Or, our troop reductions provide the incentive for the groups to find a political solution.
We engage other de facto powers in the region (like gasp Iran) to jointly provide assistance (financial aid, weapons) to groups that will ensure stability (the rest of the Middle East wants stability in Iraq also).
After some civil unrest, a political solution is finally found.
Beats the hell out of a $150BB/year occupation.
Edit: I’d also question the assertion that somehow Obama the president will be privy to information on Iraq that Obama the Senator doesn’t. So this question again implies that Obama already knows the situation on the ground in Iraq and is intentionally deceiving us as to his true plans.
If I understand the current attitude of the “we must stay forever or bad things will happen” crowd, it’s something along the lines of:
Irrational fear without accountability or oversight got us into this war, and by god it’ll be irrational fear without accountability or oversight that’ll get us out-- someday… a hundred years from now.
What’s your definition of “staying?” If we have some number of forces in Iraq, but we aren’t conducting active search and destroy missions, etc. does that constitute “staying” for you?
Where do you come up with this? We sure have cracked down on those Saudis since they asked us to leave. Also, my impression is that the amount of resentment against the U.S. world wide due to Iraq is now much greater than a specific extremist group pissed off because we had troops in Saudi Arabia.
I would claim that the resentment against the US due to Iraq is due more to how we did it than because we did it. But that’s true in general.
Competent leadership might have prevented many of the scandals associated with the war, but we still wouldn’t have found WMDs. Sure a functional Iraq would better, but there would still be anti-american sentiment built up because of that (which works to Al Queda’s advantage). That also doesn’t mean that Al Qaeda wouldn’t have bombed that mosque helping to incite the civil war (which may have broken out anyway due to the fact that the only thing holding Iraq together was force). Thus, the only way to probably keep Iraq together after the invasion would have been overwhelming force and a draft would have killed the war politically. With a competent president, we may not even be in Iraq. There are just too many unknowns to say the neocon ideology would have worked if it hadn’t been Bush.
Man, I really hope Obama can pull this off, because I see a lot of people trying to make excuses for a failed ideological view of the world.
I’m not here to defend “neocon ideology” or any such nonsense; maybe that’s why you’re confused. What I’m saying is that our options were the same – our hand had been forced – regardless of the ideology of who was in power.
Sure, monitoring Iraq for WMDs was working just fine. The problem was that we couldn’t monitor them any more, because our presence in SA – especially the presence of female soldiers who had a tendency to undress in the hot desert, in an extremely conservative Islamic country, that was then used to recruit folks to fly airplanes into buildings – couldn’t continue. We had the two crappy choices of either abandoning Iraq to its own devices or invading.
We were probably going to be in Iraq a long time no matter how well we pursued the invasion, however. Obama’s shown (when he changed his position on capital gains tax) that if the facts prove him to be wrong, he’s perfectly willing and capable of changing his mind. Don’t be surprised if Obama wins and we don’t leave Iraq entirely for a long time, once he’s briefed on the whole situation.
A friend in the region, huh? That’s certainly optimistic.
More likely it will be a symbol of western imperialism, a long-term occupation that can continue to serve as a rallying call for continued anti-American attacks both in Iraq and around the world.
First off, Hans Blix would disagree with you that we “couldn’t monitor Iraq any more”.
Also, it’s not an either-or scenario - we could pull troops out of Saudi Arabia, while still launching fly-overs from Turkey, or Kuwait, or out of the Persian Gulf. Where do you get this crap from?
The Bush administration wanted to remake the middle east, they were looking for an excuse to invade Iraq, and so they manufactured one. Trying to gussy it up after the fact is intellectually dishonest.
I guarantee you that Al Gore would’ve found a way to continue monitoring for WMDs and enforcing the no-fly zone without invading. Hell, McCain probably would’ve also.
Turkey categorically said “No way.” The Persian Gulf? Same problem as Kuwait – they’d always know what direction we’d be coming from, and could concentrate their AA fire on that choke-point. Our planes would get slaughtered. What do you propose next in this imaginary fantasy Gore-led world of yours – we build a base with our good friends the Syrians, or our even better friends in Iran? I’m sure Iran would just LOVE having a US military base on their soil, given our long history of great friendship together.
Trying to gussy it up after the fact is intellectually dishonest.
I was saying (and hearing) the same things prior to the invasion, so I’m not sure where you get that accusation.
Component leadership wouldn’t have invaded in the first place. Contrary to the bullshit you hear, no Democratic president but Joe Lieberman would have been stupid enough to think Iraq really had WMDs when the CIA told him no.
Umm, that’s crazy talk. Our hand was not forced with regard to Iraq.
The problem was that we couldn’t monitor them any more, because our presence in SA – especially the presence of female soldiers who had a tendency to undress in the hot desert, in an extremely conservative Islamic country, that was then used to recruit folks to fly airplanes into buildings – couldn’t continue. We had the two crappy choices of either abandoning Iraq to its own devices or invading.
Who is feeding you this bullshit? Or is this some way of relieving guilt after the fact for supporting the nutcases in office? Our presence in Saudi Arabia had little to do with our ability to monitor Iraq for WMDs, or else we would have known he didn’t have any. We didn’t finish leaving Saudi Arabia until 2003 (2 years after 9/11) and even then, that process had started well before the attacks.
In no way, shape, or form, were we forced into invading Iraq after 9/11. We were forced into invading Afghanistan, but not Iraq.
“I was a little puzzled by the frenzy that I set off with what I thought was a pretty innocuous statement,” he said on a flight from Montana to St. Louis. “I am absolutely committed to ending the war. I will call my joint chiefs of staff in and give them a new assignment and that is to end the war.”
Obama will face Republican John McCain, a staunch advocate of the war, in a November presidential race that is certain to focus heavily on the future of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Obama said he did not make a mistake Wednesday with his choice of words in describing his Iraq position – even though he called a second news conference a few hours after his initial comments to clarify his stance.
He laid the blame with reporters.
“I’m surprised at how finely calibrated every single word was measured. I wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t said before, that I didn’t say a year ago or when I was a United States senator,” said Obama, who is still a senator from Illinois.
“If you look at our position, it’s been very consistent,” he said. “I am unwavering in the belief that this has been a strategic mistake and that this war has to end. It would be a further strategic mistake for us to continue with an open-ended occupation of the sort that John McCain has promised.”
Obama said his willingness to consider changing conditions on the ground and the potential ramifications of the pull-out plan was a strength – and a sharp contrast to Republican President Bush’s stay-the-course strategy in Iraq.
“The tactics of how we ensure our troops are safe as we pull out, how we execute the withdrawal – those are things that are all based on facts and conditions,” he said.
“I’m not somebody who, like George Bush, is willing to ignore facts on the basis of my preconceived notions. I want to pay attention to what is happening on the ground.”
Under heavy pressure from McCain, who criticized his failure to visit Iraq since 2006, Obama plans to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. The dates have not been announced for security reasons but the trip is expected within the next month.
While Obama would not admit a mistake in describing his views on Iraq, he said he had plenty of room for improvement as a presidential candidate.
“One of the things I’ve always tried to do is learn from mistakes and try to get better,” he said.“There is a learning curve and growth being a presidential candidate. I think I’m a much better candidate now than I was six months ago or 12 months ago. I think I’ll be a better communicator and even more effective six months from now.”
But again, his spokespeople are saying, consistently and using the same wording (a sign that the message has been crafted by the campaign) that he is only talking about removing the “combat troops” in the 16 month timeframe, leaving advisers, training forces, “anti-terrorism” forces, and “protection” forces.
So I’ll ask again - I know the hard left will be unhappy with that, as they want ALL U.S. forces out of Iraq. What is the expectation of folks here?
Realistically, down to, say, a thousand advisors, stop trying to pacify the country and let them figure it out, dismantle the green zone and that enormous embarassment of an embassy, and stop trying to turn the country into a resource colony/Rapture. Of course we aren’t going to abandon the country completely.
Sigh. Where exactly will these troops come from? Are you expecting a draft? The surge is already unmaintainable.
It seems like you’re pretty strongly committed to keeping troops in Iraq. So, instead of trying to convince the rest of us that Obama is lying about his intentions despite the fact that there is no evidence of this, why don’t you just vote for the candidate that agrees with you?
So, the US Military, armed with cruise missiles that have a 10-meter accuracy, can’t keep the mighty Iraqi army from closing down a 200km long border, so our only choice was a disastrous $500 Billion war?
OK, Rimbo, whatever helps you sleep at night, man.
You’re addressing some phantom belief system that isn’t up for discussion. What I said is true whether they actually had WMDs or not. The claim that they did was just a sales pitch, because the real reason was not the sort of thing you share with the general public – and I said as much even back then. WMDs were always a red herring. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have invaded, nor does it mean we should have said, “Guys, you know, Saddam’s really a bad person, and we’re not getting along with Saudi Arabia like we used to.” That would be an even bigger fuckup than what we did.
Sure, in the same sense that 2+2 isn’t actually equal to 4 until you actually add them together. Our hand was forced with regard to Saudi Arabia, but the base was only there to monitor Iraq, and there were no other places available where we could effectively monitor them. I guess we could’ve tried to enforce UN regulations from Kuwait – and failed miserably. Or I guess you could live in a dreamworld where the UN would magically lock Iraq out of WMDs with no military support whatsoever.
Why do you keep attacking this straw man?
The base in SA had no effect in our monitoring their WMD program? You can’t accuse me of going off the deep end and then make a statement like that. And given that most of Saddam’s closest advisors themselves believed that they had a WMD program, it’s easy to see why a foreign intel agency might make the same mistake or find conflicting information. It’s just light-minded silliness to think if we’d just removed our desire to promote the WMD story to the UN that we’d magically have realized The Truth prior to the invasion. But if that makes you feel self-justified (hey, I can play the ad hominem game, too), you go on believing that.
Take 200km and divide it by 2x the effective range of a SAM missile.
Take the S-125, which has a terrible range, only about 15km. It’s far less effective than other things the Iraqis had, but effective enough to take out a Stealth Fighter in Kosovo in 1999. You could put ten of those in a row and lock down the border with plenty of overlap.
It sounds like you also agree with these, correct me if I’m wrong:
The US has the right to invade any country it wants, regardless of whether or not the world agrees or we have a reason that makes sense to more than 55% of the country, or any other country.
The US has the unilateral right to police the world’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
Invasions are an acceptable way for the US to police the world’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
All of this applies even though Iraq had no nuclear program, the CIA actually knew this, and the Bush administration forced them to say they were working on nuclear weapons anyway?
And despite your previous statement, the ONW ran missions to enforce the no-fly zone out of Turkey all the way up to the beginning of the Iraq Invasion.
Am I missing something here, or is your argument just based on incorrect facts?
The base in SA had no effect in our monitoring their WMD program? You can’t accuse me of going off the deep end and then make a statement like that. And given that most of Saddam’s closest advisors themselves believed that they had a WMD program, it’s easy to see why a foreign intel agency might make the same mistake or find conflicting information.
“Conflicting” information? There was no information at all except from the charlatan Chalabi, his cronies, some source from Germany that no one even in the US or part of any US agency even talked to, and false information gained from torturing Al Qaeda members.
It’s just light-minded silliness to think if we’d just removed our desire to promote the WMD story to the UN that we’d magically have realized The Truth prior to the invasion. But if that makes you feel self-justified (hey, I can play the ad hominem game, too), you go on believing that.
We wouldn’t have realized “the truth” but we could have kept pressuring Iraq to comply with inspectors and inspectors were even incredulous that Iraq had anything. If this was so inevitable and necessary, why didn’t we have UN support?
