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Originally Posted by Not Bob
Really interesting article in Vox about the the lead-up to the Iraq War. It wasn't lies or mistaken intelligence, this theory goes, it was driven by the views of the neoconservatives who viewed the American military as a means to overthrow authoritarian governments we disagreed with and spread democracy. Not bad in the abstract, but the devil is in the details.
And even if one agrees with the decision of GHWB/Cheney/Powell/Schwaezkopf to stop at the border after expelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, it's hard to argue with then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who wanted to shoot down Saddam's helicopters to keep the Republican Guard from crushing the Kurds and the Shiites in southern Iraq who took us at our word and rose up against Saddam.
Anyway, worth a read. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/1102210...oconservatives |
It is a good article, and it demonstrates how the neo-con ideology overwhelmed all reason and rational thought -- from how evidence of WMD was interpreted, to how obviously flawed sources were credited, to how every aspect that might make the neocon goal difficult to achieve was simply dismissed (e.g.: If you believe that Shiites and Sunnis will start fighting each other, then the whole project gets very difficult. Ergo, there are no real divisions between them. See also, the will welcome us as liberators.)
But I disagree with your last point, sort of. The mistake Bush I made was not failing to take out the Republican Guard and the Iraqi air power. The mistake he made was encouraging Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein in the first place. It's really easy to say "if Bush had taken out the Iraqi air force, many thousands of Shiites would not have been slaughtered." Okay. But what would have happened next? Would Saddam simply have surrendered, or would the country have fallen in to a sustained civil war between government and rebel forces that were more balanced in their military power? (See, e.g., Syria) How long would that war have lasted? How many factions would the rebels have split into? How many more people would have died, from all the factors that a long and drawn-out civil war creates? Would a cycle of Shiites killing Sunnis and Sunnis killing Shiites have followed? (See, e.g., Iraq)
We went there with a clear and specific mission: End the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The war should have stopped once that mission was achieved, plus at most some additional degrading of Iraq's ability to lash out again (i.e., destroy much of their armored forces, which had already happened). The mission was not to overthrow Hussein, nor to support a rebellion against him, nor to do anything inside of Iraq's borders; it was solely to defend the sovereignty of Kuwait.
Bush should not have made promises that he did not intend to keep, and could not have kept. And for all the times that I've heard people say "he should have prevented Hussein from crushing the Shiite uprising," no one -- particularly Wolfie -- has given a credible analysis of what would have happened next.
I realize that it is cold-hearted as hell to say what I am, in essence, saying: That we should have let Iraqis deal with their own problems, even if that meant a lot of them died, so long as those problems didn't cross their borders. But unless we were prepared to do a hell of a lot more than just shoot down some helicopters, that is actually what we should have done.
