re: In hindsight; was removing Saddam Hussein a good idea?

I would say it backfired bigly. We removed one dictator that was only interested in terrorizing his own people, and maintaining his power. And he was replaced with groups that are more interested in terrorizing europe and USA.

No, but neither was removing Qadafi, or Mubarak, all were secular leaders that were put in place by the CIA long ago to stop the spread of Radical Islamist in the region.

Easily the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, maybe even bigger considering the lasting effects

I'm not sure how anybody can analyze the results of our actions in Iraq and not conclude that it was a bad decision. I was 16 when the war started and a subscriber to the neoconservative mission statement throughout my college years. Watching the absolute failure of interventionism along with the soaring costs in both capital and lives I've completely 180'd on my foreign policy philosophy. Moral intervention is most always a terrible idea but now we can clearly see that the notion of installing democracy does NOT result in the liberalization of foreign civilizations as was hypothesized by neocon intellectuals. We should adjust our policy prescriptions accordingly.

quote:

---

15 years, 5,000 deaths

---

THIS is the problem.


I have NEVER agreed with the "you break it, you bought it" bullshite.

Got in and removed Saddam in about 100 days with fewer than 100 casualties. Should have just left.

frick nation building. Simply say...whatever grows into the void...we can come back and remove you, too.


We could have gone back and removed 50 regimes for the cost.


You want to be a totalitarian dick and become rich while subjugating your own people? Have at it. You make us feel threatened...you are gone. Easy peezy

The primary mistake made was disbanding the Iraqi Army and just sending them home. The draconian de-Baathification removed all the experienced civil servants and contributed to the infrastruction and administration problems that plagued them for a decade.

It wasn’t so much the invasion or occupation so much as the vacuum created by demilitarization and debaathification.

No, it was an awful thing to do. The world is paying for it today. You either have to make two choices in (most of) the middle east. A dictator, or brutal religious fanatic.

He should have been left alone, but personal grudges (GW Bush) won out in the end.

This is why Assad needs to stay in power in Syria.

quote:

---

Explain this one

---

The reason the Battle of Berlin was the way it was is because it was the soviets; the Germans fought for every street corner and house from Poland through Berlin because they knew what would happen if the USSR won. However, I meant more taking Berlin as in Patton pushing the soviets back across Eastern Europe at the end of the war. We would likely have had the Germans fighting alongside us in that endeavor.

The smart move there was getting the Russians out of Europe. They were beaten near to death in almost every way, we could have cleaned house all the way to Moscow.

Let's ask one of the architects of Desert Storm if he thought we should have taken out Saddam at the end of that conflict:

quote:

---

Because if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you've got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had, but for the 146 Americans killed in action and for the families it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was, how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got it right.

---