The Iraq War retrospective Thread

[Thecla]

I'm not seeing a disaster.

No idea what I can say to that...

So what I'm saying is that now knowing this, the threat was there but not realized... if you put yourself in the shoes of an intelligence analyst in the mid to late 90's and you know that high ranking Iraqi's are meeting in Sudan with known high level al Queda, what would you believe?

This is an extraordinarily thin thread on which to hang a weighty conclusion. A less threadbare case for conspiracy could be made for almost any unpleasant country you care to mention. Hindsight was not necessary to realize that an Iraq-al Qaeda conspiracy put was an unlikely one.

I think this war was unique in how quickly it was executed. The pencil pushers couldn't keep up with the tanks. There was a definite vacuum between destroying the administration and rebuilding it which was exacerbated by the swiftness in which every city fell almost simultaneously.

Are you really suggesting they shouldn't have planned for these eventualities before they launched the war?

Who started the one in 1991?

Iraq started that one.

Ok, so you leave Saddam in power, and then what happens? We lift sanctions? We allow him to rebuild his military industrial capabilities. Then, what happens?

Well, after he's used his non-existent connections to al Qaeda to supply them with his non-existent WMDs, Iraq creaks along much as it has before, and who knows what happens after that. Maybe Iraq collapses, maybe Hussein commits further acts of aggression which elicits a coordinated international response, maybe he gets assassinated, maybe he decides after a while to try and reintegrate Iraq in the international economy (like Ghadafy)...

If I understand you correctly (and maybe I don't), you believe the war was necessary in order to prevent the possibility that Iraq might reconstitute it's weapons programs at some indeterminate time in the future. If so, that's an extraordinarily flimsy and unwise rationale for war.