Being told they pose a massive threat and actually posing a threat are not the same thing.
More proof the War on Iraq was a lie?
- Thread starter LateX'Dog
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Being told they pose a massive threat and actually posing a threat are not the same thing.
Gassing of kurds, regular torture and murder of his own citizens. Especially from his son.
There is nothing to discuss in that regard. It's fact, not some made up stories.
To top it off the only way to keep him in check was with UN inspections that he kept breaking on a regular basis.
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You can't hive off the military aspects of the operation as a success when 1 million Iraqi people dies after the removal of the Saddam regime. It is all intertwined.
Syria it is then........
And as said before it's not that simple.
We no longer have the resources.
You need the supply lines and a way of getting military in, which I have no idea what allies we have around Syria and if we could use bases/airspace and the like.
There's also what we have found out before, that some countries are far to tribal/fractured for change.
So it's not as easy as saying bad country let's go in, although I really wish it was.
The west certainly does the the combined military strength, granted alone the UK may be stretched.
Israel.
Like Iraq and Libya?
We agree.
Regional stability was far greater while Saddam was in power. His government was Sunni (counteracting the Shi'a power of Iran) and radicals like Moqtada al Sadr would never have been able to muster a fighting force like the Mehdi army. Iraq's border with Syria is now seriously unstable and a lot of small arms are now floating about the region that weren't properly secured during the invasion.
How did Saddam pose a 'major threat'? He gassed the Kurds in the late-80s and while authoritarian wasn't much of a threat to his own citizens after either the Iran/Iraq or Gulf wars.
If you really want to talk about intervention, a far better case can be made for DRC than ever existed in Iraq in terms of lives lost.
The invasion achieved it's initial objectives within the stated parameters and timescales. It was successful.
However the events immediately after the invasion and removal of Saddam are something else. The disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the creation and setup of GreenZones, the inclusion of private security and control, and a whole range of other issues which meant that the Iraqi people saw the Coalition as occupiers rather than liberators, along with the incompetence of the coalition administration and the corruption of the interim Iraqi council led to creating an environment for insurgency and internal power struggles.
As shown the UN and the nations that make it up do not have the backbone, so no we do not have the resources alone.
No, nothing like Iraq and Libya.
Afghanistan maybe, it's very much split it to tribes and we are struggling to unite them. Until they unite or at least work together how can any government work properly. Other than by force and killings.
Soldato
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We would have the combined military strength if the troops werent already busy elsewhere in the world.
1 war at a time!! Soon we'll have the whole world under our wonderful US/UK ran Democracy....
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
It wouldn't have remained that way, Saddam's position was becoming less tenable as time went on, if he had fallen without being pushed, Iran would have been perfectly positioned to gain control either directly or indirectly of Iraq.
Had Saddam had been allowed to remain in power, he would have either left a vacuum into which Iranian supporters would have moved or we would have either a failed state without the coalition troops and resources to combat it or an extension of Iran. Neither was conscionable at the time by either the West or the Arab countries such as Saudi and Kuwait. Having a Somalia in the Middle East is not in our interest.
To state Saddam posed no risk to either the region or to his own people if he remained in power is rather short sighted given his history. If we had managed the situation after his removal better then we almost certainly would not be having this discussion, Iraq would be a viable and hopefully democratic independent stable state and the Arab world wouldn't see the US as aggressors, but partners.
Bush/Rumsfeld were idiots and need to be held to account, not for invasion itself, but the litany of disaster afterward.
It must be so frustrating knowing the truth behind everything but being unable to do anything but post constantly on the internet about it
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GIVE ME A THOUSAND POUNDS.
I see what you're saying, and that scenario isn't impossible - I'm just not sure it would have happened but I guess we'll never know
The upsides to me in the scenario you describe would have been that the institutional memory of Iraq wouldn't have been destroyed (thanks for de-Baathification and decommissioning the Iraqi army Bremer).
I think it's equally possible that we'd have seen Saddam's sons take over and a continuation of more of the same. I doubt the country would have slipped into anarchy simply because of the high numbers of middle class citizens in Iraq (who have mostly now abandoned the country) and a functioning economy.
I take issue with you saying Saddam still posed a big threat. By all accounts his chemical and biological weapons programs had been gutted (borne out by the lack of weapons found) and I doubt the military would have started shooting civilians ala Syria unless they were Kurds. The Kurdish problem is a whole other deal, and is a bit too complex to go into here... Undoubtedly torture and repression of rights was still a huge problem under Saddam, but name me any authoritarian country in the MENA region where that's not the case (Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria...).
Iraq as a country worked for so long because central authority was imposed through the influence of the huge military and its distribution around the country. I'd argue that transitioning to any type of non-authoritarian central rule would have been nigh on impossible even in 2003 (more so now).
You're right that a real window of possibility existed in Autumn 2003 though, and had there been any sort of statebuilding strategy in place from the coalition we'd be in a far better place than we are now. However, I'm still not sure Iraq would have been a regional beacon of democracy.
[TW]Fox;19983064 said:It must be so frustrating knowing the truth behind everything but being unable to do anything but post constantly on the internet about it
Not as frustrating as my lack OF encyclopaedic knowledge of BMW's.
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