How the Iraq war was won, media review 3 years on

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Darius871


There's a treasure-trove of hawkish posts from Oerdin here that are shot down by Che and GePap:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...31#post1707831

I've done my mea culpa long ago. My tour in Iraq convinced me the administration lied to get us into it and then was to incompetant to do it right.

I intially supported the war based upon the idea of creating a second swing oil producer and to create a new pro-western government in the middle east. My mistake was thinking the adminstration would be even remotely up to the task and that Blair would some how get Bush to do things mostly above board. I was wrong on both counts.

[Drake Tungsten]

That's a pretty bipartisan group in the opening post; I'm not surprised to see that our press corps is so uniformly shortsighted. Unfortunately, I don't think things have changed much in the intervening three years...

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Bosh


Well it takes too much effort to dig up all the dumb quotes but I did make a poll about what people thought would happen in Iraq on the 3rd of March 2003 and I think the results are fairly interesting:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=79538

Ooooh and it looks like I was spot-on with the Lebanon option. Go me!

So was I.

[KrazyHorse]

(not in that thread, but in many others)

I was also right about the extent of Saddam's CBN programs.

[Bosh]

I made one big mistake in my predictions in 2003, I really underestimated the willingness of the Bush administration to turn over power to Iran-backed Shia Islamists. Aside from that I think I did pretty good job...

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
That's a pretty bipartisan group in the opening post; I'm not surprised to see that our press corps is so uniformly shortsighted. Unfortunately, I don't think things have changed much in the intervening three years...

Well looking through your posts in 2003, you sure did a lot of cheering them on.

[Drake Tungsten]

Really? I was always pretty reluctantly pro-war and wary of the post-war consequences, if I remember correctly. And given that I cranked out plenty of public (and easily looked-up) op-eds during that time period, I think I do.

[Dinner]

I think there has been a lot of flip flopping.

[Chemical Ollie]

Yeah, looking at the old threads, there's at least two of them.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Arrian
Arg, reading all those smug, moronic quotes... what *******s. Pisses me off!

-Arrian

I'll bet you that just like our fearless leaders, over 90% of those smug, arrogant ********ers never put in a day in the military, and 100% of them were never line animals, airborne, jarheads, or any other high-risk MOS where you had a risk of having your head or legs or both blown off.