Questions from me to you about the war in Iraq

I'd like to hear some DUers opinions and not talking heads "opinions."

1. Do you think bush/cheney et al knew there were no WMDs? Or do you think they really thought they were there and would be the perfect ploy to be able to go into Iraq? (I am leaving out the possibility that they actually went in because they thought the US was threatened or to "spread freedom" because I find both of those scenarios so far-fetched as to be pathetic).

2. Why do you think they didn't commit as many troops as needed? It wasn't as if we didn't have a RECENT EXAMPLE (Desert Storm) of needing tons of troops, so why didn't they? Sheer incompetence or something more sinister (planned failure???)?

3. In the end, WHY do you think the bushies did this? PNAC goals? US bases? Oil? War profiteering? All of the above? Something I didn't mention? Big, high-level stuff, what was the MAIN reason or reasons?

Thanks!

1.) I think they were warned that there was a good chance that there wasn't WMDs, but they chose to ignore the warnings.
2) They didn't commit enough troops because they were testing the PNAC minimalist troop theory.
3) PNAC goals, which include most of the other reasons. It didn't hurt that Furious George had the chance to go one-up on Daddy.

"testing the PNAC minimalist troop theory."

Damn glad Mr. Moonbeam got out of the Army when he did and didn't join the NG. He would have been part of this immoral experiment.

Nice of them.

1. They never said that Iraq was a threat to the US, which it was not. WMD's? I'm sure they thought he had something. It was 2003. Everybody has something.

2. Rummy acted confident so they followed him. Then they didn't want to admit they were wrong. It's faith-based policy.

3. They did it because they felt like projecting power.

they did use the word threat.

The fact that members of this administration have suggested on more than one occasion that we should invade Iraq is damning enough to make me consider they tried to make the crime fit the punishment by concocting a story believable enough to get a consensus of public opinion.

here are my thoughts:

1. I believe that since Iraq didn't adequately account for mustard gas, Nerve gas and other things in artilliary shells, almost everybody believed they still had some left over from the Iran/Iraq war. The nuclear crap was made up pure and simple from Chalabi and his merry band of thieves. Remember Wolfowitz's comment soon after the war began? He said that WMDs were the "bureaucratic reason" they thought the country would rally around.

2. Chalabi is the answer to this question also. The false info that Chalabi was providing to the OSP in the Pentagon indicated that this woudl be a "cakewalk" and would require just the bare minimum of troops from the beginning. Afterwards, when we weren't greeted as liberators, Bush couldn't send in more troops because he would have to admit making a mistake....and we all know how that goes.

3. My best guess is the invasion was a priority for two reasons: PNAC vision of the middle east AND Israeli security...Wolfowitz, Pearle, Feith and Grover Nordquist all have strong ties to Sharon's government and are anxious to do his bidding.

Just my $.02 worth.

have a good point with your answers to #3 and about #2: CHALABI??? bush et al make a big deal about not listening to other countries, but one wack job caused us to deploy too few troops? If that is true, the bush administration is even more wacked out and incompetent than I thought, and that's pretty hard to do.

that all the faulty information which contradicted the CIA was "stovepiped" from the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon (Doug Feith's shop according to Lt Col Kwiakowski) directly to Cheney. And where did OSP get it's intelligence? Does the name "Curveball" ring a bell? It turns out Curveball was one of Chalabi's friends who claimed to have access inside of Saddam's regime......a claim which later proved to be false.

That's why I think what I do.

1. They didn't know there were no WMDs. They probably figured there would at least be a few old rusty ones found, and that Saddam might have a few undetected weapons programs going, as in the fanciful cartoons Colin Powell showed the UN. But Admin didn't sincerely believe that Iraq was an imminent threat, or that for the purposes of stopping Saddam from getting WMDs that war was superior to inspections.

2. They didn't commit enough troops because: a.) they really did think people would be throwing flowers and waving flags and b.) Rumsfeld had/has his own zealous fantasy of semi-privatizing, semi-outsourcing the military. His recent SWAT-team style musings on the future military revise and extend this fond fantasy of his. Remember his crackling pride in the first days of the invasion? "It's going to be a war the likes of which you have never before seen . . . blah blah blah." He was going to do it the right corporate way, and on the cheap, by jingo.

3. I think you're on the money with PNAC goals being the big motivator. Those guys were/are crazy "idealists" of a sort, and some of them are hanging on to their strange geopolitical zealotry at all costs.

On edit: Add that US wants big bases in the region to quickly mobilize for probabilities like destabilization of Saudi Arabia (and the oil supply there, which US sometimes views as its very own).

I think the military bases theory is quite credible, especially considering that we are building 14 of them now.

Also, damn if you are right on #2, rumsfeld is a FUCKING IDIOT and shouldn't be in charge of the corner ice cream shop, know what I mean?

1. Yes, they knew. "We want to go to war because of the Neocon agenda" doesn't make a great political line.

2. Remains to be seen. My take is that they knew this, too; the chaos provides a ready trigger for escalation and a good excuse for staying.

3. Since the reasons politicians do things are almost always totally unrelated to reasons they say they do things, the only credible measure is to look at the effects of the things they've done. Syria and Iran are now sandwiched between US troops (Israel and Iraq, and Iraq and Afghanistan respectively); Iraq will for the foreseeable future have a puppet governnment -- and that has all sorts of economic (oil) implications; if the US public "buys" the Iraq war in November, they will win the elections -- without it they would have to be running on the loss of jobs and economic meltdown, and the failure to get Osama; we (taxpayers) paid the defense contractors to bomb the shit out of Iraq and now we're paying Halliburton to "rebuild" it, which is nothing but a big swindle.

The only mistake they may have made is that they thought that the September 11th "wave" would last longer than it did. We'll find out in November.

great analysis. You are a bit more tinfoil hatty, but I really liked what you had to say. I guess I must be too! Still, it made sense, especially #3.

But I have to add that the only thing that makes me sound "tinfoil hatty" -- as far as I can tell -- is that I don't buy into their "incompetence". It's actualy _the_ big issue of mine, and the pivotal point of my disagreement with most liberals: these guys are not incompetent. Turn around. See that big gut huffin' and puffin' on top of your ass? He didn't get there by being "incompetent".

And for the PC crowd, a disclaimer: I've nothing whatsoever against anal sex, whatever the gender, so spare me.

wink wink

But I think it's possible that bush IS totally incompetent. I don't think he's really in charge, but that doesn't mean I let him off the hook. I think he truly is a dimwit, albeit an evil one.

The rest of them are very competent, but unfortunately use their powers for evil intead of good.

wink wink

Bush _is_ actually incompetent. And that is exactly why they put him on top of their ticket. He appears "folksy" to the freepers and "incompetent" to the rest of us. It's a brilliant, brilliant two-sided propaganda strategy. Imagine if, say, Dick Cheney had been the president during the last four years; do you think that, for example, LIHOP would be a far-flung "tinfoil hat" theory in the mainstream, a sheer taboo to even bring up, after all of the evidence that is available even to the mainstream? But it's so much easier to believe that the monkey just didn't read his Aug 6th PDB and took too many vacations.

wow, it was even more brilliant than I thought of them to put bush at the top of the ticket.

The only thing I don't like about acknowledging this is the undercurrent of letting him off the hook. I don't. He's an adult and he signed on.

I hold ALL of them accountable.

1. I think they believed there would be some small token stockpiles of something-or-other -- just enough to legitimate their actions. And I think they figured that everything would go so smoothly and peacefully (see question 2) that people wouldn't notice: it would all just be a big success.

2. For the initial invasion, they knew that Saddam's armed forces were just a miserable shadow of what they were in Desert Storm. So defeating the uniformed army really would be easy, and wouldn't require all of the heavy divisions of Gulf War I. But why didn't they commit the troops necessary to bring order and security after the defeat of the Iraqi army? Because they believed those INC assholes like Chalabi who told them they would be greated with flowers. They were blinded by neo-con ideology -- the naive Wolfowitz's in the administration.

3. Everything in the region has to do with oil. Yes US bases, yes profiteering, yes support of Israel, but to what end? Control of a strategic resource: oil.

How's that?

I was wondering about the oil.

Do you or anyone know how that's going by the way? Are the Iraqis sabotaging the pipelines so much it has been a wash or are we controlling/taking Iraqi oil yet?

I'm not as up on that angle of this war....

1. I think they thought some old crap would be found that they could spin into "justification"; remember the delirium from the rightwingnuts over those 2 wienie trucks (oops, sold to Iraq by the UK for hydrogen balloons) or every time Faux Moos announced "WE FOUND EM!" (oops we didn't but we won't bother reporting a correction).

But I believe they believed they'd be instantly "welcomed", like Clinton always is in Kosovo, and of course the American public wouldn't then give a damn about the lies, the terrorizing by their own government and the total lack of justification.

2. See above; they really did think they'd be greeted as "liberators" and bombarded with roses and sweets. THEY REALLY ARE THAT IGNORANT.

3. They did it for geopolitics. The US National Energy Policy, under bush, calls for "securing the world's natural resources INCLUDING BY THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE, if necessary"

Energy = OIL.

The #1 future threat the neocons fear is China; China has no oil itself. None. Must import all it uses, and China is fast becoming a huge user of oil.

If China is prevented access from oil, China becomes far less of a threat to America.

So yes, it's all PNAC.

The war-profiteering is gravy.

The bases in Iraq are gravy and pulling all our troops out of SA is a sop to bush's best buddy Saudi Arabia -they desperately wanted US troops out of their country; this way the USA could pull all troops out of SA and still "save face" doing so.

(And how's THIS for irony...ALL BIN LADEN WANTED, long before 911, was for America to remove US troops from Saudi Arabia.)

Is it moral that (so far) tens of thousands of Iraqis and 1069 of our men & women have died for what boils down to someone else's oil?

And if you REALLY don't think it's oil...how about that US agreement with CANADA; Canada MUST supply the USA with a minimum amount of oil, EVEN if that meant Canada had to go low or do without, herself. Wanna bet how long it would take US troops to invade Canada if Canada said no more oil for the USA???

"America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades," Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham told a National Energy Summit on March 19, 2001. "The failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation's economic prosperity, compromise our national security, and literally alter the way we lead our lives."

"Energy supply" = other nations' OIL.

And that's a hell of a lot of gravy, but I do think the PNAC goals were the overriding ones.

Funny everytime I have brought up PNAC with a freeper they refuse to discuss it. Period. Even the ones who KNOW about PNAC. No, ESPECIALLY them. The others say "huh???"

1. Do you think bush/cheney et al knew there were no WMDs? Or do you think they really thought they were there and would be the perfect ploy to be able to go into Iraq? (I am leaving out the possibility that they actually went in because they thought the US was threatened or to "spread freedom" because I find both of those scenarios so far-fetched as to be pathetic).

They didn't know, and didn't want to know. They hoped there'd be some, but there were none. It would have been hard to sell a war on them when they didn't have even so much as the means to do us harm at all. This was the big play to get ahold of Iraq's oil fields.

Contrary to what I think is the majority of DU, Cheney and Bush aren't stupid, they're just evil. They know that either we get ahold of that Iraqi oil or our economy is in the most serious trouble it's ever been since the Great Depression before Russia's does. Think about that for a minute. We're going to go broke before Russia does because of their massive oil reservoir. They can do whatever they want for decades after our economy falls in the dumpster. We need to be the last man standing as oil falls apart, or we'll get attacked at home. Tell you the truth, I think they might be right.

We had to go. Maybe 9-11 was known or something, or maybe it was helped along a little, or maybe our administration did it to us. Any way you look at it, the whole world was behind us on the war on terror, and it was a great excuse to just attack Iraq and steal the most important material prize in the history of human warfare. This was a really really big deal, folks. They know our economy is going to collapse soon, and they're building up the military as much as they are because they want to kick ass and take names as the world runs out of gas.

2. Why do you think they didn't commit as many troops as needed? It wasn't as if we didn't have a RECENT EXAMPLE (Desert Storm) of needing tons of troops, so why didn't they? Sheer incompetence or something more sinister (planned failure???)?

That I don't know. There's a good arguement either way. In my opinion, we're there for the oil. Maybe we need a reason to ramp up the occupation with more troops and prepare to spend 20 years there "straightening things out." Maybe it would have been a bad idea to go in and be successful immediately cause why would we stay? Or maybe it was like a million other things and was just misjudged quite a bit. Evil, intelligent... but not infallible.

3. In the end, WHY do you think the bushies did this? PNAC goals? US bases? Oil? War profiteering? All of the above? Something I didn't mention? Big, high-level stuff, what was the MAIN reason or reasons?

All of the above. As unbelievable as this may sound, we may look back on this president and say, Well thank God he built up the military as much as he did just before our economy went down the toilet. At least we'll be able to defend ourselves if we get invaded by all the countries we fucked with all these years. Seriously, I think we're in the middle of a series of resource wars that we will either win or end up under the leadership of either Russia or China. I think that is very possible, and these men my just have it right. I hope Kerry sees all this stuff, too.

I just wish that we would have been THINKING more and just taken the 120 billion and bought acres upon acres upon square miles by the hundreds and erected wind power generation stations instead of poisoning a whole country with depleted uranium and causing the suffering of thousands of human beings. We'd be in the middle of pushing ourselves away from the hairy man-boobs of Saudi Arabia, you know?

reducing our dependence on foreign oil needs to be our NUMBER ONE PRIORITY.

Everything else is secondary. We've been TALKING about doing it since the early 70s if not before. But we have to get off the pot and do it. For real.

On edit: I will never thank bush et al for this.

1.) Yes, they all knew there was nothing. Dubya was highly doubtful of the...ahem..evidence, and after Gulf War 1, Cheney said Sadaam was "bottled up".Plus they didn't let the inspectors finish their job, and of course they have given 18,000 different reasons for going in.

2.) If they had enough troops, there wouldn't have been such widespread chaos and insurgency and there wouldn't have been a reason to stay.

3.) It was definately about PNAC goals, which include US bases. The oil and war profiteering were just icing on the cake.

I can't wait to get rid of those frickin scumbags!!!

I think #2 is bothering me more and more all the time.

If they did, indeed, commit too few troops in the hopes of extending our stay, that is just criminal. Just criminal. Might as well send our troops in their with bullseyes painted on their backs.

Bastards.

Here's my thinking on the subject, condensed as much as possible.

1) The general consensus of the defense community was that Hussein probably had WMD (even Clinton thought this was the case), but this was not viewed with excessive alarm because Hussein was considered "deterable", especially after the crippling blows dealt to him in the first Gulf War. Further, Hussein's power was easily contained.

Bush under represents the success of that containment and emphasizes associations with terrorists. (Hussein, like all Middle Eastern leaders, had such connections ... but he never trusted terrorists much. Their ideology and methods were a threat to him.) Much has been made recently, for example, of Iraq giving refuge to Abu Nidal or the restrictions placed on him by the Iraqi government. Restrictions which he eventually exceeded.

Less has been said about the manner of his death. (Poor man committed suicide. Had to shoot himself multiple times. Pity.) Why did this happen? Because Sadaam wasn't about to risk his own ass for Anu Nidal, and Nidal had stepped out of line. That is the essence of "deterable".

As has been noted elsewhere, more fanatical or desperate (and hence less deterable) regimes are also developing or possess WMD, yet their countries of not yet been invaded.

2) Much of the intelligence re: WMD appears to have emerged from Israel, and because of its source was regarded as being highly reliable. Oh, well. As a nation, we need to carefully consider our relationships with an "ally" so willing to manipulate us, especially when we evaluate intelligence they provide to us. Israel has a right to exist, and we have a right to apply the principle of "caveat emptor".

3) 9/11 and the WMD canard provided a rationale suitable for public consumption for the invasion of Iraq. The real motivations for that invasion appear to have been to a) establish a long term military presence in the Middle East and b) establish control over major oil supplies. This is the first major step towards the establishment of a "benign hegemony", a world order structured to suit the purposes of certain interests.

I believe the urgency behind this imperial movement is a recognition that dwindling resources, exploding demand (especially from China), and the effects of global warming and pollution will create a "perfect storm" which threatens the structure of the high energy technology based civilization created by the West. The basic strategy is to get in the drivers seat before that happens, and to project to the rest of the world an idealistic vision justifying imperial action.

Iraq was chosen because of its high value (oil) and because it was perceived as being weak and ripe for the plucking. A good place to start. Resistance to imperialism would decline as American citizens experienced the economic benefits of receiving the spoils of war. (This relates to the vaguely expressed concept of an "ownership society" Bush has been touting over the past year or so.)

But in order for this strategy to work, Iraq has to be secured and transformed into a profitable enterprise. That is not happening. I think that has so shocked the PNAC'ers that they are not sure what to do next.

and this part scares the shit out of me:

Iraq was chosen because of its high value (oil) and because it was perceived as being weak and ripe for the plucking. A good place to start. Resistance to imperialism would decline as American citizens experienced the economic benefits of receiving the spoils of war. (This relates to the vaguely expressed concept of an "ownership society" Bush has been touting over the past year or so.)

But in order for this strategy to work, Iraq has to be secured and transformed into a profitable enterprise. That is not happening. I think that has so shocked the PNAC'ers that they are not sure what to do next.


So does all the oil stuff. I keep wondering if I will be telling my grandchildren tales of me actually driving around in my gas-powered minivan and having, you know, electric lights and everything and them just listening slack-jawed at such marvels I experienced.

but it will require structural changes which are not welcomed by the existing economic power structure.

The neo-cons want to dominate experience, but the tidal waves of change rushing towards us cannot be dominated. We can surf 'em, however.

1. i don't think they knew either way, i think they took the intel that backed their claim and left the rest. it was merely their excuse for going to war, like wolfowitz said.

2. incompetence. they had no idea, and i think they really believed it would be a cakewalk.

3. this is the real million dollar question, and it's the one that's kept me tossing and turning since 2002. it's pretty clear that this was planned from the beginning. i think it was oil, a hatred for saddam, maybe a little PNAC, a way to boost their job approval rating, and probably a few things we don't know anything about.

there are several answers to question #3, too. It isn't just one thing. I do think PNAC and oil (related) top the list. Hatred for SH was just a fringe benefit for bushie et al, I'm sure.

1) bushco knew there was no WMD....

2) they thought it would be quick and easy, no WMD, and a grateful, freshly liberated, cooporative Iraqi population....

3) all else pales next to OIL OIL OIL.....

Congrats, you did it in the fewest words!

And I am still conflicted on #1, tend to agree on #2 and definitely agree with you on #3. Thanks!

a rationale for them to flog the war to the public. It worked, to our everlasting shame.

Reasons they did it?

1. To kick the ass of an Arab country post 9/11, demonstrating the military might of the U.S. and our willingness to use it, cowing the world. Not just Arab countries, but China, N. Korea, and Europe too.

2. To establish bases and a strategic outpost, permanent, in the heart of the Middle East to strike out easily at Iran, Syria etc. The bases would be strategically valuable to actually do these things, but even the THREAT of being able to carry out these military actions would be strategically valuable. I remember how long and ponderous the buildup phase to Gulf War I was, months and months of shipping and flying equipment in.

3. To control the massive oil reserves of Iraq, both for financial gain and as an issue of geopolitical strategy.

4. For domestic political gain. Think back to what was going on, what was in the news at the time the drumbeat to war began, the propaganda campaign, which started up many months before the actual invasion, the "selling" of the war. There was no good news for this president. Crap economy, Enron, corporate scandals galore. Shrubya was on the express train to one term palookaville. Now we have instant "war president", not only demanding the right to automatic support from the people, but to intimidate the media into submission. Worked like a charm during midterm elections, and most of the last 2 years, but the bloom is off the "war president" rose.

5. I think enriching corporate cronies like Halliburton was an incidental "side benefit" of the war and not a primary motivation, but that's my opinion.

I think the strategic goals of the war (obtain bases in the heart of the Middle East, intimidate the world, cementing the American empire's power and influence) were primarily those of the PNACer true believers like Wolfowitz. I've always felt that shrubya is probably NOT one of those true believers but was sold by Rove that going along with this agenda was to his political advantage by becoming a "war president" and so he went along. If they had felt it was NOT to their advantage politically I doubt they would've done it. I could be wrong.

Now, as much of the country that cheered the war now sees it for the quagmire that it is, Bush is back to maybe about where he was politically when the decision was made to do it. Maybe a little ahead, maybe worse. Hopefully enough of the country can cast the veil off its eyes in time.

I think part of it has to do with testing "lean military" PNAC doctrine, but honestly I think part of it is just plain incompetence and inexperience on the part of the people involved. In other words, though I think it was fully intended from the beginning to permanently occupy Iraq and establish bases and a puppet government, most of the Wolfowitz type ideologues driving this have little or no real military experience and didn't even consider that to occupy a large country is a daunting task.

Most of these people are very enamored of the massive technological superiority of the U.S. military which is quite impressive. It's great in the invasion phase where you're flying around in stealth bombers, dropping laser guided JDAMs and the like blowing up buildings and rolling across the country in M1A1 Abrams tanks. But as we have not invented the T2000 robotic trooper yet, actually occupying a country over the long term is a low tech task, requiring pimple faced 19 year olds from Alabama standing on street corners with a rifle and driving around in Humvees. These troopers can be shot and blown up by AK47s, RPG rounds, cell phone triggered car bombs and the like.

The early victory was well anticipated and executed, but I honestly don't think much thought was given to any but the rosiest scenarios, where the huge majority of the Iraqi people were so happy that Saddam was gone that there was no effective resistance and we could successfully occupy and control the country with a force the size of our current one or smaller.

As far as the WMDs, I think that, using "rosy scenario" projection, the PNACers, along with Rove and Bush, figured that the American people wouldn't care that it was a lie. In other words, if there were say 200 American dead which largely stopped several months ago, the whole war cost say 5-10% of what it already has, we were controlling a peaceful country with 40,000 troops, and there was no oil pipeline sabotage and we were beginning to see massive oil revenues flow into U.S. coffers, most Americans and most Repub voters wouldn't care that the reason for the war was a lie.

And I think that they would be right about that, I'm sad to say. It's only the fact that the thing is a quagmire with continued deaths and no clear exit that is not "embarrassing" to the U.S., that forces many of these former cheerleaders to confront the awful error of this war. If it were "cheap and easy" in the rosiest case scenario I painted, most of these same people would be "toasting the troops" from the comfort of their suburbs and Bush would be coasting towards an easy landslide with 60 percent of the vote. Sad but true. Human nature.

to why they didn't they commit enough troops when the gravy train was riding on it.

Part of it was holding down cost estimates to sell the war. But mostly I think the "lean military" was an essential part of the PNAC plans, without it we are exactly where we are - a military stretched too thin and a theater too large. And they believed it would work. And they believed if it didn't, we would get stuck with the bill in the form of a destabilized world that must be confronted militarily. To confront, we would need them and the industrial complex they own.

Win-win, if you look at it that way.