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This thread was inspired by a minor derail in the USPol July thread. If the subject matter is too controversial or uninteresting, or mods otherwise disapprove, my apologies. Disclaimer: I am writing this OP from the perspective of a left-wing individual who does not approve of the Iraq War. That doesn't mean people who support/supported it aren't welcome (i.e. people from more conservative subforums than D&D who usually lurk), or that I want those opinions shouted down. The point of this thread isn't exactly to hold a formal debate on the ethics or need for the war, more than it is looking for stories and anecdotes from the people who lived through it. This thread is obviously from a US perspective, but non-US goons are welcome and encouraged. As usual in D&D, please don't be racist/sexist/otherwise an rear end in a top hat. The Iraq War (March 20, 2003 - December 18, 2011): We all know about it. One of the most recent major conflicts - and, many would say, failures - in American foreign policy history, the Iraq War was a protracted invasion of Iraq, a Middle Eastern country that essentially sits in the center of the region. The reasons given ranged from "Saddam Hussein is a bad man" to "Iraq has or is seeking WMDs," and it was backed up by faulty or outright fabricated intelligence. The Bush Administration was culpable for and complicit in lies and deceit knowingly given to the United States Congress to justify the war, even as it made secret deals with foreign governments to pursue the war regardless of what their respective intelligence communities recommend. On July 6, 2016, the Iraq Inquiry was published, an official government investigation into the Iraq War by the British. In it was a scathing criticism of the war and the means used to get Britain to commit to it. It shows that Bush Administration was not the only government complicit in sabre rattling for the war, even to the point of lies. And of course we all know that the war itself was a total disaster. Too few troops sent, with insufficient equipment, supplemented by private contractors siphoning money off from the government for little gain. War crimes like the Abu Ghraib facility torture incidents were just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of civilians died, either from direct fighting or indirect causes like famine and disease. Thousands of American soldiers returned home to a broken VA system that did little to protect them from hardships resulting from PTSD and other wartime ailments. Today the Iraq War is toxic in American politics; both current Presidential candidates oppose it, though Hillary Clinton voted for it and Donald Trump is on the record supporting it at the time. A war that enjoyed upwards of 70% approval when we invaded is now almost universally reviled, or intentionally scrubbed from history as a political inconvenience. We invaded Iraq a few days before my eighth birthday. I remember it only vaguely, snippets of news here or there. I remember reading an article about how we caught or killed Saddam and most of his upper entourage of cronies. I know a little bit about it as a historical event. But honestly, I know that I don't know a lot about the war in practice. I'm sure someone will point out in the first few posts mistakes I made in this OP. And I know for many people in modern American politics, there is a great divide between those who remember the '90s and 2000s and those who don't (see: Hillary supporters versus Bernie supporters). So I made this thread not to hold a referendum on the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq War, but to ask goons who experienced it truly as an adult, as a political and cultural experience, could share with me and the forum their stories. A goon's history of the Iraq War, if you will. I know this OP is very American-centric, but I imagine there are many foreign goons who have vivid memories of the Iraq War and what it was like to live through it, and if you want me to add anything to the OP about the experiences of those in other countries, I will gladly do so. As I said, those who don't oppose the war or otherwise have atypical opinions on the matter from the D&D norm are welcome. I'm sure there will be slapfights and trolls, but I believe your experiences matter too. I'd be especially interested to hear the stories of those who actually fought in Iraq, if you're willing to share. This thread can also be for sharing anecdotes about what it was like to live under the Bush Administration in general, because from what has been implied in USPol, it sounds like it was a crazy time. I know I lived through it, but I wasn't old enough to understand the politics. Edit (August 9, 2016): Fish of hemp posted:Obligatory comic strip: Extensive Vamping posted:In any case, this story is so worth reading I'll post it again. It should really be added to the OP: http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/11022104/iraq-war-neoconservatives Lightning Knight fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Aug 10, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 15:59
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Oh, man. I remember 9/11. The school social worker had gathered all the fifth graders into the social studies teacher's room to talk to us about an autistic classmate who needed assistance. The loudspeaker came on - it was our principal, telling us with tears in her voice that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The social worker looked up at the loudspeaker, looked at us, and shrugged. She didn't get why the principal had announced it, and we didn't get it either, until ten minutes later when we were back in our homerooms and Mrs. Brown had pulled out the TV on wheels on CNN. I watched the towers fall. It was awful to watch, but still, no one really got it. I remember one of my older friends, who was having his teenage wicca phase, freaking out because he'd had what he in retrospect considered a clairvoyant dream about people dying and didn't tell anyone about it. I remember the leadup to the war, how loving ridiculous it was to me even as...I think I was an eleven-year-old. There was this weird carnival atmosphere in the...what was it, the race to find WMDS? The race for Saddam to turn over things? Race for something. I didn't get why we were invading Iraq, because hadn't we just invaded Afghanistan and kicked the Taliban out? Wasn't Osama a Taliban? The other kids in my social group didn't get it either, and I went to a school that prided itself on having involved, politically active students, /and/ I had a girl in my class whose parents were Iraqi immigrants. She didn't get it either. "Bush stole the election" fervor had been tempered slightly by 9/11, but it was still there, especially in a bunch of kids who assumed they were smarter than anyone else in the room and listened to Rage Against The Machine and Green Day. I didn't get why we were ignoring the UN. I remember the day we invaded Iraq. My math teacher yelled at us for giggling in class because of "the horrible events occuring today." I remember the bombing of Baghdad - my homeroom teacher took us up to the computer lab, where the school's tech guy was livestreaming it, and that was bizarre as hell, to be sitting watching this city spark up red and orange. And then we went downstairs to lunch, where they had Freedom Fries on the menu. That was weird as gently caress to me too. My class was supposed to go on a trip to Toronto but then they shut the border and when they opened it back up they said you needed a passport to go over. This was very weird to me, as a person who was used to being driven over the border by 16-year-old babysitters who would just be asked "Do her parents know that she's with you?" And the babysitter would say yes, and the border control person would shrug and say "Try to get a note next time." No checking of IDs, no scanning, no car searches that I remember, just "Citizenship? Where are you going? Have fun." Also, being so close to the border, the TV at our house picked up CBC, and what CBC was showing about the war was a lot different than what NBC was showing about the war. The comedy on CBC was a lot more critical. Royal Canadian Air Farce didn't have any problem calling Dick Darth Cheney. This Hour Has 22 Minutes had no problems saying that Bush was both greedy and inbred. Just For Laughs had Muslim/Sikh/SE Asian comics doing bits about those loving idiot Americans committing war crimes. Fox on weeknights was rerunning fluffier episodes of The Simpsons. The Iraq war taught me very early on that the President is not necessarily a good person, and that it's okay to reject blind patriotism, and that America is not the de facto good guy. It's also taught me that I was apparently living in an incredibly progressive bubble when I was a kid, because even just shifting over to different schools or the suburbs or a forty-minute drive to the more rural areas shifted opinions so far to the right that it was scary. There were kids in my school making zines about how much Bush sucked, and no one in my sixth grade homeroom class stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance for the entire year, and my seventh grade social studies teacher, during our unit on Mesopotamia, offhandedly said something like "And we're bombing the cradle of civilization because they have oil." My eighth grade English teacher made us read Vietnam war literature and told us that America gets into stupid wars that hurt everyone. My eighth grade social studies teacher, a veteran, told us that the government recorded MLK having sex to discredit him, and didn't flinch when some kid said "I hope George Bush dies." He laughed, even. I think I still have trouble understanding that other people still think the Iraq war was a sound decision at the time, or that it was okay for their kids to die in it, because it didn't look sound to me even as a literal child, and no one around me except for my dad (a racist) thought it was sound either. And if you can reject the Iraq war as never a sound decision, and the accumulated ridiculousness around it as garbage (Freedom Fries! TSA! Passports at the border when I'm 11 and just wanna go to the loving Toronto Zoo! Mega-patriotism! Dick Cheney!), and you look how the right and the left have mutated in response to it, then you can reject a lot of just-so justifications for Americans and Are Freedoms. edrith fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 16:29
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I mean, I think at this point everyone outside of the American political Right accept that the Iraq war was a boondoggle of lies and rushed action, especially with the recent UK report. I remember being vaguely excited as I watched in High School as the war exploded, and the Patriotism in the school was thick. But I think deep down we all knew something wasn't right, and especially as Bush's term wound down and nothing ever came of the WMDs, we all realized we'd been misled. 10+ years on, and multiple deployments, and the rise of ISIS has kind of revealed to us that Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' landing after the Invasion wasn't for the US citizens or the victims of 9/11. It was for him. And, maybe, his dad. He didn't do it for us. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 16:34
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We watched Bush start a loving war.
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Aug 1, 2016 16:43
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It's crazy to think how different the the world would be if Bush v. Gore had gone the other way.
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Aug 1, 2016 16:48
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Gore would have done the same thing with minor details different, because electoral politics is a sham and there might as well only be one party. The democrats spent the 90s loving with iraq, remember?
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Aug 1, 2016 16:55
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HorseLord posted:Gore would have done the same thing with minor details different, because electoral politics is a sham and there might as well only be one party. The democrats spent the 90s loving with iraq, remember? ...are we comparing a full on invasion to embargos?
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Aug 1, 2016 16:58
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HorseLord posted:Gore would have done the same thing with minor details different, because electoral politics is a sham and there might as well only be one party. The democrats spent the 90s loving with iraq, remember? nah, bush was gunning to invade iraq from day one. dems would have just stuck to sanctions and no fly zones
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Aug 1, 2016 17:00
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CommieGIR posted:...are we comparing a full on invasion to embargos? The point is that the Iraq war is the conclusion to a long buildup of aggression which started before bush rigged that election. The election platitudes of Democrat and Republican presidents don't hardly change poo poo about the trajectory of the US Government or the ruling class it serves. President Gore would have merely overseen an Iraq war where the failed rebuilding included more solar panels, and perhaps a little later on than Bush did. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 17:03
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HorseLord posted:The point is that the Iraq war is the conclusion to a long buildup of aggression which started before bush rigged that election. The election platitudes of Democrat and Republican presidents don't hardly change poo poo about the trajectory of the US Government or the ruling class it serves. Demonstrate this or stop posting. quote:President Gore would have merely overseen an Iraq war where the failed rebuilding included more solar panels.  Riiiiggghtttt
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Aug 1, 2016 17:04
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Y'all are bad at telling stories. 
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Aug 1, 2016 17:06
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CommieGIR posted:I mean, I think at this point everyone outside of the American political Right accept that the Iraq war was a boondoggle of lies and rushed action, especially with the recent UK report. I was quite convinced by Scott Ritter's arguments that, if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, they would be scattered, unmaintained and basically unusable. On the strength of that I attended a protest march in my home town. I remember as we marched a guy getting up on a statue and yelling at us WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN SADDAM USES CHEMICAL WEAPONS ON US. We're in Australia. I think any conservative commentator who fought for the case of going to war should have SADDAM HAD NO WMDS branded on their asses.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:08
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CommieGIR posted:Demonstrate this or stop posting. It's self evident that the foreign policy of the US Government barely changes along with the President. Socialist Afghanistan fuckery was first under a democrat, then a republican. Iraq fuckery started under a republican, continued low key under a democrat, and then erupted again under a republican, (with bonus Afghanistan part II). That then carried on under a Democrat. It's not even a pattern exclusive to foreign policy, dude. Reagan turned the screws on the poor and black people, and then Clinton rolled into office and thought it'd be real cool to "reform" welfare into nothing. Jee, I wonder if Mrs Clinton will undo any of the Bush era poo poo Obama promised but didn't. (The answer is no)
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Aug 1, 2016 17:12
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Starshark posted:I was quite convinced by Scott Ritter's arguments that, if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, they would be scattered, unmaintained and basically unusable. On the strength of that I attended a protest march in my home town. I remember as we marched a guy getting up on a statue and yelling at us WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN SADDAM USES CHEMICAL WEAPONS ON US. We're in Australia. I think any conservative commentator who fought for the case of going to war should have SADDAM HAD NO WMDS branded on their asses. What really nailed the coffin for me was both the extreme lack of any sort of demonstrable WMDs and how hard the GOP/Bush tried to cover that reasoning up with 'Well, Saddam was bad, so he had to go'. HorseLord posted:It's self evident that the foreign policy of the US Government barely changes along with the President. Right, I forgot how many invasions Clinton kicked off, or how far into Iraq Bush Sr. went.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:12
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Saying "oh Gore would have went to Iraq" is a nice way to sound savvy, but it displays a complete and utter ignorance of the way the Bush administration pushed the Iraq War in an explicit rejection of the internationalist approach of the Clinton administration which Gore embraced. Let alone finer details, like the fact that the Clinton administration was aware of and attempted to warn the Bush administration about Bin Laden and was ignored.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:17
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Signed up for the US Army on September 1st, 2001. When I saw the towers going down I knew that 9/11 was going to be the event politicians used to justify military action in the Middle East, but I had signed up already and I was not going to back out of that. Got to my first unit in Germany in July of 2002 and we were constantly in the field, training. We spent close to 3 weeks out of every month from July 2002 to February 2003 living in tents, pantomiming our duties, and generally getting ready for war. At this point Bush was hammering hard on weapons inspections, uranium cake, and WMD's, so by the time we got into Kuwait at the end of February 2003, our commanders were telling us it was not a matter of if, but when we would be going to Iraq. To a man, this seemed like leaders would say one thing on tv (think something along the lines of weapons inspectors being granted access to wherever) but were telling the military something different (that this war was going to happen). The deployment itself was fairly boring with only a few times I really felt that I was in danger, but I feel as though I was lucky to be apart of the initial invasion as the really bad poo poo started happening around the end of 2003/beginning of 2004 (we didn't have any training about IED's until well after we had been in country for 4 or 5 months). Looking back, of course, is a sad excerpt in the politics of the US but I believe my deployment showed me that not all Muslims are out to kill Americans and that life can be a hell of a lot worse than just being poor in the US. I think that had I not been deployed to Iraq that I would be some stupid shitheel talking about how we should ban Muslims, and mosques are nothing but fronts for terrorism. This is my story.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:23
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HorseLord posted:It's self evident that the foreign policy of the US Government barely changes along with the President. Socialist Afghanistan fuckery was first under a democrat, then a republican. Iraq fuckery started under a republican, continued low key under a democrat, and then erupted again under a republican, (with bonus Afghanistan part II). That then carried on under a Democrat. on the other hand it's unrealistic to claim that any democrat wanted to invade iraq as much as bush 2 did
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Aug 1, 2016 17:24
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Bush and the pro-Iraq war people had to do a lot of wrangling to override the top and mid-level bureaucrats at CIA, DoD, State who under normal circumstances create and execute policy. The invasion was by no means a foregone conclusion, although enmity and airstrikes against Saddam would have likely continued. The point people miss who say things like "the President doesn't matter" is that there still are a range of options within the admittedly very narrow framework of U.S. foreign policy that can have an enormous impact.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:26
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b0ng posted:Signed up for the US Army on September 1st, 2001. When I saw the towers going down I knew that 9/11 was going to be the event politicians used to justify military action in the Middle East, but I had signed up already and I was not going to back out of that. Got to my first unit in Germany in July of 2002 and we were constantly in the field, training. We spent close to 3 weeks out of every month from July 2002 to February 2003 living in tents, pantomiming our duties, and generally getting ready for war. At this point Bush was hammering hard on weapons inspections, uranium cake, and WMD's, so by the time we got into Kuwait at the end of February 2003, our commanders were telling us it was not a matter of if, but when we would be going to Iraq. To a man, this seemed like leaders would say one thing on tv (think something along the lines of weapons inspectors being granted access to wherever) but were telling the military something different (that this war was going to happen). If I might ask, were you frontline combat, or were you support staff? Could you tell us more about your interactions with the locals? How did they perceive you?
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Aug 1, 2016 17:27
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I was 14 at the time and remember thinking how bullshit everything was. I'm from Texas and when Bush ran for office in 2000 we were all enamored. He was very likeable and appeared competent. My older brother got a letter from him in the 90s for getting exemplary grades (Governor Bush). My dad told him that Bush would be president someday. After 2003 I realized it was all a loving sham. I did not cheer. I hated when Army and Marine recruiters came to my high school to try to impress us. I grew up watching Three Kings and Michael Moore and Daily Show. I knew that killing innocent people over terror fears was absolutely disgusting. It's going to sound silly, but I think about the Iraq War everyday. Every time someone praises America, I remember the hundred thousand civilians killed in Iraq. Every time a new headline reads "Terrorist bomb kills 20 in Baghdad." Every time Hillary speaks and Obama speaks and FOX News continues to exist. It has forever shaped my political leanings. I will not vote for Hillary. She may side with a lot of my politics, but the lady is a warmonger. I will note vote for more murder. Frijolero fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 17:30
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Frijolero posted:It has forever shaped my political leanings. I will not vote for Hillary. She may be side with a lot of my politics, but the lady is a warmonger. I will note vote for more murder. did you vote for obama? if so, i have some bad news...
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Aug 1, 2016 17:31
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Gore wouldn't have taken the Cheney-led faction of impatient neocons into the White House and it's hard to imagine him appointing a Paul Bremer to completely poo poo all over the country if he had gone to war for whatever reason. There also wouldn't have been the incredibly toxic Blair-Bush alliance.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:33
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Popular Thug Drink posted:did you vote for obama? if so, i have some bad news... I voted for Obama in 2008. I voted for Jill Stein in 2012. Obama was the peacetime candidate remember? He had the power and gumption to get us out of war. He criticized candidate Hillary for being so gun-ho. Thanks Obama! Frijolero fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 17:36
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Lightning Knight posted:If I might ask, were you frontline combat, or were you support staff? Could you tell us more about your interactions with the locals? How did they perceive you? I was communications so the first portion of my deployment was at Camp Victory which was on the grounds of a huge palace right outside of Baghdad. I did not have much interaction with any local populace there and it was very tightly controlled with who was able to get into the camp. About halfway through (around late August, early September) my team of six soldiers were given a job to provide communications for a civilian affairs unit in the green zone. I lived in a convention center in Baghdad right across the street from the Al-Rashid hotel (I was in the hotel at the time of the attack). Every day locals would come to the convention center looking for work , help with being displaced, or anything else you could think a civilian populace would need having just had their homeland torn asunder. We had an infantry unit (Florida National Guard, loved those guys) with us in the convention center for security and QRF purposes and we worked with them quite a bit if they needed extra bodies to complete a task, it felt front line-ish, but I have no other experiences to compare it to. There were translators that worked with the Civilian Affairs that I interacted with a lot, and honestly, most of them were just happy that they could provide for their families. Locals would be in the building often as well looking to speak with the military about getting food/water/etc to their people but only a few out of the hundreds that I met seemed to have a hate boner for Americans in general. To me, they were just everyday people who wanted to work and provide and could easily be anywhere else in the world and just living their lives. They just happened to live in Iraq and the US just happened to have a president who wanted to get Saddam Hussein and did not care who got hurt in the process as long as Hussein was captured or killed.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:47
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The Iraq war is where we learned America tortures. We aren't supposed to, but I don't know anything anymore. We still haven't prosecuted anyone for that.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:47
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I was in college in 2003, and at the time I thought it was pretty clear Bush was going to invade Iraq regardless of what the weapons inspectors did or did not find. That opinion has been justified by facts and history. It's completely astounding that the United States invaded a country for essentially no reason other than that the president wanted to. I still get a little bit angry when I think back to those days when smug rear end in a top hat college republicans would condescendingly tell me I was naive for stating the war was both unnecessary and a bad idea. Yes, I was the naive one, and not the ones who thought the Iraqi people would gratefully greet US soldiers as saviors and liberators. I've been reading the recent biography Bush by Jean Edward Smith, and it's been very enlightening. Pretty much any opportunity Bush had to avoid war or make the occupation less of a mess he would do completely the wrong thing, often unilaterally without even consulting advisors or his cabinet. Smith, by the way, happened to be one of my professors in college during the Bush years and I can vouch for him as a good dude who tries to present historical facts without bias.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:19
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The fact that the impetus for war remains opaque still bugs me. I was in high school at the time, and not very politically aware or interested. I wasn't sure what to make of Bush's war drums, but after the craziness of 9/11, I figured that the full magnitude of DoD and CIA intelligence meant that there had to be some substance behind the alleged WMD threat. I'm never making that mistake again. I think that this paragraph from David Kaiser's blog is the best single-paragraph summary about the reasons for the war: quote:Friday, December 23, 2011
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Aug 1, 2016 18:27
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Grondoth posted:The Iraq war is where we learned America tortures. We aren't supposed to, but I don't know anything anymore. We still haven't prosecuted anyone for that. It's impossible to overstate the effect of our acceptance of torture on the corrosion of our shared concept of civic virtue and the rule of law. The complete disregard of the constitution's value by the right got its biggest push by this fundamental redefinition of what is humane. Now torture is seen as just another political issue that it's ok to have different opinions about.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:27
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SedanChair posted:It's impossible to overstate the effect of our acceptance of torture on the corrosion of our shared concept of civic virtue and the rule of law. The complete disregard of the constitution's value by the right got its biggest push by this fundamental redefinition of what is humane. Now torture is seen as just another political issue that it's ok to have different opinions about. i'd think of this as a reiteration of divisions on the role of morality in national security picked up during the vietnam war, when people would defend atrocities such as my lai. like sure we argue about tortue but at least we aren't arguing about literal massacres
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Aug 1, 2016 18:35
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Bubbacub posted:The fact that the impetus for war remains opaque still bugs me. I was in high school at the time, and not very politically aware or interested. I wasn't sure what to make of Bush's war drums, but after the craziness of 9/11, I figured that the full magnitude of DoD and CIA intelligence meant that there had to be some substance behind the alleged WMD threat. I'm never making that mistake again. I draw a distinction between Bush's motivations and the motivations of the rest of the administration. The neoconservatives probably wanted to use American military power to reshape the Middle East as they saw fit and would cynically use any justification to do it. Bush, meanwhile, I can actually believe thought he was doing God's work by fighting the evil forces of Gog and Magog and bringing the light of freedom to the people of the Middle East.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:41
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Mountaineer posted:I draw a distinction between Bush's motivations and the motivations of the rest of the administration. The neoconservatives probably wanted to use American military power to reshape the Middle East as they saw fit and would cynically use any justification to do it. Bush, meanwhile, I can actually believe thought he was doing God's work by fighting the evil forces of Gog and Magog and bringing the light of freedom to the people of the Middle East. Oh man, I'm having flashbacks to FOUO DoD briefing slides with Bible quotes
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Aug 1, 2016 18:43
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SedanChair posted:It's impossible to overstate the effect of our acceptance of torture on the corrosion of our shared concept of civic virtue and the rule of law. The complete disregard of the constitution's value by the right got its biggest push by this fundamental redefinition of what is humane. Now torture is seen as just another political issue that it's ok to have different opinions about. You do realise that the US government has been extraterritorially torturing, maiming and mutilating people for decades, yes? The war on terror wasn't some watershed moment where the gloves came off and the US decided to start playing dirty, it was the continuation of an overreaching foreign policy that pervaded the entire cold war and only had a short breather throughout the 90s because the communist boogeyman fell apart and the US hadn't found a new enemy yet.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:45
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TomViolence posted:You do realise that the US government has been extraterritorially torturing, maiming and mutilating people for decades, yes? The war on terror wasn't some watershed moment where the gloves came off and the US decided to start playing dirty, it was the continuation of an overreaching foreign policy that pervaded the entire cold war and only had a short breather throughout the 90s because the communist boogeyman fell apart and the US hadn't found a new enemy yet. They do it inside US territory too.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:47
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Another factor is that the vote was NOT sold as "Let's invade Iraq," it was sold as "Let's put some muscle behind the Weapon Inspector teams." The fact that this seemed to work and the teams had unrestricted access everywhere in Iraq didn't matter. Bush wanted his war. Hey Hans Blix, I know you're still in the middle of your inspections, but you better get out of the way cause we're coming in!
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Aug 1, 2016 18:51
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7c Nickel posted:Another factor is that the vote was NOT sold as "Let's invade Iraq," it was sold as "Let's put some muscle behind the Weapon Inspector teams." The fact that this seemed to work and the teams had unrestricted access everywhere in Iraq didn't matter. Bush wanted his war. Hey Hans Blix, I know you're still in the middle of your inspections, but you better get out of the way cause we're coming in! Nothing stops the Army of God!  Even more damning was the UN/US inspection team saying "Uhhhhh....everything is kosher, nothing out of the ordinary..."
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Aug 1, 2016 18:54
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i'd think of this as a reiteration of divisions on the role of morality in national security picked up during the vietnam war, when people would defend atrocities such as my lai. like sure we argue about tortue but at least we aren't arguing about literal massacres
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Aug 1, 2016 18:56
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7c Nickel posted:Another factor is that the vote was NOT sold as "Let's invade Iraq," it was sold as "Let's put some muscle behind the Weapon Inspector teams." The fact that this seemed to work and the teams had unrestricted access everywhere in Iraq didn't matter. Bush wanted his war. Hey Hans Blix, I know you're still in the middle of your inspections, but you better get out of the way cause we're coming in! That was so infuriating at the time. The inspectors not finding anything was just taken as proof Saddam was hiding the weapons. We now know the decision to invade had already been made. Getting the UN to initiate inspections on Iraq was just to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the invasion so it wouldn't look like an act of pointless aggression.
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Aug 1, 2016 18:57
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TomViolence posted:You do realise that the US government has been extraterritorially torturing, maiming and mutilating people for decades, yes? The war on terror wasn't some watershed moment where the gloves came off and the US decided to start playing dirty, it was the continuation of an overreaching foreign policy that pervaded the entire cold war and only had a short breather throughout the 90s because the communist boogeyman fell apart and the US hadn't found a new enemy yet. Re-read what I wrote. It certainly was a watershed moment because we stopped being shy about it.
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Aug 1, 2016 19:18
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b0ng posted:I was communications so the first portion of my deployment was at Camp Victory which was on the grounds of a huge palace right outside of Baghdad. I did not have much interaction with any local populace there and it was very tightly controlled with who was able to get into the camp. About halfway through (around late August, early September) my team of six soldiers were given a job to provide communications for a civilian affairs unit in the green zone. I lived in a convention center in Baghdad right across the street from the Al-Rashid hotel (I was in the hotel at the time of the attack). Every day locals would come to the convention center looking for work , help with being displaced, or anything else you could think a civilian populace would need having just had their homeland torn asunder. We had an infantry unit (Florida National Guard, loved those guys) with us in the convention center for security and QRF purposes and we worked with them quite a bit if they needed extra bodies to complete a task, it felt front line-ish, but I have no other experiences to compare it to. Did you ever question what you were doing, or why you were there? Is your opinion on it now the same as it was then? Do you feel that you, personally, helped people in Iraq, even if the war itself did not? Do you have any memorable stories or anecdotes about your time in the military during the Bush years, even before you went to Iraq? Edit: quote:I was quite convinced by Scott Ritter's arguments that, if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, they would be scattered, unmaintained and basically unusable. On the strength of that I attended a protest march in my home town. I remember as we marched a guy getting up on a statue and yelling at us WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN SADDAM USES CHEMICAL WEAPONS ON US. We're in Australia. I think any conservative commentator who fought for the case of going to war should have SADDAM HAD NO WMDS branded on their asses. What was the pro-war movement like in Australia? You guys were in Iraq, right? I know that opposition to the war was high in other countries but I assume it wasn't universal. Lightning Knight fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 19:34
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I was 17 when 9/11 happen and consider myself now a moderate to left liberal/Democrat. The reason I start with that is because I think people have to realize what shock ran through the in the aftermath of 9/11. People were scared and willing to accept almost anything to feel safe and I was living in a fairly liberal place. At the time I believed an invasion of Afghanistan was justified (and still do even if it was bungled) and at the time that if handled right, getting rid of Saddam Hussein could bring some peace to the region. Though I didn't believe he had ties to Al-Queda, I knew in the past they had chemical weapons and that they had caused major stability issues in the area. At the time I was more supportive of the war but I wouldn't say I was rah rahing it. Then I went to college, which would been about a year into the war and started to realize the Bush administration had no clue to what they were doing and their flimsy excuse for invading Iraq had started to fall apart. It was also helpful to have professors teach us how to think about the world around us and have honest discussions about policy in class. I don;t mean this in an AMERIKKA AM I RITE kinda of way. I mean in the fact that, oh man the stuff I am learning now helps me get context or complex ideas better. Again, as we get deeper and deeper into the first few years, I started to realize the Bush Administration knew nothing, had no plan, and cared not for the people they were putting in danger. Then as other people mentioned, we started to openly endorse torture and reprehensible tactics. And it was just disheartening to think I could of supported something like that. If people are looking for a fairly comprehensive guide to Iraq should watch this Rachel Maddow's Why We Did It.
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Aug 1, 2016 19:42
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