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[The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq] : 10 Years in Retrospect
The Ender
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHBF8EKt-zcIt's difficult to think of where to start on this subject; the relationship between Iraq and Western democracies has many years of history behind it and has always been complex, with it's contemporary dictator bouncing from trusted NATO ally to despised enemy of all free peoples depending on exactly what Western goals in the Persian Gulf have been at the time.
The most relevant context for the 2003 invasion probably begins in 1991, with the end of Operation Desert Storm and prelude to Operation Desert Fox (the sustained bombardment of Iraqi secret police compounds that would continue throughout Clinton's presidency, in an ill-conceived attempt to stir an insurrection). Iraq's military was decimated after Desert Storm and it's economy was in total ruin as a result of;
a) the scorched Earth strategy commanded by Saddam
b) the loss of Iraq's most lucrative trade avenues
The Republican Guard still loyal to Saddam still held enough weapons and armored vehicles to maintain control and violently suppress the few Shi'a uprisings that had been encouraged by President Bush Senior, and Saddam was able to leverage his newfound position as both an adversary of the West and a survivor of a war with Western powers to find some non-traditional Ba'ath allies among Sunni radicals. The country could be called 'stable' after the failure of the uprisings in that Saddam's cabinet was never under any real threat of collapse or succession; the words that best describe the 12 year interim in Iraq between Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom would either be 'Molestocracy' or 'Predocracy', given that rape was Saddam's policing tool of choice (...it is disputed whether or not the dictator himself or either his sons really organized what could only be called the rape police. Literally gangs of state-enshrined thugs who abducted and assaulted family members of people who they felt needed to be taught a lesson, video-taped the act and then sent it to them via post).
I think the context of what Iraq was is important, and I find that it gets glossed-over, demented or forgotten in many discussions. It was not a place under Sharia Law, it was wealthier in it's urban areas than most of it's neighboring countries and therefore offered a higher quality of living to it's citizens, it was a place where Arabic women did not have to wear veils and were allowed to go to school - but it was also a place dominated by fear and state debauchery of the worst sort. Whatever you happen to think of the libertarian Green Zone or the plainly corrupt / incompetent current government of Iraq, neither of those things should be or can be compared to what existed from 1991-2003 in that same space.
According to Richard Clarke, the asphalt for the road to Operation Iraqi Freedom was being poured immediately after the mass murders in New York City, Pennsylvania & Washington D.C. on 9/11; this seems to be at least partly corroborated by statements made by Bush administration officials in the media shortly after the attacks, but regardless, a clear prelude to the invasion of Iraq began in 2002. The U.S. administration cited 3 primary complaints to justify a military action:
1) Iraq was obtaining Yellowcake Uranium for use in making nuclear weapons
2) Iraq had obtained aluminum cylinders that were consistent with fissile material refinement centrifuges
3) Iraq had developed a robust biological & chemical weapons program
Point #1 was based on forged reports that Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium from Niger. Every intelligence source that saw the reports recognized them as fraudulent, with the exception of the Italian SISMI that dragged them out in the first place, and U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson criticized the administration for using this known to be false 'information'. In retaliation, Vice President Richard "Just Call Me Penis" Cheney and Lewis "Trust Me, I Really Am the Slimiest Fuckstick" Libby betrayed the identity of Wilson's spouse, who was an undercover intelligence agent.
Point #2 was found convincing by exactly one person (Colin Powell), while the Department of Energy and NIST (who may have had some knowledge about centrifuges) thought that the cylinders would've been totally inappropriate for that purpose (but probably totally appropriate for more conventional military applications).
Point #3 was put on the table by a source initially known as 'Curveball' - an Iraqi refugee who we now know made-up the entire story in the hopes of helping to catalyze an intervention in Iraq. U.N. weapons inspectors were allowed in to do a full inspection and claimed to be satisfied that no such weapons program existed in Iraq; the U.S. administration used ad hominem attacks to dismiss the inspectors and doubled-down on Curveball's testimony.
The conventional invasion was overwhelming and decisive, involving both covert pre-combat operations to convince some of Saddam's military commanders to stand down & extraordinary direct firepower (with the typical contemporary focus on air superiority & night time armor raids). Saddam's forces collapsed entirely within about 20 days, with the stiffest resistance provided by Fedayeen Saddam special forces (often disguised as either civilians or emergency service personnel).
American & British forces, having done most of the heavy lifting, did little to nothing to restore central authority, police services, medical services or basic utilities as months passed by; Saddam himself was found in December - suitably enough, squirreled away in a cellar. He was sent through a kangaroo trial and hung, doubly shameful considering that there was no need for a kangaroo trial and the opportunity to bring justice to bear was tossed away. The unchecked criminal element (including looting & destroying priceless pieces of centuries-old artwork throughout the country) and execution of the former dictator ultimately catalyzed a civil war, and at some yet-to-be-established point in time, al Qaeda fighters began to engage in guerrilla combat against occupying American & British forces as well as murder Iraqi civilians.
American & British forces responded to this violence by tracking down 'suspects', whom were offered no legal recourse, and shuffling off to detention centers - some of which practiced systematic torture & execution.
At the end of the day, the conflict has caused about 110,000~ Iraqi civilian deaths, 4,800~ Coalition soldier deaths, 16,000~ Iraqi security force deaths, and left Iraq as a place in political limbo. The current government is rather good at 'losing' large quantities of money, have not proven capable of protecting Iraqis from sectarian violence and has had a few rocky episodes with persons accused of past war crimes - but they have been holding monitored elections, and it's hardly inconceivable that it could someday develop into what most people would see as a functional egalitarian administration.
10 years later, and 4 years since major U.S. presence ended in Iraq, what do we see looking back?
If it does turn out that perhaps the great grandchildren of today's Iraqi parents will enjoy the privilege of watching Saturday morning cartoons and wailing for toys at Wal Mart, how does that weigh against a pair of administrations (one in the U.S. and one in the U.K.) behaving in an imperialistic manner in all of the wrong ways, running roughshod over all of the diplomatic frameworks that were painfully established in order to drag the international community away from the war, war, war mentality from the early 1900s?
With Love and Courage
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The video is of Saddam's consolidation of total power on the 22nd of July, 1979: he had the scene videotaped.
The bald man in the video is Muhyi Abdel-Hussein - former secretary general of the Ba'ath party - whom had been imprisoned and tortured the night prior. Saddam is having him 'confess' to leading a fifth column of Syrian traitors, and naming 68 'co-conspirators'. As far as anyone currently knows, none of these people aside from Abdel-Hussein were of particular interest to Saddam; they just happened to be the unlucky names drawn from a hat.
Abdel-Hussein and the 'co-conspirators' were executed, and the executions were carried-out by firing squads comprised of the remaining Ba'ath cabinets members - cementing their loyalty to Saddam by coercing them into participating in the coup and become murderers.
I'm afraid I don't have a complete transcript.
Now I get it.
Noam Chomsky had an excellent article wherein he explained how US foreign policy isn't at all about going in to these regions to establish democracy. Looking at what we've done throughout history in Latin America and now parts of the Middle East, all we've been doing is setting up puppet governments that are willing to give us access to their natural resources. More specifically, they grant access to our politically-connected corporations. Everyone else gets screwed over. We could have done a much better job installing democracy in Iraq, it just wasn't in our best interest.
Ideology said that everybody hated Saddam and would love for Iraq to be turned into a Democracy.
Reality said that a guy like Saddam would never have been stayed in power without some real support from a significant section of the people. And while everybody claims to love Democracy, most people only like it when their side wins the election.
What pisses me off the most in hindsight is all the pro-war people going "nobody could have foreseen the chaos our Invasion caused", when that was the main objection anti-war people made against the invasion. The re-writing of history to make it so that "everbody" supported the war, when that was so obviously not the case.
In the case of the British public the majority were in favour of the war at the time (though try finding someone who will admit it now), however it must be said that is probably because our Prime Minister stood up on TV and said that he had intelligence that Saddam Husain had chemical weapons that could be deployed against the UK in 45 minutes. That we know for a fact he knew fine well the intelligence was crap and lied through his teeth about it anyway is a massive black mark on British government.
People will roll their eyes when I say this but I firmly believe it, Tony Blair should be in prison.
I can rationalize by saying that I was only 20. I trusted my government that they wouldn't lie about something so serious. That it was obvious that Saddam was involved in 9/11. Our nation went a little crazy post-9/11, in a way that a lot of people have forgotten (selectively, in many cases) and most people who were under eighteen at the time never really experienced / knew. But I still supported it until it became clear Saddam didn't have an active chemical / biological weapon program, and that the post-invasion was so horrificially mismanaged and a nightmare.
I firmly believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc should be in prison for...well, many thing before and that followed, but especially for pushing the fraud that led to the invasion of Iraq. It was a waste of a decade, hundreds of thousands / millions of lives, trillions of dollars, international goodwill, and just an all around cluster-fuck. The amount of possibilities / potential that were pissed away in Iraq makes me so mad I try not to even think too mcuh about it, and it's definitely tempered my political attitudes and made me far more pragmatic and cynical.
One thing that Bush and his administration did do is guarantee I would never vote for a Republican. Not just with Iraq, but that was a big part of it.
I've always wondered if the Bush administration really did believe their own narrative or not. I mean, it's incredible either way: either it really was a cloak and dagger effort in the shadow of an overwhelming crime & tragedy to push a political agenda... or they really were just as stupid and useless as every pundit has always said.
Imagine a world without 9/11. Where would we be as a country? Where would the world be? What would have been Bush's Legacy?
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
A 1-termer remembered mostly for a bad economy and being particularly dim.
I doubt it. Ford just had the fist shot at doing what the party machine would always do.
*I'd say precedent was set with Clinton; having it happen to the next President makes it a...tradition, for lack of a better word.
Which narrative?
The narrative that both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were enemies to the United States, and their hostility itself justified military action against the countries that housed these evil ones?
Or the narrative that Hussein and Bin Laden were not merely enemies of the US, but enemies in allegiance, actively cooperating towards their mutual goals?
I would submit that if you really believe the first narrative, then the second narrative is a relatively minor detail. Some members of the administration (including Bush Jr. himself) likely believed it; others simply didn't care (possibly Rumsfeld). They were both enemies, they both deserved to be smacked down. Yellowcake, then, was a white lie - a small falsehood that didn't matter because it spoke to an even greater truth: that there are enemies of the US in the middle east and we had to bring the fight to them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Boy. There's a question with so many facets.
First of all, in an alternate world where Ford didn't issue a pardon and Nixon and his cronies got taken down hard, we wouldn't have had to deal with 'Company' because a good portion of them would have gone down along with Nixon. Certainly when Nixon went down for torpedoing the peace talks so Nixon could win the election. Even if they didn't go down, the stink wouldn't have come off them.
Second, in the alternate world where the precedent was set with Nixon, 'Company' DEFINITELY never would have made it past the prosecution of Reagan. Take your pick - Iran / Contra, chemical weapons / support of Saddam, etc. Rumsfeld and likely Cheney would definitely have stewed in prison for that one in a just world. They weren't just fresh faced turds like with Nixon, those assholes were right in the thick of things.
I honestly think there is less that's directly prosecutable with the Bush administration than under Nixon / Reagan. It's ironic, but the treason of Nixon and Reagan are a matter of historical fact, while the best you could realistically hope to nail W and his administration on is what? Torture or warrantless wiretap programs? Either one of those is going to be largely unprosecutable by a unbaised court, as much as I absolutely hate to say it.
The thing that frustrates me is that Gore should have been the president in 2000, ordered the strikes against Al Qaeda that were already planned out and waiting for a 'go', and not pissed away Clinton's surplus through meaningless tax refunds. Maybe no 9/11, no Afghanistan, no Iraq, etc. Maybe. But hard to predict.
It's just frustrating to think about how badly Bush and his cronies fucked our country. Pretty much a lost decade.
#Gore2000yesimstillbitter
Specifically, their interpretation of Curveball's story about mobile chemical munitions factories - that Saddam was rebuilding his arsenal in preparation for... something.
Did they actually think that a cab driver who stole money from bad people he was now on the run from was also a chemical munitions lab insider? Or was this just a convenient fraud to latch onto while conspiring to launch an invasion?
If we had his administration sitting in a courtroom, charges of lying to congress & lying under oath would definitely be on the list somewhere, as well as conspiracy to commit acts of war based on fraudulent information.
From a professional perspective it was amazing to watch a major superpower like the US fall flat on its face. The only thing I felt I was wrong on was the time it took to realize that a major insurgency was underway in Iraq. I though the US was going to be much quicker on the
uptake on that one.
Oh, and wondering why nobody was pointing out that the "Leaks" in the NYTimes where obviously planted by the administration to drum up support. Remember that? Presenting it as independent reporting, while rewriting Karl Rove Press releases as breaking news.
Oh. Yeah.
I have no idea how many times Hans Blix had to say "seriously guyz there's nothing here. saddam's an asshole but his balls have been cut off. hello, seriously, nada. zip. zilch. nuffin. is this thing on?"
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The American media's complicity in the hype machine was disgusting. Anyone who dissented was branded a traitor, a supporter of terrorism. The war was an atrocity waiting to happen, but the US media just happily went along with it, parroting government press releases and engaging in no critical questioning of any kind.
Not to mention Robert Novak and Valerie Plame.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Just out of curiosity: suppose that the mass murders hadn't happened, and in 2002 the Bush administration started to beat a very candid war drum regarding Iraq - telling people honest stories of the human rights abuses there, that Saddam was literally raping the public, etc, and said that he felt a moral obligation to put an end to it all. How would you have reacted to that sort of campaign?
Oh, right - another thing I'd have charged the Bush administration with.
Treason.
Torture's explicitly against both US and international law. And the wiretapping was a breach of the 4th amendment. Both were impeachable offenses. Though yes, they were probably less criminal than Nixon and Reagan. Certainly less so than Nixon. The media's decision that the country couldn't afford another failed Presidency so downplayed Iran-Contra was the moment they lost all credibility, as far as I'm concerned. Especially as they curiously reconsidered when a Democrat was in the White House. And then reconsidered again with a Republican back in.
Grumble.
As for this, I'm marginally in favor of intervention in Syria, so I would kind of have to be in favor in this hypothetical. 17 year old me was much dumber so believed Powell, I'm ashamed to say.
You spend about thirty minutes glancing about the internet, and you see how very easy it is build a case around whatever you decide you want to believe. It's demonstrable fact that there is conflicting evidence out there. On pretty much any given issue, there will be people asserting X and people asserting Not X. Sometimes, you're fortunate, and one of those groups are a bunch of crazy dudes wearing their underwear outside their clothing and talking about lizard people. Other times, the group is a bunch of crazy dudes who wear nice suits and have PhDs and respectable-sounding titles.
In those latter situations, the ones in which the crazy-wrong folks don't have the common grace to drool on themselves by way of self-identification, an ideologue can surround himself with some pretty convincing - to him - information. If you were inclined to think Saddam had nukes the whole time, it was pretty easy to build a case for that. And while it's an appealing fantasy to suppose that those in positions of power should have access to more accurate information, often it's just the case that they have access to more convincing bullshit from more capable charlatans.
I think it's tempting to suppose that we should've had more effective intelligence, or better separation of powers, or more suitable safeguards, and that the right set of laws might have averted the Iraq war. Really, I think we were just buggered the second we elected an ideologue to power - an ideologue who surrounded himself with other ideologues, in some kind of meaty, war-mongering stew. Once 9/11 happened, we were going to war. It might have happened even absent 9/11, but after the Towers fell it was inevitable. The motivation for war would be discovered, the proper evidence would be unearthed, and the reasoned voice of authority would be cast - the only questions were what that motivation would be, who would find the evidence, and who would play salesman. In this case, it was: nukes; aluminum tubes; and Colin Powell. It might also have been: lead pipe; conservatory; and Colonel Mustard. In the end, it didn't matter.
The lesson here is to keep ideologues out of power. Keep them out of your cabinet. Keep them out of your intelligence community. It doesn't much matter if they're right on any particular point or not. Because while they might be right 99% of the time, when that 1% rolls around, they will not back down. They will not be un-convinced. And if, by extreme misfortune, that ideologue is at all charismatic, you'll probably find yourself agreeing with him in the end.
And then your stew boils over and rains FAE bombs over Professor Plum. Or, you know, something.
I think the invasion would have been far more supportable on that front.
Frankly, and maybe this is cause I'm not American and so the idea that anyone actually bought this shit blew my mind at the time and still does, it seemed like the most obvious sign to this build-up being full of shit was how incoherent the justification were. It seemed like they were all over the place. Today it's 9/11 for some reason, tomorrow it's nuclear weapons, the day after it's chemical weapons, the next day it's 9/11 again, the day after it's human rights abuses, etc, etc, etc.
If they'd presented a clear case for stopping human rights abuse, I think they'd have persuaded many people they didn't. But at the same time, they'd have lost a ton of people for whom those kind of reasons are irrelevant. And also cause we were already doing the same kind of thing in another country and why stretch and do two at once?
And I think that ultimately the war would never have happened then because of that. They needed all those rotating reasons to drum up fear and anger to get the ball rolling on the Iraq War in the first place.
That said, even if they had managed to get an invasion going solely on humanitarian reasons, I think we'd still be condemning them for a combination of:
a) doing this in the middle of another war and thus with more limited resources
b) fucking it up anyway
Ultimately, for whatever reason the US went in, the real tragedy of the Iraq War was what the US did (or didn't do) after it had crushed Saddam. The lying to get the war started is just the shit icing on the turd cake.
Comparisons to Bosnia and Milosevic came up occasionally.
I didn't support a ground war in Iraq over human rights abuses because:
1) "And also cause we were already doing the same kind of thing in another country and why stretch and do two at once?" per shryke
and
2)
this pretty much sums up my feelings on Syria, BTW
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I suppose I should note that 17 year old me said they fought the right war for the wrong reasons, which made them somewhat unique in history. I mean, I was still probably wrong, but at least my reasoning was the humanitarian one.
Guess what was more important for the Young Republicans running the Coalition Provisional Authority during the Iraqi Reconstruction than getting power, food and water back to the Iraqis? Modernizing the Baghdad Stock Exchange.
What was funny to me was how fast this changed.
I was a freshman in high school when the invasion happened. I don't honestly recall much, except the vague 9/11 and "Saddam gassed his own people!" but mostly from news sources I heard the weapons of mass destruction bit.
Two years later I was taking an American government course at a community college and Iraq came up. The professor asked why we had invaded Iraq and the answers kind of dumbfounded me. "Human rights abuses," "to give the Iraqis freedom." I raised my hands and said "...to find weapons of mass destruction" and people laughed.
Not like a mean spirited laugh or anything, but... at that point it was clear there was nothing like that there. I felt really strange that no one else had mentioned that (we had gotten several different answers by the time I contributed)
I thought it was kind of sad that several years in, after that was shown to be what it was, people quickly jumped to the other justifications rather than admitting something was kinda fucked.
And this is, I think, ultimately the source of the tragedy of post-war Iraq. The one thing Bush et all valued more then anything was loyalty. Not skill, not competence, not intelligence, loyalty. Specifically, political and intellectual fidelity to the beliefs of the group.
And that's the most damning thing. That they didn't even, in the end, give a shit about Nation Building. They were more concerned, on whatever level and for whatever reason, with finding jobs for supporters. Or, at least, they believed for inexplicable reasons that political fidelity was so important it overshadowed everything else.
They even mention it in that article:
This isn't new for them either. GWB's admin drastically undermined the US government apparatus via the same bullshit. Stuffing the place full of incompetent loyalists.
Honestly, it's amazing how much it resembles the actions of a tin-pot dictator.
Man, it was confusing when you were paying attention.
This seemed like the Canadian experience on the whole few years:
/911 happens
America: "OMG, we've been attacked!"
World: "Holy shit! We're here to help."
America: "We gotta make them pay for this"
World: "Yeah, let's get those fuckers."
America: "There they are!"
World: "Let's do this!"
/Afghanistan Invasion
America: "Now we gotta rebuild this place."
World: "Let's do it"
GWB: "Let's get Saddam!"
America: "Yeah!"
World: ".... what?"
GWB: "He's a bad guy, let's do this!"
America: "YEAH!"
World: "Wait, hold on, what are you people talking about? Where are you going?"
/Iraq Invasion
America: "Yeah, we kicked there asses!"
World: "What the fuck just happened?!?!?"
We should keep our own influences in mind, Shryke: the Canadian government and media more or less swung the opposite way, and even in die-hard conservative rural Alberta where I grew up, home of The Grand Apologist, I was being told that a war in Iraq was foolish and the information was no good. All true, sure, but I had no means of verifying what was true at the time; like most people, I was awash in the spectacle.
The echoes of this are so strong in their response to Katrina, which is why I really don't know what to think as far as whether or not they cooked-up a plot to invade Iraq or whether it was all a catastrophe of incompetence created by the ass-slap pattycake attitude in Washington.