I actually had this conversation with several Iraqis a number of times, in Baghdad in 2006-07 (before the surge, during the worst of the sectarian murderfest). The consensus was that they were really glad the U.S. had gotten rid of Saddam, but they couldn't fathom why we had farked up the occupation so badly (they were much more diplomatic in how they put it). shiates tended to think it was worth it, Sunnis not so much.

Fact is, the Bushies had reasonable motives, if ones that weren't good enough, and they didn't have anything to do with WMDs. 1. Cheney and the other oil men (remember, the Bushies were almost ALL oil men) wanted a more stable supply of Persian Gulf oil, which was constantly at risk because of Saddam's habit of invading his neighbors. 2. They really thought they could diminish terrorism by removing the state sponsors of it, by imposing a sort of America-led Arab spring. Rumor had it in Iraq that in 2003 we were planning to invade five countries in seven years, in this order, in order to "liberate" them from autocratic rule: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria. This turned out to be a ridiculous pipe dream, but a lot of them STILL think it could be done, by using better tactics. 3. Saddam tried to kill Bush 41. Never underestimate how personal motivations drive national leaders.

Some people made huge personal fortunes off of the war, so I'm betting they're itching to do it again.

If you owned stock in the right corporations, yes.

Gergesa: He asks one kurdish person.  That isn't meaningful statistically.

"Saddam tortures people" isn't compelling as a reason to go to war; just imagine Bush using that and leaving out any nonsense about WMDs as his sole justification for going to war.

Then there's the fact that our invasion didn't exactly stop the torturing, merely changed who was getting the torture (and sometimes not even that as Iraq's press corp can well attest).

hitlersbrain: WhiskeyBoy: allow me to elaborate on WHY we went to war with / invaded Iraq.

You SOUND like you worked for the Bushies all right. A hundred brutal dictators defying UN resolutions around the world and we just up and decided we'd blow half our GDP on this particular guy huh? A whole bunch of countries that WOULD have benefited from our intervention and we chose to just level a thriving one and turn it into rubble?

Dude, STFU.

We went to Iraq because it was a convenient war for a Republican president.
Republicans pride themselves on being warriors, without a war they seem useless.
George Bush also had it out for Saddam for attempting to assassinate his father (Bush senior).
Finally, America was suffering from post 9/11 blues, where we felt we had to get anger out of our system... Iraq was our rebound war, to make us feel like we are winners (vs. Afghanistan which no one can conquer).

All in all, the Iraq war was the LARGEST protested war BEFORE it started and it still did not matter.
We the people know that this is all political theater with our lives and treasure.

As a person who served in a Diplomatic function in Iraq post Saddam (I was there in 2009/2010) allow me to elaborate on WHY we went to war with / invaded Iraq.  Since it seems the bullshiat revisionist history has become almost cemented as fact in the minds of the masses.

The US did NOT go to war in Iraq because we thought Saddam had ties to al Qaeda, and we definitely did NOT go to war over oil.  Give me a break.  We went to war because of the lies peddled by a CIA asset code-named CURVEBALL, and his attempt to get a visa.  His lies lead to lots of corroborative rumint (slang for rumor-gathered-intelligence) from multiple intelligence agencies, and the summation of that rumint started to make WMD proliferation look possible.  UN Resolution 1441 was passed in order to prevent this proliferation and Saddam defied it at every turn.  Hans Blix was sent in to inspect, but not wanting to be the guy who started a war, did a half-assed job of it.  Satellite imagery showed that Saddam was moving things out of places set to be inspected.  It was all bad news, and the actions of the Saddam regime did not reflect the actions of innocence.  When the UN would NOT follow through on the sanctions and penalties 1441 was supposed to impose, the few nations that saw this potential threat as a problem took action.  All this time some pencil pushing analyst at the CIA probably was tasked with finding out if Saddam had any ties to al Qaeda.  It's a CYA move.  Not at all surprising considering people like al-Zarqawi moved in, and al-Sadr controlled almost every neighborhood east of the Tigris.  In all my meetings and interviews with Iraqis, I would go so far as to say most of them were glad Saddam was gone, and placed the blame on the lack of a new functional government at the hands of power grabbing Iraqis trying to fill the power void (this view was especially prominent with the Kurds).  And go ahead and look up the back and forth that happened between al-Malaki and Allawi in the race to become prime minister.  The majority of negative feelings toward the US held by non-extremists was because the US did a lot of damage to historical locations and neighborhoods, and didn't do much to compensate.  But that's part of why I was there.  The experience was both eye-opening and worth it.

I need to start purchasing books now that accurately explain the events that led up to the invasion of Iraq.  By the time my future kids get to High School or College, God only knows what they will be teaching.  We (unfortunately) live in the era of apologist America, where everything that we are even remotely involved in is somehow our fault.  Hell, even if everything went to plan, people in the US would still feel like we were in the wrong and needed to apologize.

If anyone has a chance to visit Kurdish Iraq, I highly recommend it.  Beautiful landscape and architecture, super friendly people, and the food was the best I've ever had in all my travels.  Irbil is a particular favorite, especially the hills / mountains north of the city proper.  Amazing.

It was an entertaining way of draining the Treasury without appearing to so that when the boomers needed to retire, the cupboard was bare.

"We can't afford that"  is the very convenient phrase inside the Beltway when people who are not your contributors need something.

You mean the one they had to lie to their allies to start, killed nearly 200,000 people (more than half of whom were civilians) and shipped thousands more to rot in a gulag and replaced a dictator who was only a 7/10 on the asshole scale with a series of potentates and puppets, all to secure weapons that never existed because "them's the folks that tried to kill my dad"? That war? Hm, let me think now, was that a good idea...hmmmm.....

NostroZ: hitlersbrain: WhiskeyBoy: allow me to elaborate on WHY we went to war with / invaded Iraq.

You SOUND like you worked for the Bushies all right. A hundred brutal dictators defying UN resolutions around the world and we just up and decided we'd blow half our GDP on this particular guy huh? A whole bunch of countries that WOULD have benefited from our intervention and we chose to just level a thriving one and turn it into rubble?

Dude, STFU.

We went to Iraq because it was a convenient war for a Republican president.
Republicans pride themselves on being warriors, without a war they seem useless.
George Bush also had it out for Saddam for attempting to assassinate his father (Bush senior).
Finally, America was suffering from post 9/11 blues, where we felt we had to get anger out of our system... Iraq was our rebound war, to make us feel like we are winners (vs. Afghanistan which no one can conquer).

All in all, the Iraq war was the LARGEST protested war BEFORE it started and it still did not matter.
We the people know that this is all political theater with our lives and treasure.

Don't forget the perennial chicken-hawks who simply felt a "good war" would do the 80s-90s gen some moral good. Killing poor foreigners for the sake of war profiteers, getting horribly injured, and being abandoned by the military once you can no longer serve builds character.

WhiskeyBoy: As a person who served in a Diplomatic function in Iraq post Saddam (I was there in 2009/2010) allow me to elaborate on WHY we went to war with / invaded Iraq.  Since it seems the bullshiat revisionist history has become almost cemented as fact in the minds of the masses.

The US did NOT go to war in Iraq because we thought Saddam had ties to al Qaeda, and we definitely did NOT go to war over oil.  Give me a break.  We went to war because of the lies peddled by a CIA asset code-named CURVEBALL, and his attempt to get a visa.  His lies lead to lots of corroborative rumint (slang for rumor-gathered-intelligence) from multiple intelligence agencies, and the summation of that rumint started to make WMD proliferation look possible.  UN Resolution 1441 was passed in order to prevent this proliferation and Saddam defied it at every turn.  Hans Blix was sent in to inspect, but not wanting to be the guy who started a war, did a half-assed job of it.  Satellite imagery showed that Saddam was moving things out of places set to be inspected.  It was all bad news, and the actions of the Saddam regime did not reflect the actions of innocence.  When the UN would NOT follow through on the sanctions and penalties 1441 was supposed to impose, the few nations that saw this potential threat as a problem took action.  All this time some pencil pushing analyst at the CIA probably was tasked with finding out if Saddam had any ties to al Qaeda.  It's a CYA move.  Not at all surprising considering people like al-Zarqawi moved in, and al-Sadr controlled almost every neighborhood east of the Tigris.  In all my meetings and interviews with Iraqis, I would go so far as to say most of them were glad Saddam was gone, and placed the blame on the lack of a new functional government at the hands of power grabbing Iraqis trying to fill the power void (this view was especially prominent with the Kurds).  And go ahead and look up the back and forth that happened between al-Malaki and Allawi in the race ...

That's some nice revisionism you've got there. I particularly like how you left out everything the Bush admin force-fed the media on it, Cheney blowing a CIA agent to punish her husband for undercutting the Bush admin's case that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, the UN not buying the ridiculous "evidence" we provided to justify the use of force, and the way you put the fault on everybody but the people who decided to pursue a war of choice.

WhiskeyBoy:
The US did NOT go to war in Iraq because we thought Saddam had ties to al Qaeda, and we definitely did NOT go to war over oil.  Give me a break.  We went to war because of the  lies peddled by a CIA asset code-named CURVEBALL, and his attempt to get a visa.  His lies lead to lots of corroborative rumint (slang for rumor-gathered-intelligence) from multiple intelligence agencies, and the summation of that rumint started to make WMD proliferation look possible.  UN Resolution 1441 was passed in order to prevent this proliferation and Saddam defied it at every turn.  Hans Blix was sent in to inspect, but not wanting to be the guy who started a war, did a half-assed job of it.  Satellite imagery showed that Saddam was moving things out of places set to be inspected.  It was all bad news, and the actions of the Saddam regime did not reflect the actions of innocence.  When the UN would NOT follow through on the sanctions and penalties 1441 was supposed to impose, the few nations that saw this potential threat as a problem took action.  All this time some pencil pushing analyst at the CIA probably was tasked with finding out if Saddam had any ties to al Qaeda.  It's a CYA move.  Not at all surprising considering people like al-Zarqawi moved in, and al-Sadr controlled almost every neighborhood east of the Tigris.  In all my meetings and interviews with Iraqis, I would go so far as to say most of them were glad Saddam was gone, and placed the blame on the lack of a new functional government at the hands of power grabbing Iraqis trying to fill the power void (this view was especially prominent with the Kurds).  And go ahead and look up the back and forth that happened between al-Malaki and Allawi in the race to become prime minister.  The majority of negative feelings toward the US held by non-extremists was because the US did a lot of damage to historical locations and neighborhoods, and didn't do much to compensate.  But that's part of why I was there.  The experience was both eye-opening and worth it.

Critics from the start said this war was started on lies. You're just clarifying the lies. And at the time, opinion polls showed the majority of Americans did believe Saddam was tied to Al Qaeda, so lies fomented more lies. The war for oil claim I agree has always been highly speculative, but there's no doubt companies made out like bandits in other areas. That was another major criticism of the war.So if you want to teach the "apologists" the truth, you should learn the actual details of their argument.

nekom: hammettman: I guess the big point is that this question SHOULD HAVE been asked in an honest way BEFORE the clusterfark that followed.  And had congress been given the same intelligence that the CIA gave the White House (the intel that said NO, he has no WMD's)  And had the American people not been given that "Saddam was involved in 9/11" sleight of hand.

Remember Bush's EPIC approval ratings after 9/11? They certainly rolled with that. People at the time pointed it out, but I'll admit I was fooled at the time. We were pretty much flat out lied to. It wouldn't have been so bad if the rationale had simply been that he was an evil man (true), or even that terrorists were operating in Iraq (not really, at the time), but he poured it on with the WMD talk and well, we all know how that went.

Then of course, the backlash. Even suggesting that Iraq might not be a good idea in some circles would get you "WTF are you with us, or with the terrorists?" For lack of a better phrase, we were on a war roll and nobody was going to stop Iraq from happening. By the time the public at large began to realize it, Bush was already into his second term.

I've said this before, if you remove the Iraq war from history, Bush would go down with a pretty decent legacy.

Except for ignoring that whole "Bin Laden determined to attack..." thing and staying on vacay and appointing incompetent stooges to run things like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and taking a budget surplus and turning it into deficits we're still trying to deal with and giving Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other big banks an exemption from the net capital rule which allowed them to take their debt exposure leverage from 3:1 to 40:1, and that "special" exemption they gave BP in February 2001, which allowed them to build the Deepwater Horizon without an acoustic shutoff switch that they'd had to install in other wells, which helps if there ever were a leak at the floor, which what do you know, did happen and the overall mangling of the language and groping of other world leaders, these are just a few things that stick at the top of my head, but yeah, without all these, perhaps Bush may have scraped up a close to decent legacy.

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/5044/libyanwoman2012election.jpg

Ask these people if it was worth it.

Oh, so sorry, I forgot they already answered that.

James!: MyKingdomForYourHorse: James!: MyKingdomForYourHorse: James!: It was supposed to be a show of force but really if just taught the world that you can occupy the largest army in the world for over a decade with a hand full of fanatics and twenty year old technology.

You'd think we'd had learned that lesson seeing that we helped that same thing in Afghanistan

Nobody was really paying attention to Afghanistan.

I don't think a great many people were paying attention to anything during that decade.

We'll just go ahead and mark down 2000 to 2010 as the lost years for America

The decade America got black out drunk started a bunch of fights and lost all of it's money gambling.


That's actually a pretty good description. I will be stealing that.
Hopefully, we can go into a recovery program that doesn't involve a lot of Jesus.

Something just struck me funny about the insurgency: If all Iraqis (and most humans) agree that Hussein should've been disassembled, and many insurgents are capable of fashioning a device that will blow a hole in a LAV, how is it that nobody thought to do this until after the guy they actually wanted to get rid of was already dead?

Mugato: gopher321: O I L

/that's the reason
//shh don't tell anyone

Yeah, because gas is so much cheaper now.

HALIBURTON

and Dubya's ego. Those are the reasons.

The latter two, definitely, but the first could still be valid. You don't seriously expect the oil companies to pass the savings onto us, do you?

He asks one kurdish person.  That isn't meaningful statistically.

"Saddam tortures people" isn't compelling as a reason to go to war; just imagine Bush using that and leaving out any nonsense about WMDs as his sole justification for going to war.

James!: MyKingdomForYourHorse: James!: It was supposed to be a show of force but really if just taught the world that you can occupy the largest army in the world for over a decade with a hand full of fanatics and twenty year old technology.

You'd think we'd had learned that lesson seeing that we helped that same thing in Afghanistan

Nobody was really paying attention to Afghanistan.

I don't think a great many people were paying attention to anything during that decade.

We'll just go ahead and mark down 2000 to 2010 as the lost years for America

That's really strange because everything was really great under Saddam and his sadistic sons.

James!: It was supposed to be a show of force but really if just taught the world that you can occupy the largest army in the world for over a decade with a hand full of fanatics and twenty year old technology.

You'd think we'd had learned that lesson seeing that we helped that same thing in Afghanistan