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Author Topic: The Iraq war: a Hatrack retrospective
Rakeesh
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*snort* They sure as hell didn't want what they had, and Saddam gave us the right (in my opinion) to wreak some serious changes there. A right that we squandered terribly, of course.

What makes you think Iraqis didn't want a regime change? And, by the way, we weren't planning to remake it in our image-that was never going to happen even if the negligent fantasies of the Bush Administration panned out as 'planned'. Even a government loosely modeled after ours would only be in 'our image' until Iraqis themselves started actually using it, given the radical social, religious, and politicial differences between us.

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kmbboots
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Who didn't want what they had? How did you know that? We have seen what Arab countries can do when they don't like their leadership. Were Iraqis trying to overthrow Saddam themselves? And even if they didn't want what they had, who says they wanted what we had? And at such a huge cost to them? How did one person give us the right to "wreak" anything on a whole country?
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Rakeesh
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Wait a second. I didn't expect to hear this argument in this thread: that the Iraqis were content with what they had. Are you nuts, kmbboots? The only sentences in that post that weren't reprehensible or absurd were the last two.

Do you really think that because the Arab Spring happened just this past year, that the people throughout the reason were content with their leadership? If you've actually thought that through, it is an awful belief. People who are content with their governments don't have those same governments brutally oppressing and killing them and prohibiting free speech-and those governments aren't doing all those things before they have started to do anything unusual. Do you see what I mean? Throughout the region, not excepting Iraq, governments would prohibit free speech, prohibit free elections, prohibit assembly, and suppress with violence and torture and murder anyone who disputed that, and it was so commonplace that the world largely didn't think anything of it-not excluding the UN and yes, the anti-war movement-until they really ratcheted up the brutality.

So that's how I know they didn't like their leadership, kmbboots. Because their leadership would kill them if they complained too often, not uncommonly after raping their wives and killing their sons. Were the Iraqis trying to overthrow Saddam themselves? Is that a serious question? Y'know, as outraged and baffled as you and some others are at me for the stance I'm taking here, I feel at least as strongly about the questions you've just asked.

You can justly and ethically claim that they might not have, or definitely didn't, want Saddam gone at such a cost. Goodness knows there is plenty of case to be made for that! But to suggest they didn't really want Saddam gone, or to ask, "How did we know?" is just awful. Guess we couldn't really say, for example, that Russians were unhappy with Soviet leadership. All those people in Rwanda, well how do we know they were unhappy with their government? Man, those ladies getting stoned to death in Iran, well they don't actually want a different government do they? Shame on you for asking such 'questions'.

Also strange is the idea that the Arab Spring can be completely disconnected from the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Please note that I'm not saying it can be laid at our feet-that's silly. But the notion that neighboring Arabs just didn't notice, "Hey, they're actually approaching real elections going on over there, and the strongman dictator is dead and gone," is also baffling.

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Blayne Bradley
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Actually I know a few people who've been to Iraq during Saddam's regime, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as people believe, it wasn't totalitarian. Also there is very little to suggest that Arab Spring is connected to Iraq as I don't think the people in those countries are particularly appreciative of US invading Iraq in the first place.

quote:

*snort* They sure as hell didn't want what they had, and Saddam gave us the right (in my opinion) to wreak some serious changes there.

They did no such thing, we've been over this.

quote:

Do you really think that because the Arab Spring happened just this past year, that the people throughout the reason were content with their leadership? If you've actually thought that through, it is an awful belief. People who are content with their governments don't have those same governments brutally oppressing and killing them and prohibiting free speech-and those governments aren't doing all those things before they have started to do anything unusual. Do you see what I mean? Throughout the region, not excepting Iraq, governments would prohibit free speech, prohibit free elections, prohibit assembly, and suppress with violence and torture and murder anyone who disputed that, and it was so commonplace that the world largely didn't think anything of it-not excluding the UN and yes, the anti-war movement-until they really ratcheted up the brutality.

Being a dictatorship or an unpleasant place to live isn't a valid reason for regime change, sovereignty is the highest law of the world.

quote:

So that's how I know they didn't like their leadership, kmbboots. Because their leadership would kill them if they complained too often, not uncommonly after raping their wives and killing their sons. Were the Iraqis trying to overthrow Saddam themselves? Is that a serious question? Y'know, as outraged and baffled as you and some others are at me for the stance I'm taking here, I feel at least as strongly about the questions you've just asked.

Strange how this didn't stop things in Egypt, Libya or Tunisia.
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kmbboots
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Some - perhaps even most - Iraqis may have been unhappy with Saddam. Some, certainly the Ba'athists were not so unhappy. The Suuni minority had it not so bad. The oppressed Shi'a majority was pretty unhappy, but they tend to want to live in a theocracy. How are women going to fare under them? They had it better, as a group under Saddam then they would in the kind of Iraq most Shi'a want. And Christians? There may not be a Christian population in Iraq soon because of the persecutions we let loose in Iraq.

It is so much more complicated than this one man was oppressing a whole country who would all be better off is we just got rid of him. If that had been the case, we could have vanished as soon as Saddam was captured and we would have been greeted as liberators as Rumsfeld promised. As that didn't happen, I do think that asking how we know what "Iraqis wanted" is perfectly legitimate and hardly rates a "snort".

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Mucus
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Rakeesh: Usually, in the coverage of protesters from Egypt, the protesters if they have anything to say about the US, wouldn't be "thank goodness, the Americans brought democracy to Iraq, we should try that," but rather "shame on the US for propping up Hosni Mubarak to help Israel."

The Arab Spring may very well have happened earlier if the US was less enthusiastic about demonstrating how democracies can still back dictators, torture, hire mercenaries, etc.

I also think you dismiss too quickly the valid question as to how representative dissidents are. That question is not invalidated by the fact that there are some dissidents that are treated very poorly. It may be the case that the majority did back Saddam, it may be the case that the majority did not. But that's a rather statistics-based question that isn't dealt with too well by looking at a few chosen individuals. I don't think the majority of Americans would be particularly happy if a foreign power blew up Obama based on the testimony of Americans that he has had tortured and ordered the targeted killings of for example. I'm not saying that the proportions of happy/unhappy are similar, just pointing out that the methodology here is pretty flawed as a way of judging the sentiment of an entire population.

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Rakeesh
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So, wait, let me see if I'm understanding this-evidence that Saddam's regime wasn't so bad is that not enough people spoke up? Oh, God.

And Blayne, your thoughts on oppressive, authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes are well known around these parts. You've got a pretty bankrupt position on this, and the fact that you feel so sure about it makes you, on these topics anyway, that much more laughable.

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
So, wait, let me see if I'm understanding this-evidence that Saddam's regime wasn't so bad is that not enough people spoke up?

Usually evidence works the other way.
The default position is, "we don't know" and we need evidence before we can say that something is regarded poorly or not poorly. Polling dissidents is better than nothing, but as a way to get an idea about how a population in general feels is very flawed.

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Rakeesh
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I agree with your default position. After considering that position, you have to ask, "How can I find out?" and if you *can't* because dissent is illegal from the start, and those who do dissent are often jailed, tortured, disappeared, or murdered...the question answers itself. Ugh.
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Destineer
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quote:
After considering that position, you have to ask, "How can I find out?" and if you *can't* because dissent is illegal from the start, and those who do dissent are often jailed, tortured, disappeared, or murdered...the question answers itself.
Not so. There are a lot of countries meeting your description where the human rights situation isn't anywhere near bad enough to justify military intervention. China and Russia (supposing for argument's sake that their militaries weren't strong enough to resist a US invasion), Saudi Arabia and Vietnam are all examples.
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Mucus
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Rakeesh: Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be "ugh." Sometimes recognising the limits of knowledge and more importantly, what knowledge may be unreliable can be pretty useful.

For example, if some more thought was put into why Curveball might have motives for lying for example
quote:
As Curveball watched Powell make the US case to invade Iraq, he was hiding an admission that he has not made until now: that nearly every word he had told his interrogators from Germany's secret service, the BND, was a lie.

Everything he had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme was a flight of fantasy - one that, he now claims was aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator. Janabi, a chemical engineering graduate who had worked in the Iraqi industry, says he looked on in shock as Powell's presentation revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed the lot.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/curveball-iraqi-fantasist-cia-saddam
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kmbboots
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
So, wait, let me see if I'm understanding this-evidence that Saddam's regime wasn't so bad is that not enough people spoke up? Oh, God.

I'm pretty sure that no one is saying that.
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kmbboots
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quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
Rakeesh: Usually, in the coverage of protesters from Egypt, the protesters if they have anything to say about the US, wouldn't be "thank goodness, the Americans brought democracy to Iraq, we should try that," but rather "shame on the US for propping up Hosni Mubarak to help Israel."

The Arab Spring may very well have happened earlier if the US was less enthusiastic about demonstrating how democracies can still back dictators, torture, hire mercenaries, etc.

You mean like we backed Saddam in the first place? And the Shah of Iran - we are still fighting backlash from that.
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
And Blayne, your thoughts on oppressive, authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes are well known around these parts. You've got a pretty bankrupt position on this, and the fact that you feel so sure about it makes you, on these topics anyway, that much more laughable.

Hey look, another fallacy, three; ad hominem, Tu quoque and strawman since you are not substantiating what my "position" is "around these parts" it's an appeal to a generalization in which it ignores relevance to the topic at hand.

Because suppose worst case I have some reputation that says I support dictatorships, how does that weigh in at all on the current argument? How does it change the validity of my argument?

So you could continue your onerous deflection tactics or you could answer the question, or concede.

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BlackBlade
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Blayne:
quote:
Because suppose worst case I have some reputation that says I support dictatorships, how does that weigh in at all on the current argument? How does it change the validity of my argument?
If I support ice cream consumption is it reasonable to assume that if two posters here got into an argument about whether ice cream should be offered in school cafeterias as a "dairy product" as part of a government regulation on what students eat, that I would probably have a bias in the affirmative?
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Rakeesh
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It's funny how people are saying to me, "We didn't say that!" and then pointing out how silly it is to link the Arab Spring and the Iraq War, given what I *actually said* about any connection between the two.
-----

Destineer,

I agree. Are people just not hearing me when I say, repeatedly, that the human rights situation alone isn't enough?

Russia and China are off the table from the get go in any event, human rights situation or not, because of the deterrence they have, though it never ceases to be funny to me when people bring them, and NK, up when they start talking about, "But what about all these others..."

------

Kmbboots, that may not be what you wish to say, but it is most definitely what you're saying. You even asked how we would know they didn't want Saddam? You even said, and here's a delightful example of anti-war sentiment taken to an awful extreme, "...the Shia majority were 'pretty unhappy'."

This is just nuts, and it's despicable reasoning. If someone said to you, "Stage a protest and you'll be disappeared, where rape, torture, and murder is not unlikely," would you expect people to wait to hear from you specifically, "Here's a lengthy speech about why I dislike the Saddam government..." or would you expect people to think, "Hmm. Maybe she's unhappy because when she tries to say she's unhappy, she vanishes."

It's fascinating how the anti-war movement, or at least many members, cannot content themselves with saying, "The war is wrong. It's awful, criminal in fact. We shouldn't have done it." That's a principled, reasoned stance and I can and do totally respect it. But like any other polarizing issue, talk about it long enough, and the opposition to one side leads to greater permissiveness to the other side.

Yeah, maybe life under Saddam wasn't as bad as all that, kmbboots. However can we know, anyway? You know, they might not even be very unhappy with it. And yet, from your side of things will often come the sly or overt insinuations of racism via war on brown people-those very same people you're suggesting might actually regard a brutal dictatorship as acceptable, rather than something to be tolerated over a painful, violent death. But, hey, can't get a Gallup poll so we don't *know*.

Another fascinating thing: "We really, really need to listen to the UN!" I wonder, oh I wonder, what they had to say about Iraq's human rights situation prior to the invasion. That's what I'm talking about when I point out the flaws of the UN. Not to say we should never listen, or abandon it, but to point out, hey, y'all aint such hot stuff on listening to it either.

Here's how you know, it's very easy. You know when the people with the guns and money make sure you can't say you *are* unhappy if you are unhappy. You know then because if there weren't a whole lot of people really unhappy, they wouldn't have to make the possible penalty so awful! If it wasn't a huge thing, the penalty for dissent would've been hard labor or major fines or surrendering property or something.

That, Mucus, is why it has to be 'ugh'. You can safely say the knowledge is one thing when one party has and acts on a vested interest in making sure you don't hear about it.

---
Hey Blayne, could you keep doing that 'substantiate or concede' thing in bold, please? I'm running a little wager as to how many times you'll say it, and that makes it easier to spot.

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Samprimary
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quote:
Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
Do you ever get tired of talking? You're the one who said "shut up" it's not even your thread nor have you participated in it, drive by posting a newspaper article or similar and otherwise not sticking around is not contributing.

If you have a problem discuss it with a moderator.

The reason why you end up just having to get told to shut up is because you act like this and make claims like this which have absolutely nothing to do with other people's actual "contribution" or lack of thereof.

The claim that I have not participated in this thread is you being completely bankrupt. This post ups the ante on your last one, and is the largest and most flagrant deflection by you yet.

So, again. Thanks for effectively giving up the ghost on this one, and leaving only your frustration and your half-hearted, hypocritical insults in its place, like "do you ever get tired of talking?" If you'd like to round up a moderator to 'arbitrate' this, since you seem intent on hiding behind that excuse, go right ahead.

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
If it wasn't a huge thing, the penalty for dissent would've been hard labor or major fines or surrendering property or something.

I'm glad we've moved on from polling dissidents.

But again, this is poor logic. Measuring the prevalence of a behaviour by how badly it is punished is very prone to error. For example, Canada doesn't have the death penalty for murder but Japan does. Does that mean that Japan has a higher homicide rate? Well, no. It's actually half the Canadian rate.

quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
... "We really, really need to listen to the UN!" I wonder, oh I wonder, what they had to say about Iraq's human rights situation prior to the invasion.

Well, what did they say?

If its helpful, why not just quote it rather than hinge your arguments on these strange pieces of reasoning? As I said a couple of posts back, I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that the majority of Iraqis were unhappy. I do have a problem with the arguments that you've presented.

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kmbboots
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Rakeesh, not everyone in Iraq was of one mind about Saddam Hussein or necessarily better off with the government they have now. Even Saddam couldn't torture everyone all by himself. You can't paint them all with the same brush. If you could, the country wouldn't have been (and remain) in such turmoil once he was gone. Nor does being miserable under Saddam - and nowhere have I suggest that many if not most were miserable - mean that they want a western style democracy or that we haven't just traded who was being oppressed. If that is what they wanted, why did they keep shooting at us? If everyone was so delighted to be freed from an evil dictator (and he was evil) why did they keep fighting us?

And we chose for them. If they did regard a brutal dictatorship as something to be tolerated over a painful, violent death, well we gave hundreds of thousands of them a violent painful death.

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Rakeesh
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You're changing the subject (and have, consistently) to 'has the invasion turned out well'. Which is weird because I have said before this thread that it hasn't, to put it lightly. Just now you said-I can keep quoting you, if you like-that it was 'pretty bad' for the majority, but we don't really know for sure that it was all *that* bad, because they would've rebelled.

As though there wasnt a government way of dealing with that. As though your reasoning on this doesn't lead directly to qualifying all sorts of awful regimes as 'pretty nad'. Because they haven't had a successful revolt. It's not that bad until they overthrow it. But please, let's talk some more about concern for Iraqis, shall we?

----

Mucus, the comparison doesn't follow. What sorts of things does Japan have a death penalty for (I didn't know they did). Is speech one of them?

http://www.un.org/terrorism/pdfs/2/G0215272.pdf page 80. I'll be deeply surprised if anything there is much in the way of news. Took about fifteen seconds to find, and nothing surprised me, and I'm extremely skeptical if it surprises you or kmbboots or even Blayne, whose tolerance of murderous tyrannies is shall we say high when they have the right enemies.

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
Mucus, the comparison doesn't follow.

I think you're going to have to explain why. It seems to me you're asserting that you can measure the rate of dissent in Iraq by how harshly it was punished. It stands to reason that if that were true, one should be able to measure other things the same way.

quote:
What sorts of things does Japan have a death penalty for
As I said above, a homicide rate refers to murder.

quote:
http://www.un.org/terrorism/pdfs/2/G0215272.pdf page 80.
That doesn't seem to say anything about what we're discussing though, which is how much of the Iraqis population was unhappy or how much of the Iraqis population was willing to undergo invasion in order to stop it.

quote:
I'm extremely skeptical if it surprises you or kmbboots ... whose tolerance of murderous tyrannies is shall we say high
That seems pretty rude.

We're currently discussing the failure of the war in Iraq, a war which was instigated in large part by poor intelligence gathering and a total failure to properly judge the Iraq population ("we'll be greeted as liberators" and all that). In that context it seems critical to properly assess the quality of intelligence and the mood of the Iraqi population rather than hand-wave it like you seem to be doing.

Perhaps for old times sake, you're enjoying a "if you're not with us, you're against us" Bush-style dig, implying that people that disagree with you must be friendly to the enemy. But I would remind you, that's a big part of what got you/America in this mess in the first place.

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Rakeesh
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No, I'm not discussing the failure of the war in Iraq. I'm not sure how that could be made more clear, given how many times I've acknowledged it. Around here, for years, and in this thread.

As for the comparison, it doesn't stand to reason if dissent against the government and homicide are radically different issues. You *asked* for an example of how awful the human rights situation was in Iraq, and I gave you one, from a source we're supposed to listen to. Strangely the subject has changed.

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Dan_Frank
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quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
I'm extremely skeptical if it surprises you or kmbboots ... whose tolerance of murderous tyrannies is shall we say high
That seems pretty rude.

We're currently discussing the failure of the war in Iraq, a war which was instigated in large part by poor intelligence gathering and a total failure to properly judge the Iraq population ("we'll be greeted as liberators" and all that). In that context it seems critical to properly assess the quality of intelligence and the mood of the Iraqi population rather than hand-wave it like you seem to be doing.

Perhaps for old times sake, you're enjoying a "if you're not with us, you're against us" Bush-style dig, implying that people that disagree with you must be friendly to the enemy. But I would remind you, that's a big part of what got you/America in this mess in the first place.

That is a priceless hack job you did on that quote. Almost as good as a movie trailer quoting a negative review and changing "Hillariously bad and an action-packed, overproduced mess" into "Hilariously... action-packed!"

The part you excised was where he brought up Blayne, and the part about tolerance for murderous tyrannies was obviously directed solely at Blayne and a reference to his slavish devotion to China.

I really hope you're just really, really oblivious, and that you didn't intentionally warp what he said to make him seem more insulting.

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Rakeesh
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I've largely accepted that Blayne's style of conversation here is generally OK because, as someone said, "He's rude, but he's right."
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Samprimary
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We better make note of that in the TOS then; I'm indemnified and justified forever no matter how I act! Thanks, whoever said that!
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Rakeesh
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I think you have to be discussing certain topics, where disagreement in and of itself puts you past 'man, that's some out-there politics' and into beyond the pale territory.
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Samprimary
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As fun as it is to joke about, this is territory that demolishes threads. Whoever said that was pretty much totally wrong!
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Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
Well initially I just took it as a given, really, going hand in hand not just with actual sane regime change, but dovetailing with the idea that we would actually do things long-term in nations where terrorists would be fostered. Thematically it seemed to fit. I frankly just believed they were campaigning when they said that it would only be a few weeks. When they kept talking like that as the months began to stack up, and almost at once after the invasion when it became clear they really didn't have much in the way of planning ready for things that were realistically predictable, then I was deeply surprised and worried that maybe that nonsense wasn't just pandering to the economy-focused American politicial scene.

Huh, an interesting but not totally unrealistic expectation on your part. I assumed the exact opposite from the beginning. I think one of two things: 1. They had no idea what they were doing from the start, and honestly thought things were going to be a lot easier, and when they didn't turn out that way, they had no backup plan. 2. They knew exactly what they were doing, knew it wasn't going to be as easy as they proposed, and expected it to fall apart in an attempt to sucker the country into a longer protracted war.

I lean towards one, because much as I dislike the Bush Administration, I still find it hard to assign that much incompetence and that much...I don't know what the word is, inhumanity, to them, to believe that they would want to cause that much destruction or be okay with it, just for political purposes. Maybe it's naive on my part, but I'd need a lot more evidence to do it.

On the other hand, there's evidence from the 90s of people like Cheney saying that any attack on Iraq would force us into a decade-long quagmire, so why they felt they'd be able to slip in, install a puppet and get out is beyond me, but that's clearly what they were going with, and they clearly didn't do their homework on it.

So I don't really know what to think. I don't blame you for assuming a sort of underhanded political maneuver to basically sucker the public into a war that they had planned out ahead of time. Who wants to assume that they were really that incompetent? But after Vietnam, giving the government the benefit of the doubt is a bigger leap of faith in my estimation. Especially given all the doubletalk they were doing before the actual invasion commenced.

Perhaps our different opinions come from some underlying difference in trust levels of the Bush Administration. I was okay with the pressure Bush was putting on Saddam to force inspectors into the country, and the threat of force was successful in giving inspectors much broader access to sites than they'd had before. I think more work and more pressure would have yielded better results, and a smarter invasion might have as well. But there was no way we were ever going to do this right. Even today we're forcing the Kurds to be part of Iraq when they basically have an autonomous state in everything but name. And we'll do nothing to back them up when they start fighting with the Iraqi government over oil profits as western companies begin to drill for oil in massive, massive finds in Kurdish territory in the north. Even now our legacy in that region inspires little to be proud of. If we're really installing democracy in the region, I think we should have let go of our inner imperialist cartographer and let them have the power of self-determination for the first time in centuries.

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Blayne Bradley
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quote:
Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
I'm extremely skeptical if it surprises you or kmbboots ... whose tolerance of murderous tyrannies is shall we say high
That seems pretty rude.

We're currently discussing the failure of the war in Iraq, a war which was instigated in large part by poor intelligence gathering and a total failure to properly judge the Iraq population ("we'll be greeted as liberators" and all that). In that context it seems critical to properly assess the quality of intelligence and the mood of the Iraqi population rather than hand-wave it like you seem to be doing.

Perhaps for old times sake, you're enjoying a "if you're not with us, you're against us" Bush-style dig, implying that people that disagree with you must be friendly to the enemy. But I would remind you, that's a big part of what got you/America in this mess in the first place.

That is a priceless hack job you did on that quote. Almost as good as a movie trailer quoting a negative review and changing "Hillariously bad and an action-packed, overproduced mess" into "Hilariously... action-packed!"

The part you excised was where he brought up Blayne, and the part about tolerance for murderous tyrannies was obviously directed solely at Blayne and a reference to his slavish devotion to China.

I really hope you're just really, really oblivious, and that you didn't intentionally warp what he said to make him seem more insulting.

Why do you feel it is should be accepted or relevant to the conversation at large? It is an ad hominem/poisoning the well that side steps and deflects the burden of actually have to discuss the topic at hand.
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kmbboots
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
As fun as it is to joke about, this is territory that demolishes threads. Whoever said that was pretty much totally wrong!

And not at all a distortion of what I actually wrote. [Roll Eyes]
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Parkour
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Well, what you wrote didn't really answer my question at all, either.
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Rakeesh
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You were quoted, kmbboots, and you can hardly complain it was out of context because there was almost no context save you making a false equivalence.

------

As for you, Blayne, you're hardly one to complain of derailing the conversation, given the dishonest and hysterical way you've been trying to talk with (at) me about this from the start. But hey, get all victim s'more, would? [Smile]

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
The part you excised was where he brought up Blayne, and the part about tolerance for murderous tyrannies was obviously directed solely at Blayne and a reference to his slavish devotion to China.

Well, I'm not disputing it in the case of Blayne because it's actually true in his case. But I read it in the sense that he was painting kmbboots and myself with the same brush.
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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
You *asked* for an example of how awful the human rights situation was in Iraq ...

Well, no. I didn't.

From my POV, first I disputed that dissidents are a good way of measuring the mood of a population. Second, I disputed that measuring the punishments given to dissent are a good way of measuring how often a dissent occurs. You brought up the UN and implied that I wasn't listening to the UN, so I asked you "Well, what did they say?" which probably wasn't clear enough in retrospect.

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Hobbes
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I'm a little fuzzy on what's being argued about here. I was interested in this thread personally: I was one who supported the Iraq war during the lead-up. Looking back I'd like to pretend that I was on the cutting edge of hipster technology and was just for the war ironically but sadly that was not the case. Yet, I feel there's a good chance I'd be singing a different tune if the post-war activities has been up to snuff.

I was gone on my mission from 2005 to 2007 so I missed a lot of the events that really defined the post-invasion Iraq, I'm a little hazy on some of the details. My impression was always that the whole "Mission Accomplished" debacle was an accurate representation of the Bush adminstration plan. Basically that they really had accomplished all their goals and plans and done so quickly and efficiently. Just that their goals and plans ended with invasion. I think the best reporting I saw on it was the ~2009 (maybe end of 2008?) Frontline which certainly did give that impression. A major let-down for me. Not that it wasn't criminal in its own way but lying about things like evidence of WMD had a lot less imapct on my support of the war than the discovery that there was no realistic plan to deal with Iraq after it was invaded.

Anyway, I'd like to comment further here, but I really can't quite follow what the discussion is about at this point...

Hobbes [Smile]

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Rakeesh
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So...you weren't asking me about what the UN had to say with respect to the human rights situation in Iraq, just after I was talking about how awful the UN said that situation in Iraq was?

As for the tolerance quote, I was speaking to Blayne about having a high tolerance for that, not you or kmbboots. I thought that was clear, but I can see how you might not have.

And as for comparisons between punishments, the only way that is a valid comparison is if criminalizing dissent can be considered similar to criminalizing homicide, and the punishment isn't the only way of measuring government response but more importantly rate of enforcement. For example, I'll bet that in both Canada and Japan pretty much every single time a dead body turns up, officials working for the government look into it pretty hard.

Something pretty similar could have been said of dissent in Iraq. It's a given. It's laughable that it's even up for serious discussion. As I said, totally reasonable to think the invasion shouldn't have been done, even knowing what we did then. Lots of room there.

To suggest that things weren't all that bad, and even that Iraqis weren't especially unhappy with their government? You can't find a serious person who will take up that argument, outside of debate purposes.

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
To suggest that things weren't all that bad, and even that Iraqis weren't especially unhappy with their government? You can't find a serious person who will take up that argument, outside of debate purposes.

I can't agree with that especially when you're pretty much just declaring it by fiat without any real supporting evidence. The misjudgement of the mood of the Iraqi people goes to the core of the failure in Iraq ("we'll be greeted as liberators" and all that) so hand-waving it is simply unacceptable.

As I've said about three times already, maybe the Iraqi people were unhappy, maybe they weren't, but you're simply not making a convincing case.

I've seen people vastly misjudge the mood of a foreign population too often to simply take that by faith.

quote:
So...you weren't asking me about what the UN had to say with respect to the human rights situation in Iraq, just after I was talking about how awful the UN said that situation in Iraq was?
Well, more specifically, I was asking what did the UN have to say about what Iraqis felt about the human rights situation and whether it was serious enough to warrant a) revolution and/or b) foreign invasion.

quote:
As for the tolerance quote, I was speaking to Blayne about having a high tolerance for that, not you or kmbboots. I thought that was clear, but I can see how you might not have.
Sorry, I definitely interpreted it the wrong way.

quote:
Something pretty similar could have been said of dissent in Iraq.
I'm not really following the line of argument ending here. Are you saying that the comparison is invalid because the Iraqi government didn't try to investigate dissent as harshly as other governments investigate homicide? I'm not really sure that's true and it seems counter-intuitive to the portrayal that you've been trying to make actually.
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Destineer
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quote:
I'm a little fuzzy on what's being argued about here. I was interested in this thread personally: I was one who supported the Iraq war during the lead-up.
My position here has been that the war was a mistake in every sense. The reasons for invading were insufficient by any reasonable measure. So supporting the war was wrong, even for those who believed it would be carried out more capably than it actually was.
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Rakeesh
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I'm not claiming that because the Iraqi government systematically brutalized its people, the Iraqis themselves were unhappy with it and would've just loved Americans to come in and blow stuff up. I'm only claiming the first two-that's *all* I've been claiming. I'm not sure how you got the idea I was taking that a step further.

Though I do think it's worth wondering how Iraqis would've felt about Americans coming in and blowing stuff up, had we not been determined to do a half-assed hands-in-our-ears-lalalalala job. If we had listened to those elements of our government mentioned in Samprimary's links (this weekend, this weekend Samp) that spent so much brainsweat saying, "Ok, for this to possibly work, we need..."

As for dissent, I was explaining why comparing punishments alone isn't enough, and I thought it was clear Iraq was pretty good about investigating or preempting dissent.

Whether it was serious enough to warrant revolution? Seriously, man, a bunch of Iraqis tried to have one, remember? Didn't work out so well. And I reject this implied notion that people can only be said to be bitterly discontented with their government if they openly revolt or openly call for an invasion.

I'll put the question I put to kmbboots to you: if your government said to you, "Mucus, you're only going to have sham elections, you're not going to have a free press, and if you try to dissent outside of the state-run media, even non-violently, you'll be lucky if a cop or a soldier doesn't sideswipe you with a rifle butt-but it's not unlikely we'll be kidnapping you, and keeping you for a good long while or maybe torturing and then killing you." If your government said that to you, and then someone far away pointed out that they couldn't *know* you loathed your government...wouldn't you just want to tear your frigging hair out and ask, "How would you find out?! I get killed for telling you!"

It's the same way we knew people kind of liked to leave East Berlin without ever polling them: *they had to put up a huge guarded wall and no-man's land to keep people in*.

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Destineer
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quote:
I'm not claiming that because the Iraqi government systematically brutalized its people, the Iraqis themselves were unhappy with it and would've just loved Americans to come in and blow stuff up. I'm only claiming the first two-that's *all* I've been claiming. I'm not sure how you got the idea I was taking that a step further.
But isn't the latter claim the one you would need to establish in order to (partly?) justify the 2003 American plan of going in and blowing stuff up?

quote:
Are people just not hearing me when I say, repeatedly, that the human rights situation alone isn't enough?
I understand the view, but you have to grant that it's a difficult one to argue against except in a piecemeal way. The "WMDs" by themselves weren't enough, the human rights weren't enough, the history wasn't enough by itself, but somehow each of these gives us a little bit of reason to invade Iraq, and together these little reasons add up to be enough to tip the scale and make invasion the right choice.

It's a very tough view to argue against. If the weight/importance you assign to one of these considerations (weapons, human rights, international lawbreaking) is a little bit off, that by itself could determine whether your view is right or wrong.

I'm not saying that makes your view false, but it does make it a very tough view to evaluate. In general, I don't like the idea of our government starting wars of choice on the basis of that kind of slippery reasoning, because it makes it too easy to trick yourself and others into making a bad decision. If you want to start a fight, your reasons for starting it should clear the bar by a wide margin. The default assumption should, if possible, be peace.

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kmbboots
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Rakeesh, I am going to make one more attempt at this. From my phone which is annoying so please bear with me and really try to read what I am writing. I am, for the zillionth time, not saying that the were not that bad. For some Iraqis things were very very bad. But not for everyone. If it had been bad for every single Iraqi except for Saddam, how would he have stayed in power? Someone must have supported him, right? He couldn't kill every dissenter himself? After he was killed, people were still fighting us, right? For some of them, things must not have been that bad, right? Or they all would have been happy that we showed up to free them. Ba'athists had it pretty good; they had positions of power and prestige. All those people count as Iraqis, too. So really bad for some. Less bad for others. That is not the same as not so bad for all. Is that clearer? It doesn't just average out. There are lots of different groups that make up Iraq. Some are better off now. Most even. Plenty are not. The ones whose lot we improved the most are probably Kurds and Shia who aren't fond of each other. And the Shia are not fond of us.

And then there are those who had it really bad under Saddam and who would better offf now except that they are dead or maimed or have lost wives or parents or brothers or siblings. We made that bargain for them. "Here is your freedom, but it will cost you your leg or your sight or your son." Punishment for dissent or not, we should have had some indication that they wanted that deal before we made it for them.

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Rakeesh
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Yes, I'm just misreading you, you're not making mixed and inconsistent arguments or anything. You used words like 'pretty bad', and suggested more than once we couldn't know it was so bad because we were guessing. Anyway.

I'm not taking Ba'athist perspectives on human rights in Iraq into account. The brutalizing oppressers don't get a say. To hell with the Ba'athists if their lot wasn't improved.

As for being happy immediately with the US military, of course they weren't. They didnt trust us, or our commitment, or both. With good reason, as it turned out. But the standards you're using for measuring the happiness of the populace are totally inconsistent. You now acknowledge, specifically, that it was really really bad in Iraq under Saddam (well, you and the UN in fact). But how do we know it was so bad? They weren't constantly rioting and rebelling, there was no frequent public outcry, so on and so forth. They must've been content, or we would've seen direct evidence otherwise.

Right? I've never said every single person with Iraqi citizenship loathed to the death Saddam's regime. I've only ever said that the population, by and large, hated the way their government ran. Why? Because they're a diverse population of human beings. Fearing a slow death by torture or imprisonment *more* than they hated the government isn't the same thing as not loathing the government, and it's got nothing to do with wanting to 'remake them in our image', unless despising violent tyranny is some sort of exclusively European-descended characteristic.

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Hobbes
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quote:
My position here has been that the war was a mistake in every sense. The reasons for invading were insufficient by any reasonable measure. So supporting the war was wrong, even for those who believed it would be carried out more capably than it actually was.
I see (and thanks for explaining [Smile] ). A few questions: does this assume "more capably" means basicilly flawlessly, or do you feel that being bogged down in another desert quagmire was inevitable and thus part of the reason we shouldn't have gone in? If the adminstration's claims had been accurate (from WMDs to the preception of the Iraq people) would that change your position? If not, can you give some examples of things that would make you support an invasion in general (genocide for example)?

[Not trying to be confrontational, all honest questions and open to anyone who wants to answer. It's an attempt to figure out where the disconect is rather an attempt to attack or undermind]

I wish I had a better memory as to what it was I believed was happening in Iraq at the time. I know it wasn't the same as the truth but I know it wasn't all falsehoods either. I posted about this a few times here in some depth but I think that stuff is old enough to have been deleted. [Grumble]

Hobbes [Smile]

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Rakeesh
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Something to note about genocide, we're legally bound (if we're going to pay heed to the UN) to stop, by force if need be, genocide when and where it happens. It's supposed to be the law. And yet, it has been attempted and in some cases come near to success since we and other nations agreed to that little piece of history, which is one of many reasons I've got less patience than many, and less than some would like, when it's pointed out what the UN does or doesn't sign on for. It's not because I think it should be done away with, it's because I think if we're going to talk about doing things the UN legal way, especially as if that makes things moral or immoral, a more comprehensive look is needed.
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Destineer
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Thanks, Hobbes.

quote:
A few questions: does this assume "more capably" means basicilly flawlessly, or do you feel that being bogged down in another desert quagmire was inevitable and thus part of the reason we shouldn't have gone in?
The latter (although it was more an urban quagmire than a desert quagmire). As I said a couple pages back, an insurgency was pretty much inevitable. And once we were fighting a no-holds-barred insurgency, basic human psychology ensured that a few of our own troops would eventually get twitchy and take the gloves off themselves. Torture a few Iraqis, rape a couple more. Then we've got the whole country mad at us if they weren't already, which is a recipe for a quagmire.

quote:
If the adminstration's claims had been accurate (from WMDs to the preception of the Iraq people) would that change your position?
In some ways it would, although I can't answer this question without stressing again that the administration's claims were obviously mistaken, and anyone who paid attention to the details of the news should have known that.

I think the admin had to be right about the mood in Iraq for an invasion to be justified. We needed to know it wasn't going to be another Vietnam. Things could actually have gone a lot worse for us in this respect, if we didn't get lucky. If Al Qaeda in Iraq hadn't been so brutal in their own treatment of civilians, for example, the public mood against us would have been even more negative and we might have had a truly popular uprising on our hands.

Now, if they were right about the WMD program (extremely unlikely, as I've said before, given the UN presence in Iraq at that time), that might justify an invasion if we knew we'd be greeted as liberators. It would depend on how they intended to use the weapons. We would need to gather intelligence about their plans.

If they intended to develop weapons in order to use them for deterrence, that would be regrettable but wouldn't justify an invasion. We can't claim that other nations don't have the right to defend themselves (although the US does claim this all the time, as when we label insurgents fighting our occupying forces as "terrorists"). This would be doubly true if their goal was only to develop the capability for producing bombs, and not to actually produce any weapons (as appears to be the case with the Iranian bomb program).

But if they were in fact producing weapons with the intention of using them offensively or providing them to terrorists, then we would have to move to defend ourselves. I think that only goes for nuclear weapons, though. Chemical and biological weapons are really much less effective against civilians than people think. Many countries have had chemical arsenals at various points in history. Chemical weapons are dangerous, but not much more so than conventional explosives if those are targeted at the right spots.

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Rakeesh
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quote:
In some ways it would, although I can't answer this question without stressing again that the administration's claims were obviously mistaken, and anyone who paid attention to the details of the news should have known that.
They weren't obviously mistaken at the time (WMD claims, that is). Heck, we've even had this discussion in this thread. There was lots of reason-and not just to Americans-to believe Saddam was working to get WMD, or conceal them. There's a reason there wasn't widespread or even a very common outcry of, "Hey, wait, this is nonsense!" and it seems clear that reason is because, at the time, the world generally *wasn't* as sure as all that.

What do you base your claim that bio-weapons are much less dangerous than people think?

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Destineer
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quote:
They weren't obviously mistaken at the time (WMD claims, that is).
I really strongly disagree with this. Of course it wasn't obvious that the administration's claims were false, but the idea that they had anything approaching good evidence for them was purely a construction of US propaganda.

As Mucus has pointed out, much of their case rested on the questionable testimony of Iraqi dissidents. Rather than think wait, these guys want us to invade anyway, maybe they'll color their testimony to influence us in that direction, they were simply taken at their word. Meanwhile the UN inspectors went in and expressed a high degree of confidence that there were no weapons.

quote:
What do you base your claim that bio-weapons are much less dangerous than people think?
In practice the danger from them is substantially lessened by the fact that extremely expensive and often bulky lab equipment is required to keep the really dangerous bugs alive and to prevent their handlers from getting infected and dying. Terrorists don't generally have access to that equipment, and if they did it would be relatively easy to catch them.

This is all theoretical, but it is somewhat backed up by the empirical fact that no one has ever used biological weapons with much success in even a limited capacity.

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Rakeesh
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We've spoken before on the limitations of the inspections as they were, in spite of their justified confidence in their findings so far as they went. The case didn't only rest on dissident testimony (though to some it seems human rights violations does *shrug*), but also on years and years of intransigence. It's hardly unnatural to believe he was hiding something, and to think it was likely, given the situation.
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Destineer
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quote:
The case didn't only rest on dissident testimony (though to some it seems human rights violations does *shrug*), but also on years and years of intransigence.
There was also the "yellowcake purchase," which was known to be fake before the invasion. The evidence that the US case was largely trumped-up was there to see, for those who hadn't already made up their minds.

quote:
It's hardly unnatural to believe he was hiding something, and to think it was likely, given the situation.
Natural though it might be, I think it was a mistake to believe that, given the other explanations available for that intransigence. With Iraq's conventional military crippled and the Iranian enemy right next door, it's easy to see why the Hussein regime would not want to project further weakness.

Looking at the issue dispassionately, I would've said before the inspectors went in:

OK, they could be hiding weapons or they could be trying to hide the fact that they don't have weapons from their powerful enemies in the region. The odds might be 50/50.

Then, after the inspectors found nothing, I'd say the odds that they were hiding their weakness and not their secret weapons stash went up considerably. That's why I thought there was maybe a 10% chance they had weapons, and almost no chance that waiting a few months for the inspectors to do further work would risk any kind of attack.

Like we were discussing before: Pakistan has had actual nukes for years and years without incident. We could afford to wait a few months and see how further inspections panned out. That we did not wait was a crime against peace. To my mind, it's no exaggeration to say that.

[ December 30, 2011, 05:29 PM: Message edited by: Destineer ]

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Destineer
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Also, the odds were much less than 10% that they had actual nuclear capability, rather than chemical or biological weapons (which, as I said, are not so bad in the big scheme of things).

They didn't have a reactor. They didn't have any good scientists who knew anything about that sort of thing. (Has anyone ever heard of an Iraqi version of AQ Khan?) They didn't have any refining equipment. Iran hasn't been able to hide these things, despite having only periodic and very limited IAEA inspections. The idea that Iraq could hide them from comparatively invasive UN inspections strains credulity.

"Weapons of mass destruction" really don't deserve to be lumped together as a group. One nuclear weapon in the right spot can kill millions. To kill a few thousand with chemical weapons, you have to drop bombs for hours (basically what the Iraqi army did to the Kurds).

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