Among other things, pre-war Iraq was crippled by sanctions. You’ll never be able to separate the end of sanctions from any improvement you think you see, even if you think you see that improvement. Never mind that nobody is really pointing to the actual improvement in concrete terms.
To me, the biggest challenge here is more in the area of ethics than political science. Even if there are objective criteria in present-day Iraq that compare favorably to the same criteria pre-war, saying the war was overall a net positive skirts very close to an ends justifies the means argument. “We had to destroy the village to save it” comes to mind.
Remember that F-35 that hit the ramp of the Vinson, skidded across the deck, and slid off the carrier? The accident report is in: the pilot tried to hotdog the landing
Timex
3341
However, around the 28:30 point in that video, it seems like it was not a result of him hotdogging it:
From the sound of it, it seems like it wasn’t hotdogging it, but that they screwed up the checklist, and didn’t turn on the APC/Autothrottle… so during the landing, he’s coming in slow, and pulls up, expecting that the autothrottle will automatically increase power… but he forgot to engage the APC, so when he pulls up and the power doesn’t increase… it fucks up and bad things happen.
vyshka
3342
Nice shot from the u-2 checking out the Chinese balloon (from cnn article):
Houngan
3343
Interesting, do they require the APC for landing, I assume it’s a system to put the throttle to military max as they have to do in case of an arrestor miss? AKA they were relying on cruise control to kick in and didn’t react quickly enough when it didn’t?
FWIW, my outdated understanding is that during a carrier landing you ease down to the deck but then whack on full throttle so that if you miss all the cables, you can still be flying when you shoot off the other end. May or may not still be the case.
Timex
3344
I do not believe it is doing what you are describing here. I think it’s more like a system that automatically adjusts the engines to give you specific performance, like airspeed. This article here talks about the older system, magic carpet, which does a similar thing.
Basically, when coupled with the Delta flight path, the APC is kind of like autopilot for landing, let’s you worry about less variables when landing.
It is not required, apparently. The current landing checklist says that the pilot can enable it, if desired.
In this case, the pilot THOUGHT he had enabled it, and as he’s approaching the deck he loses control of the aircraft. I think that since he didn’t have the APC engaged, but thought he did, he is coming in and making some adjustments, expecting the aircraft to do the rest… He then gets behind the aircraft and isn’t able to make the manual corrections necessary to do a fully manual landing.
Houngan
3345
Interesting, reading the link it’s way beyond what I thought, it’s taking in all the tiny variables in the ship, pitch, roll, air movement, etc. Very impressive.
Timex
3346
Yeah, now imagine you are expecting your aircraft to be doing all that… Except it’s not. And you are about to impact the deck at high speed in like 5 seconds.
Oh, one of the changes that was recommended after this incident was to make the landing checklist mandate that you use APC/DFP, and not make it optional.
The pilot would still have to do it though.
RichVR
3347
ITT:
People who never played serious flight sims.
Sorry if that’s a bad take. I’m kinda out there tonight.
As he said “…it’s not Naval Aviator proof”
KevinC
3350
It was my worry at the time that an invasion of Iraq was going to undermine our credibility for decades to come, especially when it came to opposing other nation’s aggression. As the years went on, I also worried we were going to spend so much treasure and lives in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan that it was going to leave us tired for when we really needed to intervene somewhere.
I feel like both are playing out to some extent now, with Russia invading Ukraine. It’s harder to hold the moral high ground when we invaded and occupied a country like Iraq for a decade. It also seemed like it fueled the isolationists that make up Trump’s base… which is incredibly annoying, because it was these same fucks calling me a traitor for not “supporting our troops” when I opposed going into (and staying in) Iraq.
The most depressing thing about it all is I was sure that when GWB left office, I had seen the worst president in my lifetime. And then this country followed it up with Trump just 8 short years later.
This was all just a long-winded way of me saying GWB, Cheney, and the GOP can go get fucked and die in an Ohio toxic train derailment.
Scotten
3351
I hugely supported the 2nd Iraq War because I believed what I was being told. Our failures during that period really hurt my opinion of Bush and the GOP.
In 2003 I was (pauses for math) 17 years old, and with the absurd overconfidence of a 17 year-old boy I absolutely knew that Bush, Cheney, et al were full of shit. Turns out I was right, though I certainly didn’t have any insider information or deep insight to back it up.
RichVR
3353
I was 44. But yeah, same.
dfs
3354
Richard Nixon was the first republican president elected in my lifetime and also the LEAST corrupt republican president elected in my lifetime.
KevinC
3355
I was a little unsure of what to believe until the invasion happened and within a couple days they were immediately pivoting away from WMD and instead talking about nation building, spreading democracy, etc.
antlers
3356
JonRowe
3357
One of my favorite lines from, and probably the biggest lesson from “Hamilton”
Winning is easy, governing is harder.
We had a plan for part 1, but not part 2. That was the real tragedy.
