Ten years

Ten years ago today, the Invasion of Iraq began.

RIP to the soldiers and civilians killed and wounded as a result of a pointless, needless war that accomplished virtually nothing, at a tremendous cost to all involved.

But hey we won.... Something?

Don't forget Vietnam, Graneda, Panama, Afghanistan and Korea.

In fact, every military campaign since the end of WWII was a pointless, needless war that accomplished nothing and cost thousands of lives.

Hmmm, might almost call that a trend of some sort.

On the one hand a ton of terrorists flocked to Iraq to get slaughtered.

On the other hand $2.2 trillion to make Iraq slightly less of a corrupt shithole.


Yay? I dunno man....

Saddam Hussein is gone. Iraq is, if not a paragon of liberal democracy, at least not a bastion of complete despotism. Iraq's non-Sunni populations are no longer brutally repressed. Radical Islam lost on the battlefield and is more or less spent as a political force in the Muslim world.

It was a harder and more expensive war (actually, the war was a cake walk, it was the post-war insurgency that was costly) than predicted and some lessons from it were hard-learned, but it was ultimately a victory and I think, given time and perspective, will be seen as a major positive step in the evolution of the Middle East.

Yeah, becoming a superpower really didn't agree with America, did it?

It's been non-stop well...superdickery ever since Hiroshima.

I've heard the rape rooms (that were a big Bush propaganda hobby-horse) continue unabated.

Nothing changed.

Should we have gone in? No.

Did we accomplish all our goals? No.

Did we accomplish something? Yes.

Was it worth it? Only time can tell.

An act of immense criminality, based on a tissue of lies, leading to immense suffering and unfortunately much of what was said and done at the time has disappeared down the memory hole.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

I supported it when I believed in the WMDs.

My dumbass reasoning back then, was that I couldn't imagine Bush/Cheney/Rummy not being executed for treason for such a destructive lie, so their lives were on the line, so they couldn't possibly be lying.

I mean, if Clinton got impeached for a blowjob, surely causing a three trillion dollar war warrants death, right?
Right?

What a naive imbecile I was.
I'll carry that shame with me to my grave.

What would've been the upside of leaving Saddam Hussein in power another 10 years?

We were all so young and naive back then.

Thousands of US-Americans would still be alive, tens of thousands of US-Americans wouldn't have been wounded, trillions of dollars we don't have wouldn't have been wasted, and an asteroid would have landed on your head and killed you.

The mirror universe sounds pretty good.

President Bush never lied under oath.

and the CIA Director (a Clinton appointee) was telling President Bush that

(evidence of WMDs) was a "slam dunk".

Yeah, it's not like its all archived on some massive collection of redundant databases linked together, accessible around the world, and retrievable at a moments notice.

Yeah, a DECADE! Hard to believe.

Let's see, for $100 billion, we could have had a lunar base, $300 billion would have got us off the oil teat, and $70 billion would get us a transcontinental rail system.

Or, we could have blown the whole $2 trillion on upgrading infrastructure in the US.

HA! I remember it like it was yesterday. I was part of that initial first wave in goat-fuck. Back when it was safe, before IED's were thought of. Some of it was fun, some not, but I wouldn't want to do it again.

Man, this ten years has FLOWN by to me! Time really does go faster as you age.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030409190747/http://www.wordforge.net/

Wordforge was against the Iraq War back before it was popular.

Oh my goodness, some of the the Red Room thread titles back in 2003 were priceless:

Black Dove was as clueless as ever, and actormike was at least partially correct, though I wish I could view the threads.

https://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_last_letter_20130318/

And yet people have forgotten most of it. They're really good at that.

Good on you for this admission. We're all dumbasses from time to time yet so few of us realize it, let alone admit it.

Whatever you're drinking, you should share. That's some imaginative shit.

Saddam was never the problem and had nothing to do with 9-11.

The neo-cons peddled the notion that if we overthrew Saddam we could install American-style democracy and gain a foothold in the region, regardless of the differences in culture. It was a belief rooted in American ethnocentrism, racism & xenophobia. 10 years later, is Iraq an American-style democracy? Nope. Will it ever be? Nope. Is it still overrun with corruption? Yup. Have billions of dollars disappeared into the sand dunes never to be accounted for to the American public, which is ignorant and kept uninformed by a complicit media more interested in Justin Bieber than real news? Yup.

Freeing the populace from Saddam's brutality became the selling point for the war only when the WMD & nuclear weapon rationales fell apart. "Well, he was just a bad man and world is better off without him." Sorry, but there are a lot of bad men in the world doing bad things. Saving the non-Sunni folks wasn't a justification for war.

Tell that to the Taliban.

Radical Islam and Sharia law are still the order of the day in that part of the world.

Then again, I thought Iraq wasn't a war on Islam, the religion of peace. That's what we were repeatedly told. That it wasn't a war between Christian America vs. the Islamic World. Acutally, wasn't Saddam's Iraq one of the more secular countries? I mean, women could actually drive cars and have jobs there, right?

What did we win?

This is the question the Iraq apologists can never answer.

Where's our trophy? Americans understand trophies. You win the Super Bowl, you get a trophy. You win the World Series you get a trophy with all those little flag poles & flags. You win the NCAA basketball tourny, you get a trophy. So where's our trophy? A medal? Blue ribbon? Where were the ticker-tape parades thru downtown Baghdad celebrating our liberation of the Iraqi people, something we were assured they would be grateful for?

The evolution of the middle east? Into what? American-style democracy? Are we the Prometheus Engineers? Did we stick a Monolith down in the middle of downtown Baghdad? Now we're back to the neo-cons and their 21st century American imperialism and manifest destiny delusions.

I'm still of the opinion that the Saddam problem could have been solved with a single bullet. He, of course, was never the target. But those people in power back then fucked up everything, 'bringing democracy', finding WMD, creating a functioning state, even stealing Iraq's oil they couldn't get right.

You may congratulate GWB to a few hundred thousand dead and a few trillion fresh new debts in exchange for exactly zilch. This is his e-mail-address: gwb@ogwb.org

For one thing, Saddam was Iran's biggest enemy and rival in the region. And Iran has been the bigger thorn in our side for the last few decades. Remember when we actually used to be friendly with Saddam as he slaughtered Iranians during their war?

Removing Saddam has allowed Iran to dominate the region without opposition. Well there is still Saudi Arabia but they aren't really a bastion of democracy either.

Despite being a brutal dictator, Saddam was actually a secularist and kept radical Islam in check.

I'm not sorry he is dead, but was it a win for our long term strategic interests there? Only time will tell. For the money and lives spent, a pretty dubious outcome.

This much was obvious from day one. A complete waste of blood, treasure, prestige, and strategic strength. That there are people still desperately looking for a silver lining is quite revealing.