The cost of freeing Iraq

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

Come now, we all know who helped Saddam to get in power and helped him to stay there.

The Baath party, of course.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

The US got upset not because Saddam was nasty - he always had been that way - but because Saddam no longer was one of the US's nasty lackeys.

He was never our lacky. We pretended to help one another while repeatedly stabbing one another in the back for a while, then came the open hostility.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by techumseh

You can't possibly have read and analized this report in the time since I posted this, so what is your basis for saying so? As my math teacher used to say, show your work.

And as I used to reply, "It's right isn't it and faster than anyone else in class."

Originally posted by techumseh

You know, this self serving hypocrisy no longer fools anyone. When Saddam was a US puppet and fought Iran for the Americans, he was supplied with all kinds of arms, including the WMD's your regime was so anxious to recover, and embraced by by none other than Don Rumsfeld. (I know this was never shown on American news coverage, but Oprah got ahold of the footage and had the courage to air it. AFAIK, it's the only time it's been broadcast in the US.) All his crimes were overlooked by US governments as long as he was useful to the Americans.

Perhaps you can show me a list of the weapons that the U.S. supplied Iraq. I think you will find such a list extremely short. It will include no WMDs, although Sadam did purchase some raw materials that were probably used in some of his many WMD programs. Germany supplied much more in terms of WMD infrastructure, while France supplied 100 times as many conventional weapons as the U.S., and the Soviet Union much more than France. Considering that the U.S. is the world's largest supplier of arms it is obvious that our share of the Iraqi arms market is orders of magnitude lower than it is for the average state.

And yes, his crimes were minimized by the U.S. while the threats of the Cold War and the Iran Iraq war still were extent. But we didn't let him continue on his way once we could spare enough force to deal with him and he handed us a causus belli on a silver platter. I bet you boo-hooed for that one too, because we don't have a right to confront evil on our own timetable, only yours.

Originally posted by techumseh
First it was weapons of mass destruction, when they weren't found, it was links to al Queda. When every serious intellegence analyst sneered at that whopper, then all of a sudden the war was about bringing "freedom and democracy" to Iraq. This despite any reasonable modicum of post war planning to restore public order or utilities, let alone nation building.

I remember all of those ideas floating around well before the war started, though the administration has emphasized them in roughly the order you suggest. Frankly I was puzzled about them myself to some extent. My own lukewarm support for this war was based upon Saddam's violations of the cease fire agreement of the last war. It's a simple case to make, but it doesn't bring in the U.N. nearly as well as the WMD argument in large part because so many of the violated U.N. resolutions deal with WMDs. The U.S. hoped to bring the U.N. along on the war, and highlighting the WMD issue was what the administration probably felt was the best means to do so. The terrorist stuff isn't as far fetched as one might believe, even if Saddam and Al Quaeda don't care for one another. Iraq had a number of wanted terrorists living there, and a fairly close relationship with Ansar Al Islam despite claims to the contrary. But there is very little chance that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.

Interestingly, the neo-cons are the ones who have pushed the "make Iraq a beacon of hope in the middle east" idea earliest and often. The reasons that we were not more prepared to take over the country are mainly of two types. Firstly, we had very poor intelligence about the condition of the country before we went in. Not all of our data were crap, but the good did not win out over the bad, more the opposite really. This led to a lot of rosy scenarios creeping into our plans that never came about, such as the Iraqi army surrendering, being purged and then used to police the country. Instead we took only a few thousand prisoners while the Iraqi army destroyed itself by sending everyone home. Estimations used by the military also failed to show just how tenuous electricity and water supplies were on a daily basis in Iraq before the beginning of the war, which set back the timetables for many things in the actual event.

Aside from the bad information that the Pentagon relied on to plan the war I think we can reasonably assume that the war was sold to us without regard to the occupation phase simply because it was assumed that those costs would be considered too prohibitive by a large segment of the population.

Originally posted by techumseh

The fact is that the US has a long history supporting dictators when it suits them, and has never given a damn about elites robbing the poor in any country, as long as American corporations get to the front of the line.

The fact is that the U.S. doesn't have a long history of anything. The fact is that you'll swallow a lie about the U.S. and run and protest about it while real crimes a thousand times as large hardly register for a second with you because you are fixated on the U.S. How much energy have you out into protesting Saddam's crimes vs those of the U.S.?

[Q Classic]

i honestly ask you, if the invasion of iraq was done for humanitarian reasons, why did we:

1. not go in sooner;
2. not go into other nations with equally atrocious human rights records;
3. tack it on as an afterthough--if at all--in virtually every speech leading up to the war?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
2. not go into other nations with equally atrocious human rights records

Or worse.

Like Congo, Somalia, Liberia, etc.

[Pandemoniak]

the cost of freeing Irak will be probably be huge, seeing the americans wont leave that easily. it will probably need around a thousands iraki martyres

[Nubclear]

[Pandemoniak]

well, they meant freeing irak from the us-and-more occupation, right ?

[DaShi]

What's the cost of freezing Iraq?

[laurentius]

Freeze!

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by Pandemoniak
well, they meant freeing irak from the us-and-more occupation, right ?

Pandemoniak sighting +2!!!!

[axi]

455 dead and 2279 wounded on the invader's side, according to this site.

http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

Wounded count is after 30/8 and today's casualties are not counted yet.

As I said somewhere else, we will never really learn pinpoint the exact toll on the Iraquis.

[techumseh]

Originally posted by Ned
Also, leftists, explain, if you would, what was Bush's reason for invading Iraq if he knew, as you contend, the intelligence about WMD was faulty?

Sikander because we don't have a right to confront evil on our own timetable, only yours.

You have to get past the concept of your government being "good" and everyone it opposes as being "evil". It's not only a gross oversimplification, but it assumes that one of the parties to a conflict must be at the "good" end of the spectrum.

Perhaps you can show me a list of the weapons that the U.S. supplied Iraq.

There's a detailed list in Michael Moore's new book, "Dude, Where's My Country". If that's not good enough for you, here's a link to a paper that details the arms relationship between Iraq and the Reagan and Bush I regimes: http://www.logosjournal.com/gendzier_iraq.pdf

an excerpt:

"James J. Tuite III, Principle Investigator of the Riegle Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, disclosed that the U.S. “had exported chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile-system equipment to Iraq that was converted to military use in Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program. Many of these weapons—weapons that the U.S. and other countries provided critical materials for—were used against us during the war.”

The Chair of the Senate Committee, Donald Reigle, concluded on the basis of his Committee’s investigation, that “the U.S. government actually licensed the export of deadly microorganisms to Iraq.” It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare capsulatum. Riegle’s Committee listed other biological agents as well as the dates and addresses to which they were sent in Iraq, along with the symptoms they were known to produce."

According to witnesses at the committee, US-Iraqi military cooperation continued right up to the invasion of Kuwait.

The fact is that the U.S. doesn't have a long history of anything.

Chou en Lai said "The charming thing about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory."

Since the end of WWII, the US has overthrown more democratically elected governments and bombed or intervened in more countries than all other countries combined. Here's a very partial list, just from memory: Iran, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, El Salvador, Bolivia, Greece, Honduras, Haiti (coups) and Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Somalia, Panama (attacked). This does not include countries such as Iran and Ethiopia that have been attacked by a third country which has been incited by the US.

You might forgive some of us for being sceptical of the self proclaimed American mission of ridding the world of "evil".

[problem_child]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
The fact that their number range varies over 100% from minimum to maximum show they're pulling numbers out of their ass.

Also, O brilliant foreign policy visionary, what would you have done?

(a) Left Saddam Hussein and the Baath party in power and continued sanctions ad infinitum (given that sanctions didn't prevent Hussein from building palaces and monuments to himself, while infrastructure and public health and safety went to **** for ordinary Iraqis?

How about not complicitly allowing Saddam to put down the uprising after GW1 just because a popular uprising would not have been in US interests... in fact how about not allowing the Conspiracy Institute of America to have helped him into power in the first place.

or

(b) Left Hussein and the Baathists in power, but canned the sanctions and said "Go ahead and rearm and build more palaces now that you have all the sanctions removed. You've proven what we've all known all along, that the UN is a bunch of impotent sockstuffers and that sanctions are a Lima Delta tool for those who feel they have to do something, but don't have the balls to really do anything, or to admit that in dealing with dictatorial *******s like you, sanctions are just a way of slowly, passively killing innocents while you continue to thrive."

Why is it there's never any leftist handwringing about the cost of leaving this kind of ******* in power?

The Sanctions where called Genocidal by the UN staff charged with administering them, and against the Geneva Convention. Iraq was held under seige for twelve years by the US and it's lackey... this had nothing to do with WMD, but everything to do with the purposeful impoverishment of a sovereign nation state, an attack upon the human rights of it's civilian population (the sanctions actually made Saddams Ba'athists look good in their governments actions to avoid mass starvation!) and a 'softening up' of the country for 'aquisition' and administration by the puppet-regime that will shortly be installed to service American interests.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by techumseh
You can't possibly have read and analized this report in the time since I posted this, so what is your basis for saying so? As my math teacher used to say, show your work.

The simple fact that they can't pin down a casualty range with less 100% variance from minimum to maximum shows they're using soft numbers and second or third hand reports. Not surprising given the state of Iraqi morgues and statistics gathering, but not very reliable, either.

You know, this self serving hypocrisy no longer fools anyone. When Saddam was a US puppet and fought Iran for the Americans, he was supplied with all kinds of arms, including the WMD's your regime was so anxious to recover, and embraced by by none other than Don Rumsfeld. (I know this was never shown on American news coverage, but Oprah got ahold of the footage and had the courage to air it. AFAIK, it's the only time it's been broadcast in the US.) All his crimes were overlooked by US governments as long as he was useful to the Americans.

You should at least get your facts straight. Saddam wasn't a US puppet when he attacked Khomeini's Iran. Most non-lackey (i.e. non-Saudi) arab states had broken off diplomatic relations with the US after the '73 Arab-Israeli war and the oil embargo, so our boy was the Shah. Once the Shah was gone, we were sort of SOL, had no relations with the Iraqis, and wouldn't have promoted an Iraqi war with Iran based on the relative state of the two nation's economic and military capabilities. Saddam attacked the Iranians after Iranian agents assassinated Baath officials in the Basra area and Iran abrogated previous bilateral agreements on use of the Shatt al Arab. Saddam made a limited attack on an Iranian port factility on the Shatt al Arab as a sabre-rattling exercise, and the Iranians decided to have his secular infidel Shiite-oppressing ass.

We weren't the dumbasses who started it, or even whispered in Saddam's ear. We also weren't near the first nations to provide support to Saddam - that was the rest of the arab world, who eventually ponied up 34 billion to our 6 billion, to keep Saddam in the war. We didn't directly provide Saddam with any weapons, just cash, and that laundered conveniently through foreign banks. (BNL) Even the USSR was happy to help Saddam, selling him over six billion in hardware on credit - which he never paid, and which is the main reason the Russians have wanted an end to sanctions. Ditto the French, but their generous sales were a bit less. (The O'Chirac reactor, among others)

We did provide Saddam with bombing damage assessments, and both raw and analyzed take from KH-11 and KH-12 satellite overflights, etc., and we continued to do so after Saddam used WMDs, but there is zero factual evidence (as opposed to a few people's unsupported and unsubstantiated claims) that we provided WMDs per se or WMD technology. What we did provide (intel take) was useful to WMD (or any other type) attacks, but that's not the same as providing WMDs themselves. Saddam was a client of France and the USSR for his military capabilities and hardware. If we had provided him with WMD capability, you can bet it would have been more effective.

Oh, BTW, Rummy kissing Saddam's ass is well known in the US, and was at the time ('83). Everybody in the region was more interested in what the Ayatollah was up to (with the strongest military force by far), so when Saddam reacted to Iranian provocations and gave them a visible excuse to invade, we (like the Kuwaitis, Saudis, and everyone else) supported Saddam because he was the only semi-credible barrier to Iranian fundamentalist domination of the entire gulf.

First it was weapons of mass destruction, when they weren't found, it was links to al Queda. When every serious intellegence analyst sneered at that whopper, then all of a sudden the war was about bringing "freedom and democracy" to Iraq. This despite any reasonable modicum of post war planning to restore public order or utilities, let alone nation building.

It was kind of everything at once, and it was just sugarcoating. "Saddam is a useless sack of **** and the world is better off without him" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but come on, are you really still on about the "justification" for the war? That's soooo last year. What do you want to do, give it back to Saddam and the Baath party, with our apologies?

The fact is that the US has a long history supporting dictators when it suits them, and has never given a damn about elites robbing the poor in any country, as long as American corporations get to the front of the line.

As opposed to lefties who want to either look the other way, or support dictators in the name of "the people" so long as their ideological butt-buddies in the Party get to the front of the line? The world isn't an ideal place, and the average peasant gets screwed, left, right and center, whether by action or inaction. Meanwhile, the world goes on, nature abhors a vacuum and all that.

So come on, pick an alternative - I gave you two, but you ducked those.

If the numbers in this report are overestimates, then what is a reasonable number, MtG? And what is an acceptable number of deaths? Don't tell me - what ever it takes, right?

They might be underestimates. With that range, the only thing obvious is they don't have a real count. Meanwhile, how many deaths would you attribute to continuation of the Hussein regime? What happened to that leftist handwringing about sanctions and half a million Iraqi kids (note how they ignore the Hussein regime's responsibility for resource allocation, the food for oil programme and all that?)

The real world question isn't what's an acceptable number of deaths. People would be dying with any alternative. So just pick one.

[Sprayber]

Some of you people are like a bad propaganda cartoon. It's kind of disturbing in a way.