"To me that answer is obvious"

 

What sacrifices have you made to bring this about? Have you seen a marked improvement in standards of living in Iraq? In rights of individuals to worship and assemble as they choose without fear of persecution or violence? Have you thought for a moment that since you are MAKING the decisions you then have to take RESPONSIBILITY for the repercussions?

 

That you make that choice, to intervene (totally arbitrarily in this case) and then suggest that you are "giving people a chance" - that you have arbitrarily decided to cause potentially >0.6 million excess deaths often in the most brutal and terrifying circumstances, that you have done so failing to put in place any provision for post-war reconstruction or even to ensure that the people in charge had any elementary understanding of the facts - that came years of bloody carnage later. And, to follow your logic, why stop there? Where does that delineation get made, do you talk about a "brutal dictator" and include Putin in that gamut? Do you include the PRC? Where does it end? 

 

Also you mischaracterize the "type of person" that I am, I actually believe in intervention in exceptional circumstances - I believe Iraq was not one of these - the WMD's despite your "trucks heading to Syria" argument were NEVER a) a credible or immediate threat (or any more than Syria's, among others) b) never threatened against our interests and c) NEVER FOUND - we do know that Hussein previously used chem weapons against the Kurds, we could very likely have verified their destruction had the rush to war not been announced months previously - they were what is known as a PRETEXT - a means of justifying something that would otherwise be unpalatable with the fallback "rescuing from a dictator line" held in reserve for any questioning souls.

 

YES, you can invade anywhere you want, you can invade Iraq, Iran, until you are either bankrupt or you lose popular support to the degree that it becomes impossible - the problem is this, why then, do you go out of your way as a nation to sponsor and protect a select group of REPULSIVE (ad hominem quite justified) Saudi princes who have the mindset of dark-ages despots - how is their human rights record? How will you excuse their behaviour? How will you justify the fact that they have bought a level of access in the US that basically renders them invulnerable?  Or is it OK in your book to be hypocritical in how you apply your judgements as to which repressive murderous dictators are friends and which you kill? 

 

Moreso, is it acceptable that these judgements are not based on any impartial threat analysis or intelligence, but by a president who then exerted enough influence over the mainstream media that the entire affair was practically celebrated in the streets until the reality hit home? So let's recap - you have a nation that is held together by duct-tape (Iraq) where the US is near-universally hated and will be for the foreseeable future, where a civil-war a-la-Syria is now more likely than ever, where virtually all oil production is going to nations that you regard as hostile to your interests, you have achieved this at a cost of just under 40k casualties and 1.2 - 2tn dollars - so let's say you REALLY believe you have saved a million lives (absolute RUBBISH but anyway) each life you saved therefore came at a cost of 1.2 MILLION USD - is that value for money in your eyes? when in most of the underdeveloped regions of the world a couple of dollars per child is all that's needed to ward off infection (antibiotics) or prevent future infection (vaccination) and if you had a MILLION dollars to spend you'd be looking to prevent at least a few hundred premature deaths. 

  

If you want to take ownership and credit then allow people the ability to scrutinize your decision making and your logic - it would be QUITE possible under the circumstances to impartially come to the conclusion that the entire thing achieved virtually fucking nothing.

 

R 

Actually I apologize for my tone - what makes me angry is not your arguments (I used to provide the same sort of arguments) but rather that the entire thing was based on lies that I, at the time, believed. I had the simplistic notion that even if there were no WMD's it wouldn't matter as "we were removing a brutal dictator" (except that we also armed him and used to call him an ally but that's another story) - it wasn't until a while after the invasion that I began to realize that what this opened the door to was really intervention, on our terms, anywhere, for any reason -even mere whim; that we could choose wars on our terms, lose them or even destroy the entire country in the process and then have no one, not one single solitary person held accountable for that. In other words, a completely unregulated series of military interventions using any pretext that wouldn't sound stupid coming from a Fox News anchor. 

 

If there is a humanitarian benefit to Iraq - which I absolutely doubt there is if you actually look at birth and death rates overall (but it's worth noting that one thing the coalition never bothered to do is actually record any of this data) it is purely incidental - the logic that went into the invasion was the sort you'd expect from a pre-teen - simplistic right/wrong good/evil type stuff - if you ask what sort of president would be stupid enough to genuinely see things in these terms, GWB was exactly that man - not a bad guy but someone who had simplistic reasoning (to put it mildly) the sort of man who understood why he would kiss Saudi Ass - 'that is where the oil comes from' for example and still be able to call Saddam Hussein an immediate threat to the US with a straight face. 

 

R 

Just a couple things.  

 

First, as for your figures to be evaluated:  in 2012, the CBO put the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan combined up to that point at $1.4 trillion.  A general online search for the cost of the Iraq war alone will yield endless anti-war sites claiming fanciful numbers that will use double-counting, combined costs of all military operations, and--quite often--a study by Brown University that assumes the war would last until 2017 and incur casualties that match that of the height of the combat.  Being politically motivated, these figures combine combat and non-combat incurred casualties (that would most likely have happened anyway in that  training a combat-ready force is a dangerous endeavor), and make worst-case assumptions at every turn.  What's the closest thing to the truth?  Well, I would stick with a bi-partisan report, hence the CBO.  As far as a CBO number on the Iraq war alone, from what I hear, that is very complicated.  It requires a separation of overlapping costs that I'm not sure the CBO has come up with.  If you are interested in further information, I suggest you do some searching yourself.

 

In your response to point #5, I'm not sure you understood what I said about the cost of human lives.  What I said was that the cost for the ENTIRE Iraq war in Iraqi lives was close to the cost of one single year of lives lost during the ten years of Sadaam's reign between the first and second Iraq wars.   This figure is speculative (and pardon me for using "weasel words"), but at least provides some reference for putting the Iraq war's cost into perspective.  

 

Again, as for the cost of lives, one could argue that without the intervention the Sunnis and Shiites would never go at each other and would be forever corralled in Sadaam's clutch, but such a claim is unreasonable.  In all likelihood, the two sides would eventually have at with the old regime eventually losing its grip.

 

The fact that you fail to put the brutality of Sadaam's regime into perspective with what happened during the war is probably due to the media's almost complete absence of coverage of Sadaams terror.  The stories are horrific.  Look into them sometime.  Once the anti-American media started actually reporting on the war, their goal was to rally the masses against the war.  Hence the daily dosage of graphic gore and stories of hopelessness with the bottom line being endless bloodshed culminating in an inevitable catastrophic ending.  The moment they stopped reporting?  "Coincidentally" just at the time the surge began working.  When asked why they had so greatly reduced their coverage, I believe it was the NY Times that said, "people are tired of reading about the war."

 

Now I'm sorry you were forced in the morning to read about what was happening with your tea and scone, but the fact of the matter is that far worse happened before. 

You continue with asking me if I have considered taking responsibility for the repercussions of my decisions.  The answer is, yes.  In fact, in case you missed it, that is the sum total of what we have been discussing.  The more pertinent question would be, have you taken responsibility for the potential repercussions of your decisions?  So far I haven't heard a single peep from you about what would have happened if Sadaam was never confronted and went on to complete the nuclear program--and in very close relation--what WILL happen if Iran is allowed to complete its own program.  

 

Now before you go off on the usual gripe that Sadaam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, let me ask you the following:  we know he had chemical weapons; he used them on his own people.  And we know he was attempting to develop the nuclear bomb.  Just ask the Israelis, who had to bomb his reactor the first time around.  And the yellow cake didn't just grow out of that hole it was buried in.  We know between the wars that he was continuing to procure materials for building the bomb.  From what I heard, prior to the war it wasn't just the CIA who thought Iraq was developing the bomb.  It was every nation's intelligence agency that had anyone working on it.  The question isn't whether he had a nuclear program but WHEN he dismantle it.  Was it years before the invasion or the day before?  Maybe you could give me a date.  The fact is, we still have no idea.  Why?  He never provided any evidence that the program was fully dismantled.  So do we trust our local dictator?  Is that the lesson you learned from this?

 

Let's look at what a real disclosure of weapons dismantlement looks like.  When South Africa took apart their nuclear program, they invited in the UN to conduct as much investigating as it pleased.  If provided documentation, locations of all sites of equipment and material disposal and full access to all scientists and engineers involved.  That has credibility.  Not some shifty dictator offering his word while he twirls his mustache and plays hide the sausage for ten years.  Surely you can agree with me on that much.

 

Of course this is usually when the radicalized say, "Yes, but the CIA knew!  The CIA knows EVERYTHING!"  Which is as sure to switch over to an assessment of the CIA as band of bungling idiots at the convenience of these very same accusers.   

 

So, bottom line: are you ready to take responsibility for your decision not to militarily intervene in Iran today?  Who knows?  Maybe they truely intend to use their technology for peaceful purposes.  But if you're wrong, you have to take responsibility for the deaths of perhaps thousands? millions? of people--and quite possibly American people--and stand up an look into the eyes of these very same people tell them why you decided what you did.  THAT is reality.  (Cont.)

Not standing on the sidelines second guessing while counting up the costs of what was a VERY hard decision.  That, frankly, is for small people and not an option for a real decision-maker operating in a real world with real potential outcomes.

 

You talk about the arbitrariness of deciding on which wars to enter into.  Well, they're only arbitrary if you have no capacity to weigh and balance what is most important from what isn't.  Again, in the real world it is not a single thing that drives people into choosing war.  It is a combination of things.  You could say, "why not intervene in Somalia, Syria or North Korea or anywhere else?"  Somalia has little strategic interest.  Enough to fly a few drones over but not enough for a full-scale invasion.  Syria?  There is no compelling evidence that I have seen that they are on the cusp of developing a nuclear weapon.  North Korea?  Too late.  They already have one.   

 

As for Iraq:

 

1.  Was it a direct threat to us and its neighbors?  Iraq had already attacked two of its neighbors causing over a million deaths during the wars alone.  It had developed and--in all likelihood--was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction.  Sadaam Hussein said as much in his last interview, admitting that once the pressure was off, he had intended to restart the program.

2.  Was it in a strategic location?  Check.

3.  Was it morally justifiable?  Check.  And for reasons listed.

4.   Was there casus bellum?  Iraq defied the peace treaty of the Persian Gulf War by firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.  Sadaam Hussein probably attempted the assassination of our president.  We know from documents discovered that he was involved in financing terrorist attacks against western countries.  We again know from documents that he at the very least had held talks with representatives of al Qaida.  (Though the outcome of the talks is unknown.)  

Furthermore, where do you get 600,000 potential deaths from?  That came from out of nowhere.  

 

We DO know that Sadaam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people.  Besides countless witnesses, I recall western reporters talking about their personal encounters with Kurd villages that had been bombed and how you could tell by the way the villagers had died, the specific chemical used.  

 

As far as us arming a dictator we later overthrew, what else is new?  The British give the Soviets jet engine technology because, for a brief moment after WWII, they considered them an ally.  The list includes just about every country in every period of time who could be accused of the same.   In fact, everyone is an ally until they're not.   Frankly, a ridiculous argument.

 

You conclude with a condemnation of George W. Bush as being "pre-teen" in his thinking and not focusing on your more sophisticated nuance of the "subtleties" of a complicated world.  My God!  We must be working on completely different definitions of the term "weasel words."  And then--in the same paragraph, no less--you go on to declare the Iraq war as nothing more than a result of "kissing ass" in relation to the Saudis.  (Cont.)

 

Finally--and if you're interested--I will tell you what I think about all this. And it might surprise you.

 

Option 2.  Here's the one that would derive the most personal satisfaction, though I doubt I could get many to go along with it.  Stop making us a target, declare everyone our friend, pull back our forces to our own boarders and sit back and watch the bastards slit each other's throats.  The more we do, the more we are hated.  Let the world succumb to its natural state before we got involved: evolved from the darkest corners of the human condition.  It would be nothing short of delicious to watch them tear each other to shreds while begging us for help.

 

What we DO NOT want to do is to pretend we are a superpower and then act like a paper tiger while maintain our heads on the chopping block. That would be humiliating and unacceptable. Get out now--hopefully after we've dismantled Iran's nuclear program--and then declare that from here on out, its no longer our business or our responsibility. We declare victory, remove ourselves while things are as peaceful as could be hoped for and that what follows is now up to everyone else.

 

We walk away smelling relative decent while clearly separating ourselves from the hell to come.  Want a prescription for being looked at as "the good guys" in the history books?  That's how.  

 

And what happens if things keep going on like while we were in charge--or even better?  Of course, we win again because we don't have to pay the price for benefiting from a relatively stable world.

And thank God I decided to answer "just a COUPLE things."  ;-)

 

BTW.  This comments programs is the most ungainly app I have ever used.  No cut and paste?  All replies--regardless of where you place them being stuck on the end?  Having to mess with conversion to HTML, then back to Normal, then having to remove code?   Is this because I have a Mac or do others have the same problem?  

First of all, I believe the WMD question was a pretext for removing Saddam which was likely the real reason for the war. I say this because I remember Bill Clinton talking about how it was the stated goal of the US to remove Saddam from power(this was during his administration no less). But the WMD pretext was valid.

 

Now, before the invasion in 2003, I read in the newspaper(AP or Rueters sourced-don't remember) that a UN weapons inspector had complained that there were 70,000 tons of bio/chem weapons unaccounted for. This was never reported again. During the war, US troops recovered (as reported by mainstream media) a small amount, by volume, of sarin gas. However it was enough to kill 100,000 people. Somehow 100,000 possible victims wasn't enough to qualify for the media's definition of "mass destruction". It wasn't reported further. I can't remember the source on this last part and I'll take it with a grain of salt, but it was reported GWB didn't announce discoveries of WMD's so more baddies wouldn't flood into Iraq looking for them. Who knows. 

 

I've included an interesting link from PBS' Frontline discussing Saddam's WMD's. You'll note there was a lot unaccounted for, including 1.5 tons of VX. 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/etc/arsenal.html