DIck Cheney Wrong then, Wrong now...

Julio3000 said:
Your take on the relative correctness of the Iraq pullout is . . . well, un-proveable is probably the nicest word, or non-word, I can think of.

We could have hung out there indefinitely and spent billions more per year getting slowly bled to death while in the crossfire of something between a simmering insurgency and a sectarian war . . . or everyone might have put away their guns and sworn eternal peace and brotherhood. Which do you think would be more likely?
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My take on the initial Iraq War is also not provable.

You really think that had we not left some troops behind it would have prevented ISIS from gaining a very important foothold in Iraq? ISIS wasn't prepared to deal with our troops in Iraq. We're going to have to go back in there to fight a more powerful ISIS now.

I stopped being a homer about the initial Iraq war. Stop being a homer about Obama's mistakes.
 
I'd personally rather pay a billion dollar lease on a country, influence the region, and be -- at least -- absolutely certain that my initial investment was protected before pulling out entirely (against the recommendation of my top Generals) without even having the patience/ability to negotiate some sort of residual force arrangement.

Let's not be daft here, the troops were removed from Iraq because of politics and the impetuously stupid nature of the American citizenry. Want to make economic problems go away? Well, we're spending trillions in Iraq so that _must_ be the solution. The reality is we created more problems for ourselves and our allies by limping away from an incomplete conflict and trying to pretend, at least geopolitically, like it never happened.

I have no problem supporting the war because I prefer to put aside the rose colored naiveté about peace and prosperity, realizing that you can rarely achieve that stratosphere of statehood without getting your hands somewhat dirtied.
 
Hawk said:
I'd personally rather pay a billion dollar lease on a country, influence the region, and be -- at least --absolutely certain that my initial investment was protected before pulling out entirely (against the recommendation of my top Generals) without even having the patience/ability to negotiate some sort of residual force arrangement.
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Not that countries you're describing are actually on the market to be bought and dominated by the U.S., but does $12 billion a month sound reasonable? (The Business Insider, June, 2014)

Hawk said:
Let's not be daft here, the troops were removed from Iraq because of politics and the impetuously stupid nature of the American citizenry. Want to make economic problems go away? Well, we're spending trillions in Iraq so that _must_ be the solution. The reality is we created more problems for ourselves and our allies by limping away from an incomplete conflict and trying to pretend, at least geopolitically, like it never happened.
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That's what happens when the public realizes it has once again been bamboozled into an unnecessary war.

Hawk said:
I have no problem supporting the war because I prefer to put aside the rose colored naiveté about peace and prosperity, realizing that you can rarely achieve that stratosphere of statehood without getting your hands somewhat dirtied.
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Spoken like a true hawk.

"in a March 16, 2003 Meet the Press interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, held less than a week before the Iraq War began, host Tim Russert reported that "every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement." Wiki
 
weso1 said:
It's easy to dispute the content and I already have. You mocked it with your typical go to replies which have become obnoxious at this point.

Kerry:

Iraq war: Wrong
Iraq surge: Wrong
Iraq pull out: Wrong

Cheney:

Iraq War: Wrong
Iraq Surge: Right
Iraq Pullout: Right

Obama:

Iraq War: Right
Iraq Surge: Wrong
Iraq Pull out: Wrong

Hillary:

Iraq War: Wrong
Iraq Surge: Wrong
Iraq Pull out: Wrong

Sanders:

Iraq War: Right
Iraq Surge: Wrong
Iraq pull out: Wrong

Trump:

Iraq War: Right
Iraq Surge: Right
Iraq Pull out: Right

goldfly supports Trump.
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This post is so sad it's funny.

Maybe people didn't support the surge because it's doubling down on a losing bet.

Would you rather have perpetual war? because that's the solution to the ME. We're not an occupying army. Never have been, and hopefully never will be. We liberate and leave. That's how we roll.
 
zitothebrave said:
This post is so sad it's funny.

Maybe people didn't support the surge because it's doubling down on a losing bet.

Would you rather have perpetual war? because that's the solution to the ME. We're not an occupying army. Never have been, and hopefully never will be. We liberate and leave. That's how we roll.
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The only point of my post was to show how stupid it is to ignore someone's opinion because they were wrong about something at one time. That was the subject of the propaganda video goebbelsfly posted.

But I think the surge clearly was the right strategy. Anyone with any honesty would tell you that. I guess you could argue that not leaving troops in Iraq wasn't a bad move, but I think you really have to live in fantasy land to make that argument.
 
weso1 said:
The only point of my post was to show how stupid it is to ignore someone's opinion because they were wrong about something at one time. That was the subject of the propaganda video goebbelsfly posted.

But I think the surge clearly was the right strategy. Anyone with any honesty would tell you that. I guess you could argue that not leaving troops in Iraq wasn't a bad move, but I think you really have to live in fantasy land to make that argument.
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I dunno. Pouring more water into a broken vessel isn't usually the most effective course of action. Our presence there had not accomplished, or even made significant progress towards, any of our strategic goals. Do you think that a continued—even accelerated—presence there would have stabilized the country or the region? With civil wars or insurgencies on two borders and a massive destabilizing force (Iran) on another?
 
I think it would have prevented ISIS from invading parts of Iraq. According to Obama we were leaving behind a stable self reliant Iraq. He certainly believed progress was made. He just didn't anticipate ISIS.
 
The IS may or may not have coalesced in its current form, sure, but don't you think that something—something dangerous and inimical to our interests—would have? Iraq's central government would control more territory (or, more properly, the US military would) but what about that fact leads you to believe that we would be any closer to our strategic goals?
 
Julio3000 said:
I dunno. Pouring more water into a broken vessel isn't usually the most effective course of action. Our presence there had not accomplished, or even made significant progress towards, any of our strategic goals. Do you think that a continued—even accelerated—presence there would have stabilized the country or the region? With civil wars or insurgencies on two borders and a massive destabilizing force (Iran) on another?
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+
 
Something dangerous has happened. ISIS is making some serious coin controlling part of Iraq's oil fields. We could have protected those oil fields. That money would have gone to Iraq rather than ISIS. I think there's a much better chance we suffer more in the long run because of the premature troop withdrawal, rather than had we left troops in there. You don't think that money is going to come back to bite us or our allies in the butt?

Obama has already given the US the authorization to send over 3000 troops back in Iraq, of which 2/3 are already there. So yeah, we should have stayed in until Iraq troops were trained well enough to handle an ISIS invasion. We could have defended its borders and protected its civilians.

Again, Obama stated that Iraq was a sovereign stable and self reliant country. The progress was there, but Obama failed to see the impact of ISIS.
 
Cheney Rums and Bush wanted us to have an indefinite presence in Iraq. There was never a realistic goal of having an Iraqi army "ready" to defend itself. We trained the Afghanis for 13 years and they're still incompetent. At least Iraq already had a military infrastructure and they were still outmatched.

It was a mistake to go in, the surge may have been a bandaid and the sectarian violence and ISIS would have been inevitable anyways. It wasn't a mistake to pull out. There was no clear objective or timeline. Plus with the Arab spring I think isis or a form of it was inevitable8
 
weso1 said:
Something dangerous has happened. ISIS is making some serious coin controlling part of Iraq's oil fields. We could have protected those oil fields. That money would have gone to Iraq rather than ISIS.
Again, Obama stated that Iraq was a sovereign stable and self reliant country. The progress was there, but Obama failed to see the impact of ISIS.
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Isis and AL aqaeda are the military industrial complex's wet dream. A stateless enemy that never goes away and throwing more weapons and soldiers at it exacerbates it.

Frankly the solution for ISIS in that area is for Iran and the Saudis to take care of it if it gets that bad.
 
How can you say it wasn't a mistake to pull our troops out, yet we wound up having to send them back in anyway? I think that fact makes it pretty clear that it was a mistake. the surge was much more than a band aid. It was a parachute. Iraq is stable outside of ISIS controlled territories, something we could have prevented.
 
weso1 said:
Something dangerous has happened. ISIS is making some serious coin controlling part of Iraq's oil fields. We could have protected those oil fields. That money would have gone to Iraq rather than ISIS. I think there's a much better chance we suffer more in the long run because of the premature troop withdrawal, rather than had we left troops in there. You don't think that money is going to come back to bite us or our allies in the butt?

Obama has already given the US the authorization to send over 3000 troops back in Iraq, of which 2/3 are already there. So yeah, we should have stayed in until Iraq troops were trained well enough to handle an ISIS invasion. We could have defended its borders and protected its civilians.

Again, Obama stated that Iraq was a sovereign stable and self reliant country. The progress was there, but Obama failed to see the impact of ISIS.
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Point taken about the money. Still, you don't know what the other side of the equation would be—how much it would cost us directly, and what the regional blowback would be.

How long do you think it would have taken to build a stable and functioning Iraqi army, particularly given the sectarian concerns. We had 10 years and we couldn't assemble a cohesive force that was willing and able to fight. Would ten more years have done it?

We could have protected its civilians—to some degree—from being shot in ditches and beheaded by IS. We never did a particularly good job protecting them from being blown up in marketplaces, etc., by various factions. You're building some massive assumptions into your projections. So am I, but mine are at least based on observed and acknowledged fact.
 
weso1 said:
How can you say it wasn't a mistake to pull our troops out, yet we wound up having to send them back in anyway? I think that fact makes it pretty clear that it was a mistake. the surge was much more than a band aid. It was a parachute. Iraq is stable outside of ISIS controlled territories, something we could have prevented.
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It is not particularly stable, and does not have (nor has it had) a functional national government.
 
Over 3,000 troops currently in Iraq, and 2/3 of them fighting alongside Iraqis against ISIS. We had to go back in anyway. I expect that number will continue to increase.
 
Julio3000 said:
It is not particularly stable, and does not have (nor has it had) a functional national government.
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Stability is in the eye of the beholder. We could stay there for fifty years and the minute we left, there would be uprisings of some sort or another. Where Bremer and company screwed up was purging all the Baathists out of the government from the get-go. A lot of mid-level functionaries with no particular allegiance to Saddam Hussein were drummed out and with them went a ton of expertise on how to deliver basic services.

I still think Biden had the right idea when he (and not he alone of course) proposed dividing Iraq into three different states.
 
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