Draginol Draginol

The reasons to go into Iraq never changed

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The reasons to go into Iraq never changed

Don't let revisionists cloud why we needed to take out Saddam.

from JoeUser Forums

The problem I have with the anti-war crowd, particularly those who are on-line, is that I find them intellectually dishonest. When someone tries to say "Bush lied about WMD" or that the invasion of Iraq was largely because we believed Saddam had stockpiles of WMD they are really being dishonest. But dishonesty in debate is, sadly, a regular occurrence. But when it comes to blogging, blogs can be re-read from the time frame.  And those who favored going into Iraq have been consistent in the reasons why we needed to go after Iraq.

Let's recap why Americans favored going to war in Iraq:

After the first Gulf War (1991) Saddam had continually violated the terms of the cease fire. This culminated in 1998 when the inspectors were thrown out. At that point, Americans would have supported the use of massive military support to remove Saddam. But Clinton was mired in the impeachment and the issue just didn't seem imminent enough.

Then came 9/11.

After 9/11, Americans came to the realization that the United States could no longer afford a powerful open enemy in that part of the world. Saddam had a history of invading its neighbors. It had a history of trying to acquire WMD and occasionally using them on his own people.  Saddam, in short, was a ticking time bomb. He had to go.

So the US went to the UN one last time and essentially said "We need to put this guy on notice that we're not fooling around anymore. He's gotta comply with the previous dozen and a half UN resolutions or we're going to take him out." The UN passed resolution 1441. 

Most Americans, myself included, believed Saddam had stockpiles of WMD in the form of chemical weapons. We'd been told that for 10 years. But that really wasn't the issue. But few were sweating whether Saddam had mustard gas or Sarin or whatever in his inventory. The issue was what would Saddam do after the sanctions got lifted and the inspectors were gone. But 1441 would at least let us see if he had any genuine interest in cooperating with the UN.

It turned out he didn't. He screwed around with the inspectors once again. No fly-overs allowed, no talking to scientists without Iraqi officials present to intimidate them, no paperwork on where the missing WMD stockpiles had gone. And in the midst of this, Iraq continued to shoot at US and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone.

Again, Americans were faced with a choice. We could just throw up our hands and let this guy keep doing this until one day he managed to develop and smuggle a nuke or something to Al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization, or we could go and remove this guy. After all, this guy was actively paying terrorists in Israel for their efforts, it isn't a stretch to imagine Saddam providing help to those who wanted to kill Americans.

So the United States went to war with a primary and secondary goal.

The primary goal was to remove Saddam Hussein. Doing so would eliminate any stockpiles of WMD but more importantly, it would eliminate any programs he may have had to produce WMD in the future that could be provided to terrorists.  Like I said, it wasn't mustard gas that Americans were worried about, it was a future nuclear bomb or something worse that Saddam might produce in the future and turn over. In short, we would be removing a serious threat to the United States in the post 9/11 world.

The secondary goal was to establish a stable, prosperous democratic Iraq that would serve as an example to nearby countries as part of the effort to "drain the swamp" that creates the terrorists in the first place. An open, free society in Iraq might make the people of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Syria more inclined to move away from radical Islam and be more moderate.  As an added benefit, such a state would be friendly to the United States and allow it to exert pressure on the aforementioned 3 countries that produce a disproportionate amount of terrorists.

Since the war, the Kay report came out. And the report actually backed up much of what those of us who were in favor of the war believed -- Saddam was actively trying to obtain WMD and had every intention to build WMD on a large scale once sanctions were lifted. His strategy was to not have stockpiles of WMD but instead gear up towards the post-sanction production of WMD.

But many who have opposed the war, have demonstrated a dishonesty on this issue that I find staggering. They have focused on the stockpiles of WMD discussion in the Kay report and totally ignored the real issue - Saddam wanted to get WMD and was actively putting together such a program to be fully implemented once sanctions were lifted. The people who believe we should have done more to stop 9/11 suddenly turn around and believe that it was wrong to stop what could have been a far worse catastrophe 5, 10 years in the future. In other words, the fear those of us who wanted Saddam removed was totally justified. As I wrote before the war, my concern wasn't whether Saddam had chemical weapons, my fear was that it would be my son fighting on a nuclear battle field in Iraq because we failed to act now.

Here are some of my articles I wrote on the war back at the time:

https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/InanidealworldBushcouldte.html

https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/TheCaseforandagainstwar.html

https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AmericaattheCross-Roads.html

https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/PrincipledPositions.html

https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/TheLefthaslostitsvoice.html

https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/TheDebate.html

BTW, one thing you'll get from reading those old blogs (i.e. BEFORE the war) is that I didn't even believe Iraq had any WMD at the time (I don't usually consider chemical weapons to be WMD). So as you read the articles, not only are stockpiles of WMD not an issue, I didn't even think he had WMD at the time. My concern was that after 9/11, we couldn't mess around with this guy anymore. He had shown he wanted to obtain WMD if he could and with Al Qaeda he had a delivery vehicle.

My articles are no way unique either. They mirror articles written by others at the time who supported the war. No where can I find any articles that argued that the primary or even major reason for invading Iraq was to eliminate Saddam's stockpile of WMD. The reason we removed Saddam was because we believed he was a threat that we could no longer live with in a post-9/11 world. End of story.

Those who cling to the lack of stockpiles of WMD are overstating their case and being dishonest. Sure, I thought Iraq had chemical weapons in barrels somewhere. And they might. But it wasn't something keeping me up at night. What I knew and still know is that quite a number of people over in that area of the world are trying to murder as many innocent Americans as possible. And I knew that Saddam, being an open enemy of the United States was interested in acquiring WMD destruction. Time has shown that Saddam was trying to acquire WMDs. He just didn't keep stockpiles of them, he was building the programs to produce them once sanctions were lifted. As an American, I expect my government to protect me and my family. The federal government does precious little for me given the taxes it extracts. But I expect it to do this one thing damn well. And 9/11 was the wake up call so that I could avoid having my son fighting on a nuclear battle ground in Iraq 10 years hence.

Once Saddam was toppled, the mission was accomplished. The primary goal of the invasion was completed a year ago. Now we wrestle with the secondary goal of trying to establish a stable, peaceful democracy. How that will turn out is anyone's guess. As a hawk, I'm not going to lose sleep whether Iraq ends up a democracy or not as long as it doesn't support or harbor terrorists or try to develop a WMD program. Ironically, it should be the doves hoping that the US is successful from here on out. As far as I'm concerned, our main job is done. The point of staying now is to help the Iraqi's that we have a moral responsibility to do. But that should be the argument the left is making because I'm not going to make it for them.

politics
16,403 views 39 replies
Reply #26 from JoeUser Forums Top
I admit I am not well-versed in exactly how enforcement does take place, but sanctions did work for a decade in spite of substantial opposition, so there couldn't be "nothing" enforcing compliance.

Whatever flaws in enforcement you may think might have developed (and I'd be interested if you could expand on this), it seems plausible to me that an investment of a couple billion dollars from the US would have fixed them. It would certainly not have cost anything close to the $100 billion we've spent on Iraq already (not to mention the lives lost). In 2001 we almost passed a UNSC resolution reforming the sanctions, with only Russia's threatened veto stopping us. Russia's vote and compliance could have been bought with a small fraction of that $100 billion. And so on...

In short, if the administration had been willing to push half as hard for containment as hard as it was willing to push for war, it could have been done. So why were we not willing to push for continued containment rather than in war? Because we believed sanctions were not working--because we believed in those nonexistant WMD stockpiles.
Reply #27 from JoeUser Forums Top

I have no doubt the Bush administration could have kept the sanctions going. But it only required one US administration to bow into pressure to lift or soften sanctions. Have you not forgotten terms like "Smart sanctions" and "Sanctions Lite" being thrown around at the end of the Clinton administration as a way of backing away from sanctions?

It also cost the US billions per year to "Contain" Iraq.  The actual cost of the military action is said to have cost around $40 billion (less than the first gulf war). Most of the money spent has been for humanitarian and rebuilding reasons.

But more tot he point on this article -- people like me were arguing against containment before we went to war. I addressed those issues countless times in those links. Feel free to READ them rather than trying to get me to rehash what I've written counltess times in the past.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #28 from JoeUser Forums Top
The least they could do is peruse some literature before they mindlessly spout the ideology of some inane drone like Al Franken or Trotskyite Moore.
Reply #29 from JoeUser Forums Top

I agree.  And I'm not saying someone needs to be some historian or something. They could, for example, re-read Bush's speech at the outset of hostilities or look at the actual official document given to Congress to justify the war.

None of it had to do with capturing containers of mustard gas or whatever fantasy the extreme left has cooked up this week. It was about one thing: Getting rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein because after 9/11 we couldn't mess around with him anymore like we had for the previous 12 years.

Reply #30 from JoeUser Forums Top
people like me were arguing against containment before we went to war. I addressed those issues countless times in those links. Feel free to READ them rather than trying to get me to rehash what I've written counltess times in the past.


I fail to see what I'm asking you to rehash. Let me try one more time to clarify things. Your argument now is that Hussein would have been a threat once sanctions were lifted. Your argument before the war was that Hussein was a threat, period. Reread your own blogs--you never once discuss the sanctions. The debate you linked to has a couple passing references but no serious analysis.

So now, in this current post, you are arguing that there is essentially no difference between your prewar line of "Hussein is a threat" and your current line of "Hussein would have become a threat if we had lifted sanctions." Not true. It's a small difference, but it's an important one. It means that we had an alternative to war which you (and others, including myself as a former hawk) had dismissed as ineffective. It means the doves can argue that we should have continued with containment (as many argued before), and the hawks need a better response than the old one, that "containment is ineffective"--which was pretty much how you dealt with that issue in your blogs. If Hussein really was a threat as you said, it implies that what we had been doing was not containing the threat. This is why we're hearing "I told you so" from some people--because our old argument no longer works.

You can answer this in two ways: containment would have stopped being effective in the future, or containment was worse in some other way than war. Which brings us to the debate in this thread. Would containment be sustainable? Would containment be better than the alternative? As far as I can tell this is the main disagreement between us--and it's not addressed in your old blogs, so your irritation about "rehashing" seems out of place to me.

You have of course rehashed your usual point about how Hussein was trying to get weapons. Of course, I made that point myself--twice--so it's not like it's under dispute. If you're tired of doing it feel free to stop.


Now, to continue the discussion:

It also cost the US billions per year to "Contain" Iraq


What's your source here? A quick google came up with a smaller figure (from 2000) of well under a billion:

"Though it is impossible to separate out our Iraq-related deployments from our broader presence in the region, our deployments in the Gulf cost about $1 billion/year. However, significant portions of these costs are defrayed by host nation support and assistance in kind from Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia."

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/2000_h/000323-Romanow.htm

Now there may be non-military containment costs too but I have a hard time imagining they're bigger than the military ones. These costs seem pretty negligible compared to the cost of war, occupation, and reconstruction.

I have no doubt the Bush administration could have kept the sanctions going. But it only required one US administration to bow into pressure to lift or soften sanctions.


Okay, that's the crux of the matter. Would the political will still have been there in another ten years? This depends on a lot of variables. What else could have been done with the sanctions today? Would "smart sanctions" have been effective? How would the global fight against terror have gone if we hadn't invaded Iraq? What other non-military actions might have been tried? What else might have happened in the region? What might have happened in Israel? et cetera ad nausuem... This would be a huge and extremely speculative topic, and you can point to precedents on both sides. We're still embargoing Cuba after all, for much less reason than our embargo of Iraq. This is a huge, unanswerable topic and I can respect opinion on both sides... but I, personally, think the argument that the US ought to have had higher priorities in 2002 and 2003 has merit.

Don't get me wrong. There does exist intellectual dishonestly on the left. And the right, for that matter. But what we have found out about WMD and related programs in Iraq is most definitely an important thing to think about when considering whether the war was a mistake.
Reply #31 from JoeUser Forums Top

My argument remains the same:  Saddam Hussein was a threat that we couldn't monkey around with anymore in a post 9/11 world. I didn't explicitly mention that he would be an even bigger threat in every single blog I wrote if sanctions were removed because that's kind of obvious.

I don't have a source handy but I recall seeing a figure of around $15 billion annually to maintain the bases and personnel in that region to maintain the no fly zone and provide a rapid response force.  If you think it was less than $1 billion you're dreaming.  Not to mention that our planes were getting shot at regularly by the Iraqi's.

The embargo on Cuba, which you thought was a good example is indeed a good example - for my argument. The embargo on Cuba is a good case in point - the US still has an embargo but most countries lifted their sanctions long ago. It is, in fact, Cuba that we should be learning from - countries will only enforce sanctions while political will exists and that will fades over time. Europe and Canada freely trade with Cuba for example today. So much for embargos and their lasting effects.

For me, it was important to invade Iraq and remove saddam when we did because I did not believe the political will to do so would last. That is why I didn't want to "let the inspections work".  The United States should have removed Saddam in 1998 under Clinton but he lacked the political will.  And after 9/11, the threat of Iraq was obvious (to me and others like me) -- he had to go.  He was a threat to the United States. 

I wasn't able to find the exact blog but in one of them I wrote to the effect: "I don't want my kid having to fight in some nuclear battlefield 15 years from now because we didn't do what needed to be done today."  I am convinced, particularly by the Kay report, that had Saddam stayed in power he or his sons would have gotten nuclear weapons at which point the danger to us would have become immeasurably greater.

That is why I know that going in and removing Saddam was the right thing. We did the right thing. The Kay report, IMO, vindicates this. But I also feel common sense does so as well. You don't let a violent dictator of a $20B GNP economy who is an open enemy of the US and is in the middle east stay in power in a post-9/11 world.

Reply #32 from JoeUser Forums Top
*shrug* Well I do know people who felt that further sanctions were not an option, partly because they were failing to stop Hussein's weapons development. I was one of these people, and I was wrong on that score. The left is right to bring it up. At the very least, the absence of WMD destroys *an* argument for war, and not a straw man argument--it's one that was made by, among others, by GW Bush, and one that was influential in my thinking on the matter. It's not irrelevant to the debate and it's not intellectual dishonesty to bring it up. It may be mistaken to say that *you* specifically are wrong--although I still think your argument would have been strengthened if we'd found weapons stockpiles and advanced weapons programs--but one can definitely make claims about many on the pro-war side being wrong.

I recall seeing a figure of around $15 billion annually to maintain the bases and personnel in that region to maintain the no fly zone and provide a rapid response force. If you think it was less than $1 billion you're dreaming. Not to mention that our planes were getting shot at regularly by the Iraqi's.


That figure came from a Dept of Defense official. Apparently she's dreaming. And it's odd that you'd bring up our planes being shot at, since we're being shot at a whole lot more now than we were then--and now, they're actually hitting on occasion.

I just looked a bit and found Wolfowitz's estimate of $30 billion over 12 years, or an average of about $2.5 billion/year, though it's unclear how that's distributed among the twelve years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/politics/10CBOX.html?ex=1083729600&en=b18c2b231c8ba6c0&ei=5070

He's clearly trying to spin the cost as high, so I would be reluctant to accept anything higher without some good evidence. $15 billion is way out of line with anything else I've seen. Perhaps your figure was for five or ten years?
Reply #33 from JoeUser Forums Top
Interesting arguements going on here.

I notice Brad that your arguements are about the 'home arguement' for invasion of Iraq. On the international front the US focussed solely on the threat of current stockpiles of WMD. Indeed the US did such a good case that Blair consistently agrgued "it is disarmament, not regime change - that is our objective".

So while you may indeed be correct in saying that the arguments for going into Iraq have not changed, that's only on the home front. On the international stage the reasons have indeed changed and the US has been seen internationally as a liar who used it's intelligence community to try to convince the world of one thing while internally believing another.

Oh and to put this into perspective, US < 300M people. World ~ 6B people. So the reasons given for invading Iraq have changed for over 90% of the worlds population.

Paul.
Reply #34 from JoeUser Forums Top
"After 9/11, Americans came to the realization that the United States could no longer afford a powerful open enemy in that part of the world. Saddam had a history of invading its neighbors"......

I just have a question Draginol....Saddam's "history" included the Iran/Iraq War in which the United States supported Iraq and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991...thats not a very long history of invasion. I hope you're not suggesting that Saddam needed to go because if we didn't remove him we were gonna wake up one morning with Iraqi paratroopers dropping into our yards like Red Dawn. Besides the idea that Saddam was a "powerful" enemy is kind of stretch, he had no air force because it all went away in 1991, all their hardware was only outdated russian stuff and most of the SCUDs he shot at us over there broke up in flight because they were so old and shitty. This wasn't exactly the German Wehrmacht circa 1940 we were facing.

ALSO...."The secondary goal was to establish a stable, prosperous democratic Iraq that would serve as an example to nearby countries as part of the effort to "drain the swamp" that creates the terrorists in the first place. An open, free society in Iraq might make the people of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Syria more inclined to move away from radical Islam and be more moderate".....

So you're saying that countries that hate us already would suddenly love us for deposing a neighboring country's leader and installing the type of government WE think should be there and additionally it would amazingly make the people more religiously moderate in countries that have been highly religiously radical for a long long time. And of course it would in no way make them feel threatened that they might be next. Thats amazing.
Reply #35 from JoeUser Forums Top
"The United States should have removed Saddam in 1998 under Clinton but he lacked the political will. "

there would have been no need for political will on anyone's part in 1998 had the first president bush taken care of it when he had the opportunity. nor need for sanctions, a no-fly zone, etc., etc. for the record, in may, 1992, defense secretary cheney (now the man behind the curtain according to woodward) replied to a question about the need to take out hussein this way: "How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many."

in a pre or post 9/11 world, the clearest and most immediately present danger to the united states was and is osama bin laden and north korea. hussein was an unfortunate choice of diversions by an administration with an agenda that is touted as conservative while in fact, it suffers from an terminal inability to perceive what senator robert taft once described as 'the line between idealism and imperialism".
Reply #36 from JoeUser Forums Top

The US couldn't have removed Saddam in 1991. The whole coalition was fighting under a shared presumption - liberating Kuwait, nothing more.

You can argue all day that you think it was a bad idee to go into Iraq. That's never going to change.

What this article points out is that those of us who wanted to go into Iraq have maintained the precise reasons for doing so from the start. It never had anything to do with stockpiles of WMD.

Reply #37 from JoeUser Forums Top
I hope you're not suggesting that Saddam needed to go because if we didn't remove him we were gonna wake up one morning with Iraqi paratroopers dropping into our yards like Red Dawn.


You fail to realize that the enemy is not fighting conventionally, on Sept 11th 19 enemy soldiers wearing no uniforms killed 3000 of us in an hour and a half. Hussein liked to spend money on foreign terror, he openly paid 10,000 for Hezbollah suicide bombers, why wouldn’t he fund Al Qaida or provide them safe harbor training or other logistics in their war against the west. If we weren’t going to get rid of him we should never had expelled him from Kuwait, because after that he had it in for us.
Reply #38 from JoeUser Forums Top
Yes, your right they aren't fighting conventionally. (which is exactly the reason we are having trouble defeating the insurgents in Iraq)

However regardless of whatever Saddam was giving to terrorists since we don't really know for sure, and being that they do fight unconventionally, now that saddam's gone they're just gonna go to Saudi Arabia or Syria or Pakistan or any one of the many countries over there that will support them. For instance Saudi Arabia is our friend...with friends like that we don't need enemies. The point is removing Saddam as far as terrorism and Al Qaida is concerned probably didn't even put a dent in their organization and funding. Think about it, like you said 19 guys took down the World Trade Center...how much monetary and logistic support did they need?? 300 bucks for a plane ticket and a copy of microsoft flight simulator? The very problem with insurgent terrorist forces is that removing world leaders who support them doesn't do anything to stop them. Look at the situation in Israel. They're been fighting for years and years. Now they even target individual members with helicopter gunships and they still have bombings every few weeks. Whenever they kill a high ranking member, somebody else just steps up to the plate. In addition lets just say getting rid of leaders who support terrorism helps stop terrorism. With that in mind we'd have to eventually fight the following countries....Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan....blah blah and the list goes on and on.

Yes I'll admit the Red Dawn comparison was a bit much, but the point is there is no way Iraq was ever going to INVADE the United States persay, while on the other hand taking Saddam out probably did nothing in the long run to reduce the funding, training, and logistics of Al Qaida.
Reply #39 from JoeUser Forums Top
in the long run it made familes left with a missing plate at the dinner tables. Fuck the bogus WMD argument already.