IRAQ: Was it worth it?

[KNB]

Republicans like to say that the war was a success because our unbelievably more advanced military rolled over the Iraqi power structure in just a few weeks, but that was to be expected. Republicans didn't seem too concerned with thinking through the occupation aspects.

Washington, DC, March 19, 2013 – The U.S. invasion of Iraq turned out to be a textbook case of flawed assumptions, wrong-headed intelligence, propaganda manipulation, and administrative ad hockery, according to the National Security Archive's briefing book of declassified documents posted today to mark the 10th anniversary of the war.

The Archive's documentary primer includes the famous Downing Street memo ("intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"), the POLO STEP PowerPoint invasion plans (assuming out of existence any possible insurgency), an FBI interview with Saddam Hussein in captivity (he said he lied about weapons of mass destruction to keep Iran guessing and deterred), and the infamous National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (wrong in its findings, but with every noted dissent turning out to be accurate).

"These dozen documents provide essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Iraq war," remarked Joyce Battle, Archive senior analyst who is compiling a definitive reference collection of declassified documents on the Iraq War. "At a moment when the public is debating the costs and consequences of the U.S. invasion, these primary sources refresh the memory and ground the discussion with contemporary evidence."

A decade after the U.S. invasion of Iraq (March 19, 2003), the debate continues over whether the United States truly believed that Iraq's supposed WMD capabilities posed an imminent danger, and whether the results of the engagement have been worth the high costs to both countries. To mark the 10 th anniversary of the start of hostilities, the National Security Archive has posted a selection of essential historical documents framing the key elements of one of America's most significant foreign policy choices of recent times. The records elucidate the decision to go to war, to administer a post-invasion Iraq, and to sell the idea to Congress, the media, and the public at large.

The Archive has followed the U.S. role in the war since its inception and has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for declassification of the underlying record. As the government releases these records, the Archive regularly makes them available on its Web site. In the near future, a significant collection of freshly declassified materials will appear as part of the "Digital National Security Archive" collection through the academic publisher ProQuest. (In the shorter term, visitors may visit our new Iraq War page for a compilation of currently available declassified materials on the subject.)

The first item is a memo from the State Department's Near East bureau, provided to incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell at the very outset of the new George W. Bush administration in 2001, outlining the Clinton administration's policy supporting regime change in Iraq, but through financial and weapons support for internal opposition groups, propaganda efforts, and regional actors rather than direct action by the U.S. military. (The Iraq Liberation Act signed by Bill Clinton on October 31, 1998, codified this policy and committed the U.S. to continuing support for Iraqi opposition groups.)

A bullet-pointed set of notes discussed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, in late 2001 shows the Pentagon already diverting focus and energy from the Afghan campaign less than three months after the U.S. and its allies entered that country. An "Eyes Only" British government memo succinctly summarizes the climate leading to war by the summer of 2002: the U.S. saw military action as inevitable; George Bush wanted military action to be justified by linking Iraq to terrorism and WMD; to that end "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," while as to discussion in Washington of the aftermath of invasion, "There was little…"

U.S. military planning proceeded frantically throughout 2002, with Secretary Rumsfeld pushing hard for readiness for invasion before the end of the year, as the myriad power point slides the Pentagon generated demonstrate (a set of which is included here). A full-bore public relations campaign underway at the same time ramped up a climate of anticipation and even fear, with Vice President Cheney telling U.S. military veterans that the U.S. would need to use "every tool" for a threat lurking in more than 60 countries, declaring flatly that Iraq was actively pursuing offensive nuclear weapons, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was planning their use against friends of America and the U.S. itself. The CIA leadership participated with evident eagerness, providing Congress and the public with glossy illustrated reports hyping the Iraqi threat and abandoning all standards of prudence in its characterizations of the alleged Iraqi threat.

The PR blitz won enthusiastic support from many in the right wing and from liberal hawks supporting military intervention on human rights grounds. Perhaps most aggressive was the famous neoconservative Iraq lobby, whose Project for a New American Century had begun campaigning for U.S. direct military action against Iraq in the 1990s. This public relations campaign probably reached its apex with Colin Powell's February 2003 illustrated speech before the U.N., received by many as a masterful demonstration of the case for war and by only a few as a web of unverified suppositions. Meanwhile, as one of Secretary Rumsfeld's famous "snowflake" memos from October 2002 shows, top rungs of the administration were well aware of the potential risks of an invasion, yet they chose to go forward without fully considering their implications.

The documents show that misconceptions about Iraq were useful to the Bush administration as enablers for the decision to invade; they also help account for calamitous U.S. policies post-invasion. The administration had high hopes for Iraq's oil resources, as myriad planning documents show. Among other expectations, the oil sector was to be back in operation within a few months and with its revenues the Iraqi people were expected to pay for their country's own invasion and reconstruction under U.S. authority.

George Bush, somehow not briefed by his advisors to expect divisions within Iraq, non-conventional warfare, and a nationalism-fueled resistance declared "major combat operations" over on May 1, 2003 – some eight years before his successor finally withdrew the bulk of U.S. forces from the country. Iraq's post-invasion destabilization was vastly intensified by U.S. policies, including the imposition of Coalition Provisional Authority Orders 1 and 2, which overturned the country's civil and military infrastructure, abruptly deprived hundreds of thousands of any prospects for an income, and replaced the old system, degenerate as it was, with something approaching chaos.

In Iraq, the U.S. would get its man – capturing Saddam Hussein in his "spider hole" in December 2003 – as would happen several years later with Osama bin Laden, an actual planner of the 9/11 attacks and the main focus of U.S. enmity until the Bush administration re-directed its energy to Saddam Hussein. Given the opportunity to explain his policies, Saddam only confirmed what most students of international relations or Iraq's history would have already known: that Iraq's leadership felt itself vulnerable to enemies near and far, with the perceived Iranian threat never far from mind, and believed that an attempt to maintain ambiguity about its weapons capabilities, conventional and non-conventional, was a necessary part of its defensive posture.

The last documents in this compilation are look-backs at some of the things that went wrong. One is an excerpt from the comprehensive Duelfer report on Iraqi WMD provided to the U.S. director of central intelligence, the other is a "mea culpa" by the CIA for not recognizing that there was no WMD program worthy of the name at the time of the invasion. These records are in no way a last word on the war, whose ramifications will plague the U.S. no less than Iraq for decades to come, but they (especially the Duelfer report) do convey attempts to use hard evidence rather than relying heavily on supposition to summarize Iraqi policies in regard to weapons of mass destruction. The Duelfer report attributes grand ambitions to Iraq's leadership as an impetus for the country's weapons policies, but describes a Saddam Hussein motivated largely by survival instincts and by rivalry with near neighbors – not by the aggressive intentions against the U.S. around which Washington created a justification for preemptive war.
The Iraq War Ten Years After

The war was lost when Bush invaded. The war was a disgrace to America when Bush invaded over lies.

 

[1776]

It is typical and pathetic idiots are blaming Bush for what is going on in Iraq today.

Bush left a stable and peaceful Iraq for Obama and Obama like a 3 year old with a new toy.....destroyed it.

 

[TheOldSchool]

You said it with Turkey......good God.

Turkey....a member of NATO and an Islamic country, oh wait....you believe they are all knuckledraggers.

Uh, that would be Afghanistan......the goat fucking fags of Afghanistan.

Well now you are just sounding stupid.

 

[JWBooth]

Looks like Iraq is sinking into the abyss. And would have no matter what we did other than staying forever like we did in Korea. In a time that we're all wanting to shrink budgets and spending, WE CANT JUST STAY FOREVER in every shithole on Earth.

So, we went to war. Thousands died. Tens of thousands more crippled and scarred for life, which we now see we cant even pay for their lifelong care.

And FOR WHAT???

If we could all go back to 2002, would we ask President Bush...."Don't do it"?

I would. Mr. President, just don't do it. IT WONT BE WORTH IT.

And those saying that in 2003...turned out to be right.

God bless all the lives that were destroyed by that war.....for WHAT?

Worth it? Lives lost, treasure wasted, nothing of value won.
Bad idea, definitely.

 

[KNB]

Name a single successful Islamic democracy in the middle east besides Turkey.

The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953

 

[Peach]

if that was sissy Obama that shoe would have beaned him right between the eyes

I call Bush The Artful Dodger, you are correct only in the fact the Bush boy would never stay where personal danger was threatening. I remember how he ducked & ran after 9/11. Jeb! is like him, when a strong tropical storm got within 200 miles of Tallahassee, Jeb! went to south east Florida! And Tallahassee is many miles inland.

 

[TheOldSchool]

It is typical and pathetic idiots are blaming Bush for what is going on in Iraq today.

Bush left a stable and peaceful Iraq for Obama and Obama like a 3 year old with a new toy.....destroyed it.

"A stable and peaceful Iraq"

 

[eagle1462010]

Republicans like to say that the war was a success because our unbelievably more advanced military rolled over the Iraqi power structure in just a few weeks, but that was to be expected. Republicans didn't seem too concerned with thinking through the occupation aspects.

Washington, DC, March 19, 2013 – The U.S. invasion of Iraq turned out to be a textbook case of flawed assumptions, wrong-headed intelligence, propaganda manipulation, and administrative ad hockery, according to the National Security Archive's briefing book of declassified documents posted today to mark the 10th anniversary of the war.

The Archive's documentary primer includes the famous Downing Street memo ("intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"), the POLO STEP PowerPoint invasion plans (assuming out of existence any possible insurgency), an FBI interview with Saddam Hussein in captivity (he said he lied about weapons of mass destruction to keep Iran guessing and deterred), and the infamous National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (wrong in its findings, but with every noted dissent turning out to be accurate).

"These dozen documents provide essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Iraq war," remarked Joyce Battle, Archive senior analyst who is compiling a definitive reference collection of declassified documents on the Iraq War. "At a moment when the public is debating the costs and consequences of the U.S. invasion, these primary sources refresh the memory and ground the discussion with contemporary evidence."

A decade after the U.S. invasion of Iraq (March 19, 2003), the debate continues over whether the United States truly believed that Iraq's supposed WMD capabilities posed an imminent danger, and whether the results of the engagement have been worth the high costs to both countries. To mark the 10 th anniversary of the start of hostilities, the National Security Archive has posted a selection of essential historical documents framing the key elements of one of America's most significant foreign policy choices of recent times. The records elucidate the decision to go to war, to administer a post-invasion Iraq, and to sell the idea to Congress, the media, and the public at large.

The Archive has followed the U.S. role in the war since its inception and has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for declassification of the underlying record. As the government releases these records, the Archive regularly makes them available on its Web site. In the near future, a significant collection of freshly declassified materials will appear as part of the "Digital National Security Archive" collection through the academic publisher ProQuest. (In the shorter term, visitors may visit our new Iraq War page for a compilation of currently available declassified materials on the subject.)

The first item is a memo from the State Department's Near East bureau, provided to incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell at the very outset of the new George W. Bush administration in 2001, outlining the Clinton administration's policy supporting regime change in Iraq, but through financial and weapons support for internal opposition groups, propaganda efforts, and regional actors rather than direct action by the U.S. military. (The Iraq Liberation Act signed by Bill Clinton on October 31, 1998, codified this policy and committed the U.S. to continuing support for Iraqi opposition groups.)

A bullet-pointed set of notes discussed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, in late 2001 shows the Pentagon already diverting focus and energy from the Afghan campaign less than three months after the U.S. and its allies entered that country. An "Eyes Only" British government memo succinctly summarizes the climate leading to war by the summer of 2002: the U.S. saw military action as inevitable; George Bush wanted military action to be justified by linking Iraq to terrorism and WMD; to that end "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," while as to discussion in Washington of the aftermath of invasion, "There was little…"

U.S. military planning proceeded frantically throughout 2002, with Secretary Rumsfeld pushing hard for readiness for invasion before the end of the year, as the myriad power point slides the Pentagon generated demonstrate (a set of which is included here). A full-bore public relations campaign underway at the same time ramped up a climate of anticipation and even fear, with Vice President Cheney telling U.S. military veterans that the U.S. would need to use "every tool" for a threat lurking in more than 60 countries, declaring flatly that Iraq was actively pursuing offensive nuclear weapons, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was planning their use against friends of America and the U.S. itself. The CIA leadership participated with evident eagerness, providing Congress and the public with glossy illustrated reports hyping the Iraqi threat and abandoning all standards of prudence in its characterizations of the alleged Iraqi threat.

The PR blitz won enthusiastic support from many in the right wing and from liberal hawks supporting military intervention on human rights grounds. Perhaps most aggressive was the famous neoconservative Iraq lobby, whose Project for a New American Century had begun campaigning for U.S. direct military action against Iraq in the 1990s. This public relations campaign probably reached its apex with Colin Powell's February 2003 illustrated speech before the U.N., received by many as a masterful demonstration of the case for war and by only a few as a web of unverified suppositions. Meanwhile, as one of Secretary Rumsfeld's famous "snowflake" memos from October 2002 shows, top rungs of the administration were well aware of the potential risks of an invasion, yet they chose to go forward without fully considering their implications.

The documents show that misconceptions about Iraq were useful to the Bush administration as enablers for the decision to invade; they also help account for calamitous U.S. policies post-invasion. The administration had high hopes for Iraq's oil resources, as myriad planning documents show. Among other expectations, the oil sector was to be back in operation within a few months and with its revenues the Iraqi people were expected to pay for their country's own invasion and reconstruction under U.S. authority.

George Bush, somehow not briefed by his advisors to expect divisions within Iraq, non-conventional warfare, and a nationalism-fueled resistance declared "major combat operations" over on May 1, 2003 – some eight years before his successor finally withdrew the bulk of U.S. forces from the country. Iraq's post-invasion destabilization was vastly intensified by U.S. policies, including the imposition of Coalition Provisional Authority Orders 1 and 2, which overturned the country's civil and military infrastructure, abruptly deprived hundreds of thousands of any prospects for an income, and replaced the old system, degenerate as it was, with something approaching chaos.

In Iraq, the U.S. would get its man – capturing Saddam Hussein in his "spider hole" in December 2003 – as would happen several years later with Osama bin Laden, an actual planner of the 9/11 attacks and the main focus of U.S. enmity until the Bush administration re-directed its energy to Saddam Hussein. Given the opportunity to explain his policies, Saddam only confirmed what most students of international relations or Iraq's history would have already known: that Iraq's leadership felt itself vulnerable to enemies near and far, with the perceived Iranian threat never far from mind, and believed that an attempt to maintain ambiguity about its weapons capabilities, conventional and non-conventional, was a necessary part of its defensive posture.

The last documents in this compilation are look-backs at some of the things that went wrong. One is an excerpt from the comprehensive Duelfer report on Iraqi WMD provided to the U.S. director of central intelligence, the other is a "mea culpa" by the CIA for not recognizing that there was no WMD program worthy of the name at the time of the invasion. These records are in no way a last word on the war, whose ramifications will plague the U.S. no less than Iraq for decades to come, but they (especially the Duelfer report) do convey attempts to use hard evidence rather than relying heavily on supposition to summarize Iraqi policies in regard to weapons of mass destruction. The Duelfer report attributes grand ambitions to Iraq's leadership as an impetus for the country's weapons policies, but describes a Saddam Hussein motivated largely by survival instincts and by rivalry with near neighbors – not by the aggressive intentions against the U.S. around which Washington created a justification for preemptive war.
The Iraq War Ten Years After

The war was lost when Bush invaded. The war was a disgrace to America when Bush invaded over lies.

1. I'm tired of that worn out BS over the WMD's......Both sides of the equation thought he had them. In the first Gulf War we destroyed much of their ammunition depos to hell. We don't know how much was destroyed. The Marines told me that multiple vehicles were getting Sarin alarms at the same time over there.......Probably due to weapons being destroyed. Either way, even Clinton and allies said the same of the WMD's..............

2. We lost the War over there when we didn't finish the damn thing the first time. When we had 500,000 troops in the area............We create more Wars by not finishing them the first time as it should have been.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Hey [MENTION=45621]1776[/MENTION] where else in the middle east should we go to try to build a democracy? How many trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of dead and maimed Americans would you be happy to send over there?

While China and Russia get fat and rich from the new oil supplies we'll be opening up to them at no charge?

 

[1776]

Shitstain....it was peaceful enough for Biden to claim "success for Obama" thus giving them cover to pull every US troop out.

Obama was just too stupid to realize the peace came from the US troops being there working with the ISF.

It is typical and pathetic idiots are blaming Bush for what is going on in Iraq today.

Bush left a stable and peaceful Iraq for Obama and Obama like a 3 year old with a new toy.....destroyed it.

"A stable and peaceful Iraq"

 

[1776]

Given you have an IQ lower than a chimp and you never served 1 minute in the military.....shut the fuck up inbred.

Hey [MENTION=45621]1776[/MENTION] where else in the middle east should we go to try to build a democracy? How many trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of dead and maimed Americans would you be happy to send over there?

While China and Russia get fat and rich from the new oil supplies we'll be opening up to them at no charge?

 

[KNB]

It is typical and pathetic idiots are blaming Bush for what is going on in Iraq today.

Bush left a stable and peaceful Iraq for Obama and Obama like a 3 year old with a new toy.....destroyed it.

Stable and peaceful Iraq. Only 904 total American deaths in Iraq in 2007.

iCasualties | OIF | Iraq | Fatalities By Month

Peaceful, stable, daily roadside bombings.....

 

[Lakhota]

We have the Bushes to thank for the Iraq clusterfuck.

Bush 41 suckered Saddam into invading Kuwait, then Bush 41 invaded Iraq. Saddam had legitimate grievances against Kuwait. April Glaspie

Bush 43 manufactured lies to invade Iraq again.

Colin Powell told Bush 41: You break it, you own it. Bush 43 broke it.

HELL NO Iraq wasn't worth it. Saddam kept the lid on that cesspool of tribal lunatics.

 

[1776]

Asswipe...when did Obama take charge of Iraq???

Yeah, you are that fucking stupid.

It is typical and pathetic idiots are blaming Bush for what is going on in Iraq today.

Bush left a stable and peaceful Iraq for Obama and Obama like a 3 year old with a new toy.....destroyed it.

Stable and peaceful Iraq. Only 904 total American deaths in Iraq in 2007.

iCasualties | OIF | Iraq | Fatalities By Month

Peaceful, stable, daily roadside bombings.....

 

[1776]

shit eater...

We have the Bushes to thank for the Iraq clusterfuck.

Bush 41 suckered Saddam into invading Kuwait, then Bush 41 invaded Iraq. Saddam had legitimate grievances against Kuwait. April Glaspie

Bush 43 manufactured lies to invade Iraq again.

Colin Powell told Bush 41: You break it, you own it. Bush 43 broke it.

HELL NO Iraq wasn't worth it. Saddam kept the lid on that cesspool of tribal lunatics.

 

[KNB]

Republicans like to say that the war was a success because our unbelievably more advanced military rolled over the Iraqi power structure in just a few weeks, but that was to be expected. Republicans didn't seem too concerned with thinking through the occupation aspects.

Washington, DC, March 19, 2013 – The U.S. invasion of Iraq turned out to be a textbook case of flawed assumptions, wrong-headed intelligence, propaganda manipulation, and administrative ad hockery, according to the National Security Archive's briefing book of declassified documents posted today to mark the 10th anniversary of the war.

The Archive's documentary primer includes the famous Downing Street memo ("intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"), the POLO STEP PowerPoint invasion plans (assuming out of existence any possible insurgency), an FBI interview with Saddam Hussein in captivity (he said he lied about weapons of mass destruction to keep Iran guessing and deterred), and the infamous National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (wrong in its findings, but with every noted dissent turning out to be accurate).

"These dozen documents provide essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Iraq war," remarked Joyce Battle, Archive senior analyst who is compiling a definitive reference collection of declassified documents on the Iraq War. "At a moment when the public is debating the costs and consequences of the U.S. invasion, these primary sources refresh the memory and ground the discussion with contemporary evidence."

A decade after the U.S. invasion of Iraq (March 19, 2003), the debate continues over whether the United States truly believed that Iraq's supposed WMD capabilities posed an imminent danger, and whether the results of the engagement have been worth the high costs to both countries. To mark the 10 th anniversary of the start of hostilities, the National Security Archive has posted a selection of essential historical documents framing the key elements of one of America's most significant foreign policy choices of recent times. The records elucidate the decision to go to war, to administer a post-invasion Iraq, and to sell the idea to Congress, the media, and the public at large.

The Archive has followed the U.S. role in the war since its inception and has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for declassification of the underlying record. As the government releases these records, the Archive regularly makes them available on its Web site. In the near future, a significant collection of freshly declassified materials will appear as part of the "Digital National Security Archive" collection through the academic publisher ProQuest. (In the shorter term, visitors may visit our new Iraq War page for a compilation of currently available declassified materials on the subject.)

The first item is a memo from the State Department's Near East bureau, provided to incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell at the very outset of the new George W. Bush administration in 2001, outlining the Clinton administration's policy supporting regime change in Iraq, but through financial and weapons support for internal opposition groups, propaganda efforts, and regional actors rather than direct action by the U.S. military. (The Iraq Liberation Act signed by Bill Clinton on October 31, 1998, codified this policy and committed the U.S. to continuing support for Iraqi opposition groups.)

A bullet-pointed set of notes discussed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, in late 2001 shows the Pentagon already diverting focus and energy from the Afghan campaign less than three months after the U.S. and its allies entered that country. An "Eyes Only" British government memo succinctly summarizes the climate leading to war by the summer of 2002: the U.S. saw military action as inevitable; George Bush wanted military action to be justified by linking Iraq to terrorism and WMD; to that end "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," while as to discussion in Washington of the aftermath of invasion, "There was little…"

U.S. military planning proceeded frantically throughout 2002, with Secretary Rumsfeld pushing hard for readiness for invasion before the end of the year, as the myriad power point slides the Pentagon generated demonstrate (a set of which is included here). A full-bore public relations campaign underway at the same time ramped up a climate of anticipation and even fear, with Vice President Cheney telling U.S. military veterans that the U.S. would need to use "every tool" for a threat lurking in more than 60 countries, declaring flatly that Iraq was actively pursuing offensive nuclear weapons, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was planning their use against friends of America and the U.S. itself. The CIA leadership participated with evident eagerness, providing Congress and the public with glossy illustrated reports hyping the Iraqi threat and abandoning all standards of prudence in its characterizations of the alleged Iraqi threat.

The PR blitz won enthusiastic support from many in the right wing and from liberal hawks supporting military intervention on human rights grounds. Perhaps most aggressive was the famous neoconservative Iraq lobby, whose Project for a New American Century had begun campaigning for U.S. direct military action against Iraq in the 1990s. This public relations campaign probably reached its apex with Colin Powell's February 2003 illustrated speech before the U.N., received by many as a masterful demonstration of the case for war and by only a few as a web of unverified suppositions. Meanwhile, as one of Secretary Rumsfeld's famous "snowflake" memos from October 2002 shows, top rungs of the administration were well aware of the potential risks of an invasion, yet they chose to go forward without fully considering their implications.

The documents show that misconceptions about Iraq were useful to the Bush administration as enablers for the decision to invade; they also help account for calamitous U.S. policies post-invasion. The administration had high hopes for Iraq's oil resources, as myriad planning documents show. Among other expectations, the oil sector was to be back in operation within a few months and with its revenues the Iraqi people were expected to pay for their country's own invasion and reconstruction under U.S. authority.

George Bush, somehow not briefed by his advisors to expect divisions within Iraq, non-conventional warfare, and a nationalism-fueled resistance declared "major combat operations" over on May 1, 2003 – some eight years before his successor finally withdrew the bulk of U.S. forces from the country. Iraq's post-invasion destabilization was vastly intensified by U.S. policies, including the imposition of Coalition Provisional Authority Orders 1 and 2, which overturned the country's civil and military infrastructure, abruptly deprived hundreds of thousands of any prospects for an income, and replaced the old system, degenerate as it was, with something approaching chaos.

In Iraq, the U.S. would get its man – capturing Saddam Hussein in his "spider hole" in December 2003 – as would happen several years later with Osama bin Laden, an actual planner of the 9/11 attacks and the main focus of U.S. enmity until the Bush administration re-directed its energy to Saddam Hussein. Given the opportunity to explain his policies, Saddam only confirmed what most students of international relations or Iraq's history would have already known: that Iraq's leadership felt itself vulnerable to enemies near and far, with the perceived Iranian threat never far from mind, and believed that an attempt to maintain ambiguity about its weapons capabilities, conventional and non-conventional, was a necessary part of its defensive posture.

The last documents in this compilation are look-backs at some of the things that went wrong. One is an excerpt from the comprehensive Duelfer report on Iraqi WMD provided to the U.S. director of central intelligence, the other is a "mea culpa" by the CIA for not recognizing that there was no WMD program worthy of the name at the time of the invasion. These records are in no way a last word on the war, whose ramifications will plague the U.S. no less than Iraq for decades to come, but they (especially the Duelfer report) do convey attempts to use hard evidence rather than relying heavily on supposition to summarize Iraqi policies in regard to weapons of mass destruction. The Duelfer report attributes grand ambitions to Iraq's leadership as an impetus for the country's weapons policies, but describes a Saddam Hussein motivated largely by survival instincts and by rivalry with near neighbors – not by the aggressive intentions against the U.S. around which Washington created a justification for preemptive war.
The Iraq War Ten Years After

The war was lost when Bush invaded. The war was a disgrace to America when Bush invaded over lies.

1. I'm tired of that worn out BS over the WMD's......Both sides of the equation thought he had them. In the first Gulf War we destroyed much of their ammunition depos to hell. We don't know how much was destroyed. The Marines told me that multiple vehicles were getting Sarin alarms at the same time over there.......Probably due to weapons being destroyed. Either way, even Clinton and allies said the same of the WMD's..............

2. We lost the War over there when we didn't finish the damn thing the first time. When we had 500,000 troops in the area............We create more Wars by not finishing them the first time as it should have been.

Oh? You're "tired of the WMD thing"? Go fuck yourself and then fight your own war. Disarming stockpiles of WMD was the main official reason for the invasion and that "intelligence" was based on LIES. AL-JANABI. CURVEBALL. LIES.

The Bush administration used the information (LIES) spewed forth by "Curveball" to justify the invasion. LIES = INVASION. Is it simple enough for you yet? How about this?:

BUSH'S OFFICIAL REASONS = LIES.

Is it still too complicated for Republicans?

 

[eagle1462010]

We have the Bushes to thank for the Iraq clusterfuck.

Bush 41 suckered Saddam into invading Kuwait, then Bush 41 invaded Iraq. Saddam had legitimate grievances against Kuwait. April Glaspie

Bush 43 manufactured lies to invade Iraq again.

Colin Powell told Bush 41: You break it, you own it. Bush 43 broke it.

HELL NO Iraq wasn't worth it. Saddam kept the lid on that cesspool of tribal lunatics.

A little lame in your assessment on Kuwait. Saddam was power hungry. Proved it when he attacked Iran. Any backing back then was because it was a different time and place back then. We were still ticked off at Iran for the Hostages.

You are right that it is a cesspool of tribal lunatics.

 

[KNB]

Then why did Reagan sell weapons to Iran?

 

[TheOldSchool]

Given you have an IQ lower than a chimp and you never served 1 minute in the military.....shut the fuck up inbred.

I've spent years working with military families whose family members either didn't make it home or came home with severe disabilities.

And for what? Iraq was only as stable as the amount of American blood spilled to keep it that way.

 

[1776]

Like I said, shut the fuck up....idiot.

Do you wave the US flag on the 4th of July???? you think that makes you qualified too.

Given you have an IQ lower than a chimp and you never served 1 minute in the military.....shut the fuck up inbred.

I've spent years working with military families whose family members either didn't make it home or came home with severe disabilities.

And for what? Iraq was only as stable as the amount of American blood spilled to keep it that way.