• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

The Iraq Invasion. Leaving aside the WMD issue, was it really worth it?

Undesired Walrus

Penultimate Amazing
Undesired Walrus
Joined
Apr 10, 2007
Messages
11,691
I was about to post this in the thread below (It is now!), as I often wonder if those split on the entire issue of Iraq, split on issues of WMD and Niger Uranium and such stuff, miss the question any person from 4-102 can ask. That is, with the absolutely monumental loss of life (600,000? 700,000?) in Iraq, has it really been worth it for the human cost?

It is curious this has become the hippy position in the mess of these debates, as presumably it is one of the most fundamental questions of all. Normal Iraqi's, who have absolutely no or little interest in politics, whether it be Bush or Hussain, Bin Laden or Zawahiri, have been killed in a similar style to crushing ants with giant chess pieces.

A common myth has been that American caused most of these deaths, which I do not accept, but that again leaves open the question of why normal Iraqi's should suffer at the hands of Zarqawi, Algerians, Jordans etc. I'm sure we can be certain the Islamist war we are watching today would not have operated in Iraq under Hussain.

After so many deaths, I cannot see how any of these people can say they have the utmost respect for human dignity.
 
Was it worth it?

I feel lied to about the WMDs which was the reason why i wasnt completely against the war in the first place. To me it depends on how much of a genocidal lunatic Hussain was. I think they could have got around the Hussain issue without invading Iraq. I feel sorry for Iraqis because most of them are just normal people and dont deserve any of the mayhem going on around them. Also if I was walking around my neighbourhood and found it blown up, my people killed and arrogant ignorant foreigners wandering around, I wouldnt be too happy myself. I think I would be very tempted to use my AK-47 against these people.

No. I don't think it was worth it. It might have been worth it for the Bush family and other oil tycoons. The whole thing is a disgrace. Iran has US troops on its west and eastern borders... and its surprising they want to develop nuclear weapons? 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq. The invasion was based on a lie and was conducted for selfish reasons.
 
Space_Ed said:
The invasion was based on a lie
Click to expand...

Well, we keep hearing this, but I don't really think it can be backed up with any evidence.

But that is really an issue for the other thread, as I couldn't really give much of an arse if the American people or British people feel they were lied to. Too much emphasis is put on the latter and former people and little to none on the Iraqi people's suffering. I think its high time people from both countries stopped complaining about their politicians treatment of them and focus on the world's treatment of the Iraqi's, whether they be by the hands of the one with the upper lip hair or the one with the speach problem.
 
Last edited:
Hmm, was it worth it. Well taking the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the strengthening of terrorist nations such as Iran, the increased recruitment to terrorist organisations, the deaths in Bali, London and Madrid, the restriction on travel, the restrictions civil liberties and the demonisation of a large group of people because of their religion on one hand and on the other hand ... Well no.
 
We went based on bad information (whether or not you believe it was active lying). In the process we created a situation that is costing us more than a trillion dollars and for which there is no clear exit strategy. How do we leave? Our leaders don't know. How do we stay? Our leaders don't know. What is victory? Our leaders don't know. They keep moving the goal posts to conform to the situation on the ground. They want the fact that violence is down to consitute some sort of victory...but it doesn't allow us to leave, nor does it seem to have motivated a real, sustainabile political solution among the various Iraqi parties.

Worse still...we've sold our soul (as it were), we've found a way to justify torture and redefine it down. We've lost the trust of much of the world. We've allowed our government to make horrible choices in our name with little accountability and oversight. We've become sanguine about the distruction of a country we know little about and we've become facile in our approach to complex global problems.

We've bled a lot of our national treasure. Our children will be paying for this for a long time. Considering what can happen in Pakistan and what is happening in Afghanastan (you remember Afghanastan, the country THAT WAS GIVING SHELTER TO THE PEOPLE WHO ATTACKED US ON 9/!!?), we've put our resources to the wrong cause.

I'm glad the violence is down, but between the failure of vision, scope, cost in personell and materials and money...it has been a huge waste and one that can and is crippling the capacity of this country to adequately defend itslef againg real, identifiable enemies and challenges.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
I was about to post this in the thread below (It is now!), as I often wonder if those split on the entire issue of Iraq, split on issues of WMD and Niger Uranium and such stuff, miss the question any person from 4-102 can ask. That is, with the absolutely monumental loss of life (600,000? 700,000?) in Iraq, has it really been worth it for the human cost?
Click to expand...
Was the loss of half a million American lives in 1861-1865 worth it to end slavery? Depends upon who you ask, I'd guess, though most folks whose ancestors were slaves would tend to say "yes, worth it." If that is what it took, to both end slavery and keep the nation as E Pluribus Unum, a lot of folks think that was worth it.

Was the death toll in Iraq, whatever it is, worth the political freedom for the Kurds?

Try asking some Kurds.

Was the Russian revolution "worth it?" A lot of people died in that.

If two thousand more Slovenes had died fighting the Serbs when Yugoslavia broke up, would that have made their secession from the Yugloslav body politic "less worth it?"

People die every day.

Politics is a bloody business.

If you think you can assign a casualty count threshold in a "cost benefit" analysis of a political act, which the War in Iraq was and is, I think you are trying to shoehorn ivory tower thinking into real world problems.

Worth it to whom?

There is no universal "whom" in Iraq, and thus it boils down to cases. I am not convinced the drain on American's blood and treasure is worth it, given that four years ago, the plan, such as it is, for the American way ahead was as available to the decision makers as it was last year at about this time. Three years of stupid policy is hardly ever "worth it" in my view.

I suggest to you that the arsewipe Sadr is glad America went in. The breaking up of Iraq's political system under Saddam allowed him to become important.

Worth it to him, it would seem. Do you think he mourns Sunni's and Ba'athists who his militia kills, and has killed, since 2003?

I doubt it.

The longer I ponder this, the more I find your question pointless:
in its structure,
in its allusion to metrics,
and
in its applicability to the hard reality of politics as it is, rather than some chimerical "should" state of a world that you and I don't live in.

Really.

We won't know until ten to twenty years from now if it was worth it to most people in Iraq, and the only people who will be able to answer will be living in Iraq. For the million or so who have fled their homeland in Iraq, "worth it" seems about opposite of their valuation, but I'm guessing here.

DR
 
Last edited:
Darth Rotor said:
The longer I ponder this, the more I find your question pointless:
in its structure,
in its allusion to metrics,
and
in its applicability to the hard reality of politics as it is, rather than some chimerical "should" state of a world that you and I don't live in.
Click to expand...

Bit harsh DR!
 
I hate to admit my agreement with DR but when I first opened this thread it had no reponses yet and I pondered for a while. I realized I could not come up with a satisfactory response to the OP so I exited without posting.

Reading DR's post I realize why I was reticent in responding. Determining worth from the Iraqi perspective for this debacle will have to wait for 5-10 years, perhaps longer.

Lurker
 
Acleron said:
the deaths in Bali, London and Madrid, the restriction on travel
Click to expand...

I hope you are not linking Bali to Iraq, seeing how the attacks were in 2002.

Plus, I hope you are not linking London or Madrid to the Iraq invasion, as I do not buy that they are connected.
 
I agree with one thing DR says...ultimately it won't be known for 20 or 30 years. Given the pretext used to get us into it, however, that seems to be hoping for historical reprieve rather than relying on sound strategy and tactics....
 
The unilateral invasion of Iraq by the United States and United Kingdom destroyed the last scrap of UN credibility on maintaining global peace and stability.

From the perspective of a small nation, no it was not worth it.

-Gumboot
 
Lurker said:
I realized I could not come up with a satisfactory response to the OP so I exited without posting.
Click to expand...
Ya know, I wish more people, to include me now and again, would do this.

Nice to see we find common ground on the odd occasion.

Cheers.

DR
 
Acleron said:
Hmm, was it worth it. Well taking the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the strengthening of terrorist nations such as Iran, the increased recruitment to terrorist organisations, the deaths in Bali, London and Madrid, the restriction on travel, the restrictions civil liberties and the demonisation of a large group of people because of their religion on one hand and on the other hand ... Well no.
Click to expand...


Most of the things you have described are a byproduct of 9/11, not a byproduct of the Iraq War.

-Gumboot
 
headscratcher4 said:
I agree with one thing DR says...ultimately it won't be known for 20 or 30 years. Given the pretext used to get us into it, however, that seems to be hoping for historical reprieve rather than relying on sound strategy and tactics....
Click to expand...
Well put.

"Hope is not a method" is how Gordon Sullivan (once US Army Chief of Staff) might have phrased that.

DR
 
I'm largely with Darth; this is not entirely unusual, though we do not share the same political alignment. The primary question is, worth it to whom? I think it's pretty clear from both the way you phrased the question, and from your answer to one of the first replies, that you're thinking of the Iraqis, and if that's so, I would have to say that opinions vary- violently.

Briefly, on the issue of lying about WMD, I've been very angry about it for a very long time, and as a result I have emphasized that aspect, but really, it's more a matter of convincing themselves of something that turned out not to be so, not because there was NO evidence, but because there was INSUFFICIENT evidence and they so badly wanted it to be true. And quite frankly, it's immaterial whether they outright lied or just screwed up that badly because they were looking for an excuse; ultimately, it's an issue of incompetence. And it's really bad that all those people had to die or be disfigured, not to mention everyone's future plundered, for that.
 
Here, let me see if I can get to the heart of the OP: even if there had been WMDs, the invasion and occupation was still wrong, poorly planned, badly executed, and a complete debacle from (almost) start to... I was going to say "finish", but we may never see that.

We broke their nation. Period. That can never be justified or excused. We destroyed their infrastructure, we're plundering their resources, we've allowed Islamic extremism to replace a secular government. We have made them less free, in addition to allowing them to be subject to the same abuses they suffered under Saddam Hussein. It doesn't matter what our intentions were, the outcome has been an absolute nightmare of refugees and ethnic cleansing and terrorism where none existed before.
 
Actually, thinking about this, I feel Darth is actually correct in his statements.

I am having the council for human reality trying to remove me from the Ivory Towers walls and relocate me to a two-bedroom flat in the surrounding city, and I feel their injunction against my illegal stay there is soon to come.

Apologies all. This was born out of my desire to not wish the other thread to derail.

Just, even if I do have a next-to-nothing understanding of military stategy (And I do), I just... do not like the idea innocent people have to die for a chess piece to be moved. I honestly hope to FSM that this belief is not simply a conglomerate of shadows on Plato's Cave.
 
Last edited:
What bothers me the most, which I've mentioned once or twice before, is the entire idea of "winning in Iraq". "We need to win in Iraq" is a fundamentally incorrect way of viewing the conflict there, and is quite possibly the source of the conflict. "We", meaning non-Iraqis, have absolutely nothing to win or lose in Iraq. We are not at war with Iraq, are we? So, what the hell have we been doing there for the past couple of years? Mostly, I think, we've been time and again falling into the trap described in the adage "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail."
 
http://thespinfactor.com/thetruth/2...storians-comments-as-pro-iraq-war-propaganda/

The basic premise is the intelligence community has little more access than you do to critical information, and that privileged information becomes irrelevant too quickly to be a major factor in foreign policy decisions.

Thus, the decision to go to war has less to do with military intelligence than it has to do with whims and irrational internal politics.​
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom