right decision. Unfortunate realities plagued that honorable and correct decision. The situation on the ground, had there been said weapons, would have been the same type of quagmire after initial combat ended and we would still be left with a power vacuum to the present day after insurrection began.

I will agree that the decision against fortification with more ground troops after the blitzkrieg was seriously shortsighted. I was on the fence at the time. The blitz, however, was one of the greatest examples of the use of military force in human history.

But the idea that the war was a "bad idea" isn't historically fair.

[CountArach]

I have been trying to think about this as simply as possible.

If there had been undisclosed chemical or nuclear arms or development of arms (as nearly every international intelligence agency had believed at the time) would the conflict have been worth it?

Would much if anything of what has happened on the ground in Iraq been different?


My answer is Yes to the first, No to the second. What do you think?

I'd say No and No. The UN weapon inspectors should have been given time to go through everything and if they found something then everyone should have gone through Diplomatic channels. If that didn't work, then I suppose invasion was the best realistic option.

[Big_John]

I have been trying to think about this as simply as possible.

If there had been undisclosed chemical or nuclear arms or development of arms (as nearly every international intelligence agency had believed at the time) would the conflict have been worth it?

Would much if anything of what has happened on the ground in Iraq been different?


My answer is Yes to the first, No to the second. What do you think?

probably no to the first, certainly no to the second. the weapons were pretext in the first place, so even if they had been found, the laser-guided democracy agenda would have gone about the same way.

as to the first question, would war have been the proper way to deal with the iraq problem? difficult to say in retrospect, but i have a feeling diplomacy would have worked better. or a smarter combination of diplomacy and armed forces. we had, at some point, the option of sending hussein into exile, right? wasn't he trying to broker some kind of deal at the last moment? a more peaceful transition to a provisional government under that rubric couldn't have been any worse than this war.

but assuming that was not an option, is there much benefit to the current 'democracy' in iraq over the previous regime? i'm sure you can find iraqis on both sides of that fence.

more importantly, though. does a saddam with certain weapons present a threat that justifies the risk of war? call me pollyanna, but i don't really think so.

[Sigurd]

There has not been a period of time since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that the US lead forces have not been at war with Iraq.
The first Gulf-war resulted in a truce… the war did not end.
This truce would be upheld if Iraq complied with a certain resolution which involved scraping together some documents within a time limit.
The Iraqi did not comply.
For 12 years Sadaam and his ilk defied the resolutions. The truce should have ended 14 days after it was set. That was the initial terms. Yet we looked through our fingers for 12 years.

The war was justified by all rules of war. No need to pull the WMD issue in.

[Pannonian]

There has not been a period of time since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that the US lead forces have not been at war with Iraq.
The first Gulf-war resulted in a truce… the war did not end.
This truce would be upheld if Iraq complied with a certain resolution which involved scraping together some documents within a time limit.
The Iraqi did not comply.
For 12 years Sadaam and his ilk defied the resolutions. The truce should have ended 14 days after it was set. That was the initial terms. Yet we looked through our fingers for 12 years.

The war was justified by all rules of war. No need to pull the WMD issue in.

However, there's another thing that should trump all rules of war. It was clear before the war that going in for regime change would be utterly stupid, with predictably awful consequences. Whether or not the rules of war and diplomacy justify an action, surely the rules of common sense should prevail? Even with my bare knowledge of the regional politics there, I still predicted in 2002 that the war would go smoothly, but the subsequent breakup of Iraq would not be good. Others with rather more knowledge went into this in more detail, most of which has since come to be. The metaphor that summed up the situation was "tiger by the tail" - holding on makes the situation worse, but letting go results in an immediate savaging. The only thing to do in that case was to avoid grabbing the tail in the first place, but what do we know of these things?