Why does the decision to invade still matter?

B

bozo_casanova

2,500+ Posts
So we've got two dueling threads going right now
The premise of one is that Bush lied
The premise of the other is that Saddam faked WMDs and Bush and everybody got taken in.

Maybe it's because I supported an invasion more or less non-stop from 1991-2003, but I see the "debate" about the causus belli as a dodge of the real issue: how the executive branch got away with their conduct of the war and why there was no oversight to correct it, and why the supporters of the administration looked away even as a catastophe of incompetence was unfolding.

The reason why that's an important issue is this: our next president must have an exit strategy that salvages whatever we can out of Iraq. I refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton on the basis that her stated approach will result in needless slaughter. But I never see Republicans or adminstration apologists making an equal commitment to an exit strategy. It seems that they are still caught defending the original idea, as if what we MEANT to do matters.

Does anybody share my view that it doesn't matter anymore why we invaded?
 
It will ALWAYS matter why we invaded because we have lost over 4000 U.S. soldiers in the process.

The only thing they ask of us is to not send them into harms way unless it is the last resort.

We failed the troops.
 
Ryan,
We also failed the people of Iraq, of whom a bare minimum of 80000 civilians have died, and probably more like ~500000 Iraqis have died because we didn't secure the peace.

I'm not justifying the invasion, only saying that while the invasion can be debated, we could have put our soldiers in a position to win, and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the majority of US deaths (those killed after "Mission Accomplished"), but we didn't.

To me, that's the bigger scandal. Isn't the what more important than the why?
 
It will always matter for the purpose of education and history. We don't want to be doomed to make the same mistakes again. It still matters why Germany invaded Poland, why the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and why we decided to pick up where the French left off in Vietnam.

As far as our policy going forward, however, it shouldn''t matter at all. Right now, nobody has a reasonable plan because we're going to have to escalate or leave. The current course is untenable because it doesn't do enough to eliminate the insurgency. We can go on forever as we currently are, we can escalate and try to get all the insurgents, or we can leave altogether and hope the Iraqis can police themselves. The next president will almost certainly scale back our troop levels significantly no matter who it is. The why matters to the current candidates because they still want to frame it as Bush's war, and it is his. When they lower the troop levels and Iraq descends into chaos, they can point to the previous president as the culprit, much like Gerald Ford did when he closed up shop in Vietnam. Now history hardly shows Ford as associated with Vietnam at all, though it was Ford that ended the war. The same will be true with our next president and Iraq.

The bottom line is we went in there without a plan beyond toppling Saddam. Now we are stuck with a seeping wound.
 
I would say it is up for debate.

The way I look at it is that one leads to the other.

So if the first step is eliminated then the second outcome would not have occurred at all.

I think the lie to get us to war is worse than the incompetence in which the war was fought.
 
I tend to agree with you b_c. I don't care WHY we did the wrong thing right now, I just care about how to fix it. That's for the short-term though. In the longterm view, the why is very important, although not to Iraq and not to the current situation.

First, we can't just swallow such a huge boondoggle. We have to remember where we screwed up so that next time we aren't so easily swayed. As W says, "fool me once, shame on you...fool me....can't get fooled again."

What an easy maneuver for a President to just **** something up and then use "why are you worried about the WHY when we should be focused on the WHAT NOW?" I don't want to endure this again. I'm not going to trust anyone who was in the lying camp to have the best strategy for the present. That, however, doesn't include any of the candidates, so it's a moot point in terms of the election.

As for picking a President goes, the WHY matters because of how he or she may handle the next situation. Someone who believes in the invasion is, IMO, much more likely to use force the next time they feel America is threatened. That may or may not be what I want.
 
I believe that why we went to war and what should we do now are separate, but important issues. Are they linked? As abstract intellectual exercises, maybe not. As matters of gaining a coherent vision of what we want out of this fiasco, maybe they are.

I was against the invasion from the outset because I was not persuaded that Iraq was a threat nor that Iraq was involved with the terrorists who mean to harm the US. Plenty of smart people felt otherwise at the time and I couldn't help but respect that. Only time would prove one of us correct. Had the Army found WMDs and evidence of meaningful connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, I'd have been proven wrong and I would have been glad had that been the case. So much for my history.

I salute General Petraeus and the military for their recent gains. I think we can give the Iraqis a deadline for getting their stuff together and we, as a result of Petraeus' success, may be able to withdraw in a better order than had the situation remained the same. For this, why we went to war is irrelevant.

But...

Did we invade to build a new Iraq that loves the US and will allow us to keep a large military presence there? Is that why we said we were going to Iraq? If these are the real reasons and there was never an intention to withdraw, then we must return to the root of the reasons the American people approved the invasion.

We were told one thing while our intentions were another. The vision for the US in Iraq was intentionally made unclear from the beginning. Further, the reasons why we should stay there have been shifting and contradictory from the moment the statue of Saddam was pulled down:

We are there to build a democratic paradise to shine as a beacon for the rest of the midEast.
We are there to turn Iraq into a battlefield so we can fight the terrorists there instead of on our own soil.

Am I the only one who sees that you can't do both of those?

The raising of the root lies by opposers of the invasion and the occupation, at least as far as I do so, is to point to the pattern of deceit that not only made the reasons for the invasion dishonest, but make judging ongoing policy very difficult. How do I know that they are not still lying? Why should I suspect otherwise?

Isn't credibility important?

The other reason I write about the admin's lying is to respond to the weekly revisionist thread that appears linked to some article that purportedly shows that the Bush administration was honest all along. They weren't.
 
In my opinion the arrogance of the Executive and their complete lack of accountability is the problem. Also they eroded the support from the legitimate and worthwhile cause of subduing Afghanistan and the hunt bin Laden for this mess.
 
As the leader of the free world and the most powerful nation on the planet, it always matters.

I supported the war because I believed the line that Saddam had WMDs. I was wrong.

We lied about why.
We threw a country into total chaos.
We have our people dying over there for nothing.
We have no exit strategy.
We didnt listen to the only man in the cabinet that spilled blood over there.

That is Bushs fault and the POTUS doesnt get a free pass or it will happen again.
 
If cabinet level individuals in the WH knew that the African uranium claims used as cassus belli in the 2003 SOTU were bunk before the SOTU, that would be rather profound, imo. I don't understand exactly what the legal exposure of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc. are to international law and prosecution, but intentionally lying to the world to justify pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation might have some legal consequences for individuals. It's both hard and easy to see, but I don't know. Realize that the House Committee of Oversight and Govt Reform has asked Condi Rice to testify to this very question about what info they had before the SOTU and she has thus far refused to appear in this matter. It's got some implications, you might say.

But what RomaVicta said above hits me in the gut:
In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
And the beat goes on . . .

sonny_lookf.jpg
 
Correction, it will be the 5th year anniversary of "mission accomplished." Bush made that BS speech on May 1st, 2003.

It is sick to know that Texas is the 2nd deadliest / most wounded state of this war.

361 Texans have died and 2760 have been wounded so far and people can still think that electing a candidate that will keep us in this mess is the right thing to do.
 
2 of you bozos said there was no oversight or accountability. that's ain't right.

we've had 2 elections since the invasion. congress and the supreme court have been in session all this time. the press has been all over the administration with a fine tooth comb. the administration has been a plumber's nightmare - the books and records of the administration have been a virtual open book.

if bush is a bumbling idoit with fascist inclinations, it should have been the easiest thing in the world to un-elect him, impeach him, elect a super majority in congress to stymie him. i guess bush's opponents just weren't persuasive.

oh, and btw, bush did change the course of the war. i'm not sure if any of you other bozos are aware of this, arguing as you do as though the war were still being waged pre-surge. and there's a new commander over there, too - just in case you weren't aware of that either. iow, bush as changed, reacted to events, his critics haven't.

hook'em
 
Not really- unless like me you said it's stupid as **** and is going to cost a fortune. If you understood the region you knew that as bad a s Saddam was he was a counter balance to Iraq. You also knew that the inhabitants of Iraq have a very long history of not getting along.

I alike many assumed saddam had some WMD, certainly some mustard gas somewhere, but no nukes, and more importantly no delivery system to hit our shores.... here's where the "he's an arab, osama's an arab, and they will obviously work together to put a nuke into NY harbor... in the near future if we don't act! We can't wait for a mushroom cloud, after the confirmation of the attempts to aquire Yellow cake Uranium... plus the Iraqi oil will pay for most of the reconstruction....

That's the nickel tour on how things got started...

Does it matter? From this BBS nope. If I was getting called up as a National Guard member to play target/policeman in Iraq I might have an interest in the Why.

Now we are there, and the pace of progress is so miniscule as to be ridiculous, yet we keep borrowing billions.

As for the Saddam had WMD, he did, we found them, they we rusted munitions from years ago. Bush amd moreso Cheney wanted to attack iraq and they simply believed without contradition any intelligence that pointed this direction no matter how shaky.

Today we are left in the situation that was alwasy what i considered one of the better scenrios, delaying civil war. Now how long do you want to dealy civil war at over 100 billion a year is anyone's guess. Of course if the GOP supporters of the war effort were being asked to send their own children into harms way they would have a differing opinion

FOr me the real problem is that the political progress pace could only me matched by that of a snail. It's possible that with the election of a Democrat there will be significant political progress. If not I guess we will have the same success we have in getting our friends the Saudis to increase oil production. It's nice to think about..... at a sanils pace costing 100 billion+ a year...
 
Why does the decision to invade still matter?

Preventing this from happening again under the leadership who brought us Iraq qualifies. Don't think they haven't been gaming to do it again? Does 'Filipino Monkey' ring any bells?

Cheney has had a hard on for Iran ever since the Congressional midterms wipeout.

Demanding some truth and accountability for the original question at the very least raises the bar of legitimacy for any proposed future military actions.

As of a year ago, my two main wishes for '08 have been that we do not start a war with Iran followed by not having the GOP control the White House after Bush.

.
 
and thanks for the correction, Ryan:

As of this May, it will have been 5 years since the declaration of the end of formal military operations in Iraq by the US military. How many American soldiers were getting killed in Germany in 1950 ? How many US troops were getting killed in Korea in 1958 ?

.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Weekly Prediction Contest

* Predict TEXAS-KENTUCKY *
Sat, Nov 23 • 2:30 PM on ABC

Recent Threads

Prediction Results Threads

2024 Schedules

Back
Top