At Slate Fred Kaplan considers who made the worst decision of the Iraq war? Read it and weep. There are so many bad decisions and bad decision-makers to choose from. I would start all the way back in 1990:
- Expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait
- Allowing him to remain in power
- Installing troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Maintaining the no-fly zone in Iraq
- Invading Iraq in 2003.
- De-Ba’athification
- Disbanding the Iraqi military
- Allowing the Iraqis to write their own constitution rather than imposing one on them
- Withdrawing our troops from Iraq in 2011
and it doesn’t really stop there. And the decision-makers! They include all of the last four (five?) presidents and their advisors.
These bad decisions are like dominos. Each leads to the next. The only way to win is not to play.
If we had made decisions other than those we had made, we would be facing an entirely different set of problems than we do now. Would we better or worse off? I don’t know but thousand of Americans who are now dead would still be alive and we would have spent trillions less. Plus millions of Iraqis who have left Iraq would still be there. The dominos are still toppling…
Bremer’s occupation was an actual criminal enterprise. Basically America invaded and handed over the country to the American mob. For example, making it illegal for farmers to reuse their seeds and forcing them to buy from big agriculture. We could have had drug cartels and the remainder of the Gambino family in charge, and they would have had a better feel about how to deal with a conquered population.
A question about the first one. If we had not expelled them from Kuwait, who would have? And if no one, what do you suppose the next step for Hussein would have been?
Following MM’s simile, it wasn’t a case like Germany invading Poland during WWII. It was gang warfare. The Iraqi gang vs. the Kuwaiti gang. Who cares who won?
Either his neighbors would have united against him or his Arab neighbors would have accommodated to him. I’m guessing the latter. There might have been a resumption of the Iran-Iraq war. Would that have been so bad? There might have been war all over the Middle East. That would have been different from today how? We wouldn’t have been in the middle of it and it wouldn’t have been prosecuted by headchoppers the way the present one has been. Minority populations like the Yezidis might have been able to continue living their lives unlike what happened.
“Would we better or worse off? I don’t know but thousand of Americans who are now dead would still be alive…”
Not so.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/11/14/government-report-more-military-deaths-in-some-years-peace-than-war.html
That’s the equivalent of saying that, since there are 30,000 auto fatalities per year, we should have no particular concern about the attacks on 9/11.
One thing I remember about Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait is, the troops killed and ate the animals in Kuwait’s zoo. Provision-wise, they were tapped out. They weren’t going anywhere. Most of the Kuwaiti princes had fled by jet. Why should we care?
But an American president said,”This will not stand”. And so, we backed that up. But our resolve stood for almost nothing. We got rid of tons of ageing ordinance left over from Vietnam.
But the truth is, America is neither feared nor respected in the Mid-East. I don’t like their faith, but these are people of faith, they will fight for a thousand generations, unless faced with the level of brutality we brought to Japan, and maybe then still.
Great for Halliburton, Brown and Root. They should find better ways to make money.