Guiscard wrote:Nephilim wrote:hmmm, gotta disagree w/ a lot of this. how close did US forces actually come to securing and stabilizing iraq? assuming the goal was to set up a stable gov't that would be friendly to large US military presence, a foothold in the region to exert dominance-----was this ever actually a possibility? it would seem the whole enterprise has been horrific miscalculation; how could anyone think it would work? now, if the goal was to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex and their cronies--vast success. but the tradeoff ain't so great there, so i'm thinking this wasn't the goal.
"bush" here of course stands for the policies of the entire administration, not just for the man himself. not just the figurehead, but what he represents. and that is, in the words of jon stewart, a catastrofuck.
The policies employed by the US in Iraq went pretty much 100% against the advice of most political commentators and advisers (the UK military top brass included). They were told NOT to disband the local structures of government, the ba'athist party included, as without such structures (with which Iraqi's were already familiar) they would basically have to build a nation from the ground up, and would fail especially considering the immense cultural gulf and lack of understanding of the Arab mentality.
They dismantled all state apparatus and replaced them, basically, with a foreign aggressor as the policeman rather than your Uncle Ali. I'm not saying that Iraq would have been an easy ride, not at all, but it could have been handled better and, potentially, they could be out by know.
No-one (sensible) would disagree with any of that, but there is another point, and it's relevant to what I've emboldened, and what you originally said about the Bush administration.
It's partly forgotten now, but the risk they were taking was bigger than perhaps you were saying. The actual strength of the US and British armies before the invasion were something like 150,000 and 10,000 respectively, whereas in the first Gulf War - when all they needed to do was invade Kuwait, and invading Iraq (or rather Baghdad) was never on the cards - they were more like 300,000 and 30,000. Although a lot of people were against it anyway, this was another issue at the time - why were the relative strengths so low? Iraq was weakened compared to 1991, but still, it was a much bigger prospect than just Kuwait, which is about the size of two big English counties. I remember the Guardian running articles saying how Donald Rumsfeld was pushing through a new theory of slimline armies who would do as much as was necessary with as few men as was needed.
As it happens, it was all nonsense, and as we all know, the military later said they needed three times the troops to pacify Iraq, and no "surge" will provide the necessary.
I bring this up, because it's been said that maybe that installing a US-friendly state was never the intention - maybe the intention was just to introduce chaos, although to what end exactly would just be speculation, I imagine.
