The Iraq Situation
In a sick way, the recent shift in targets is a positive sign. It means (hopefully) that the holdover Baathist thugs and imported jihadists are finding that attacking American soldiers and Marines is a very, very, dangerous thing. One thing that the media has been less than efficient in broadcasting is that when one or two American soldiers die in an ambush, the cost to the attackers is often far higher. And many attacks are foiled without American loss of life.
It also means that the counterrevolutionaries are going to be even less popular with the general populace, which can only be a good thing from our point of view.
If we continue to hunt them down, and the people continue to help us do so, things will get better. Remember, we were in a similar situation in Germany for well over a year. Operation Werewolf was killing American and British soldiers from ambush into '46.
What I remember from the pre war build up is that the administration focused on Iraqi efforts to develop WMD. Note that the consensus of all western intelligence agencies (including the French) was that Saddam either had them, or had the capability to develop them. And, of course, he had used them in the past which is certainly an indication that the idea wasn't out of left field.
The other reasons were on the back burner, but never discounted - violation of UN resolutions (18 if I recall correctly), the brutality of the regime, and support for terror. The administration never said that Saddam was directly connected to Al Quaeda, and never said that the WMD threat was imminent.
I think the central point is that after 9/11, we had to whack somebody just to establish a deterrent. Afghanistan didn't count, as it was to small, too weak. Saddam was a perfect target, because of all the reasons that were given. If we are to eliminate terror - and the war was always cast as a war on terror in general, then we have to make large scale changes in the region that is the source of the terror that has hit us hard and that continues to be (albeit smaller) threat today.
We know that Saddam's regime supported terrorists. Groups with links to Al Quaeda are in the northeast of that country, and were before we got there. The connections to Palestinian terror were more obvious.
No one of the reasons given for the invasion of Iraq was perhaps compelling enough to justify an invasion alone. But collectively, and in light of the overall threat from terrorism, Iraq was the logical and necessary choice. The best analogy, I think, for the war on terror is the British crackdown on piracy in the 19th Century, which the United States sometimes collaborated on. Sometimes it involves direct action against pirates, sometimes against the nations that support it - even if those nations didn't help the particular pirates that attacked you. Terrorism is a threat to the west, and it is not localized in one terror group.
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You offer the oft-repeated
You offer the oft-repeated line: "Note that the consensus of all western intelligence agencies (including the French) was that Saddam either had them, or had the capability to develop them".
Says who? Have you checked? This is something that should be backed up.
Or haven't you noticed that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are pissed off right now at Bush, saying their intelligence was more or less corrupted for political purposes.
I think it is highly debatable that there was general agreement. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but you state it as a kind of fait accompli.
1) You are the first person
1) You are the first person to plausibly explain how a rise in attacks might be considered a "good thing." Thanks for that. And you are right-- it IS good in a sick way, if at all.
2) In the run-up to war, we discussed the possibility that Bush wanted to whack Saddam's government as an example to others. It's not a thesis you hear very often, which is weird because it seems to me to be the single most logical of all reasons for the war. It's like we're the action hero who steps into a room of thugs who've done something bad to him and beats the shit out of the guy nearest the door-- breaks ribs, knocks out teeth, bleeding scalp, disclocated knee, swirly-- and then looks up with blood on his chin and says, "now who's next?"
Ross, I don't have links. I
Ross, I don't have links. I remember hearing these things on the TV. I don't remember ever hearing anything to the contrary. If you really want, I will find them. But I thought that that at least was relatively settled ground in the blogosphere - at least outside IndyMedia and the Democratic Underground.
And - we know he had them at one point BECAUSE HE USED THEM. It is reasonable, I think, to presume from that fact that he continued to have them.
The fact that the CIA was pissed at Bush for his use of the intelligence does not mean toooo much - intelligence agencies are generally upset with the way that any administration uses their reports; just as the military is always pissed when an administration doesn't use them the way that they would prefer.
I'm too lazy to look it up,
I'm too lazy to look it up, but there was a much-circulated email that quoted lots and lots of people stating unequivocably that Saddam had WMDs and posed a huge threat to the region. There were lots of Democratic leaders, especially, but I don't recall whether there were any foreign leaders in the batch.
There is no doubt that there were WMDs well after Desert Storm, unless one could believe that the stockpiles our troops destroyed during Desert Storm were all he owned, and if one could also believe that Saddam went through tortuous gymnastics to keep the UN inspectors away from lots of places .. for no particular reason. And, of course, risked disastrous war over WMDs that just weren't there. Huge amounts of WMD munitions were obviously dumped and buried in the desert, obviously, and pity the poor fools that run across them, possibly years from now. One can only hope the Ba'athists don't know where they are.
As for the intel community being displeased with Bush -- keep in mind that Bill and Hillary's partisan munchkins were, and still are, firmly entrenched in critical positions in the intel agencies. They decreed, eith predictable liberal glee, that "CIA should look like America" and forced race and gender quotas on all supervisory & leadership positions. It's too complicated to explain why field agents must be largely white and male (or stick out and die in 3rd world cesspools), but the result of Clintonite meddling is that most of the senior field agents quit in disgust rather than be handled by (obviously) inexperienced minority amateurs who had never been there or done that but had been promoted over those that had. To say this crippled our HUMINT efforts since the mid-90s would be a gross understatement, and truly fixing this problem is decades away, if ever.
It isn't easy to know what to believe in the world of intelligence. I spent 20 years in the Community and often can't figure it out from news reports, either.
For whatever it's worth, though -- I retired and left the business in 1985 and there was certainly no doubt in my mind that Iraq had a serious WMD program and that every major intel agency in the world knew it. Even those French fucks.