Many Democrats want America to fail in Iraq

I agree but that doesn't change the fact that this entire conflict is about spreading capitalism, not democracy.
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Based on what evidence?


Not my qualifications but puppet governments are no stranger to the past century.
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So are Jim Crow laws.


Doesn't mean we're not going to have bases in Iraq for just as long.
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And it doesn't mean the bases in Iraq will be part of a neocon oil war either.


You're not looking at the big picture
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Outline the big picture for me. SA is the linchpin of OPEC. Iraqi oil production (whenever it even begins to approach pre-invasion levels) and pricing will be limited by OPEC just as it was before the invasion. Invading an OPEC nation does nothing but chap the ass of other OPEC nations, especially if they perceive oil to be the motivation.
 
I just wonder....is this an attempt to paint the unity present during the runup to war as a declaration of belief that Saddam actually had WMDs and was a threat?
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Not only the run up to the war, but before 9/11. The vote to authorize force in Iraq came long after 9/11. These quotes are not a misrepresentation of the united support for the President directly after 9/11.
 
Another hand-raise....

Wasn't part of the argument in favor of this war that Iraqi oil would be able to pay for the reconstruction?
 
WRT Iraqi oil, there were supposedly two schools of thought in the "planning" phase. The original idea, promoted by neocons like Wolfowitz and Perle was that the new Iraqi government would declare that all treaties and agreements signed by the previous government were null and void. Iraq would then sign a bunch of things, including the NPT and the chemical / biological weapons bans, but would not join OPEC. OPEC would have a hard time surviving the loss of one of it's top oil-reserve states. Oil prices would fall as a result, or so the Administration's public voices were saying then. Apparently the neocons had been so completely taken in by Chalabi and their own PR that they discounted the possibility that the Iraqis themselves would destroy oil infrastructure in order to keep us from getting any of it. Which, of course, is exactly what has happened. They planned quite well for Saddam blowing that stuff up, but the idea that the Iraqi resistance might do it seems not to have entered their minds at all.

Oil industry execs and others with influence in the Bush/Cheney administration argued the opposite, that keeping Iraq in OPEC, with the uncertainty that the war would create in oil markets, would keep the Saudis and others happy, and keep the refunding of oil purchase dollars back to the US going. The effect that this would (and did) have on their own profits may or may not have been part of the argument... I'll leave that up to you to decide.

Nobody seems to have asked what the Iraqis, whose resources are under discussion here, might have thought about all of this.

--Shannon
 
WRT Iraqi oil, there were supposedly two schools of thought in the "planning" phase. The original idea, promoted by neocons like Wolfowitz and Perle was that the new Iraqi government would declare that all treaties and agreements signed by the previous government were null and void. Iraq would then sign a bunch of things, including the NPT and the chemical / biological weapons bans, but would not join OPEC. OPEC would have a hard time surviving the loss of one of it's top oil-reserve states. Oil prices would fall as a result, or so the Administration's public voices were saying then. Apparently the neocons had been so completely taken in by Chalabi and their own PR that they discounted the possibility that the Iraqis themselves would destroy oil infrastructure in order to keep us from getting any of it. Which, of course, is exactly what has happened. They planned quite well for Saddam blowing that stuff up, but the idea that the Iraqi resistance might do it seems not to have entered their minds at all.
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So the plan for an oil grab just coincidentally happens to meet exactly zero of its implicit goals, either in the small or big picture.
 
Oil industry execs and others with influence in the Bush/Cheney administration argued the opposite, that keeping Iraq in OPEC, with the uncertainty that the war would create in oil markets, would keep the Saudis and others happy, and keep the refunding of oil purchase dollars back to the US going. The effect that this would (and did) have on their own profits may or may not have been part of the argument... I'll leave that up to you to decide.
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The Saudis were already happy and the refunds and subsidisation were already flowing.
 
Mad Martigan,
Any which way you define the goals of this war, I think it's safe to say that it failed.
I can't speak to the whole 'oil' thing, so I will refrain from commenting on it....
The dilemma we face is what to do about it now.
 
Goals achieved:

1. Remove Saddam. Done. I don't think that mattered much from an American interest perspective, but he was a scumbag, and he's gone, so that's good.

2. Get rid of Saddam's WMDs. Well, he didn't have any, so it's kind of like the dog whose job is to keep the elephants away.. You don't see any elephants, do you? But, within those parameters, done.

3. Break up Saddam's connections with Al Queda... See #2.

Really, it seems to me we could have left after Saddam's fall and been no worse off than we are now, but half a trillion dollars richer and a couple of thousand American lives to the good.

Given that I think the whole thing was misbegotten from the beginning, we should have "declared victory and gone home" in May of 03. The Iraqis are going to end up with whatever kind of state they're going to end up with, and there's damned little we can do to change that outcome. If the goal was a pro-American democracy, we've already failed. Remember, in the 1980's, Iraq was a pro-American dictatorship. One that we helped a lot more than we hindered, to our shame.

--Shannon
 
Goals achieved:

1. Remove Saddam. Done. I don't think that mattered much from an American interest perspective, but he was a scumbag, and he's gone, so that's good.

2. Get rid of Saddam's WMDs. Well, he didn't have any, so it's kind of like the dog whose job is to keep the elephants away.. You don't see any elephants, do you? But, within those parameters, done.

3. Break up Saddam's connections with Al Queda... See #2.
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Don't forget the 15 years of UN resolutions we managed to finaly enforce for the aforementioned organization.

Really, it seems to me we could have left after Saddam's fall and been no worse off than we are now, but half a trillion dollars richer and a couple of thousand American lives to the good.
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Give or take 200 billion dollars I guess, but yeah.

Given that I think the whole thing was misbegotten from the beginning, we should have "declared victory and gone home" in May of 03.
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That may have been the best thing to do, but we didn't. And now we have to deal with it.
 
That may have been the best thing to do, but we didn't. And now we have to deal with it.
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Agreed. How?
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First thing we have to pin down is our best course of action as a nation.

I have already put my suggestion out there. Replace the word "timetable" with the word "roadmap" and "yesterday" with "last week".

Next, pin down what each party's candidates are likely to do.
Finally, decide which candidate's position aligns closest and vote accordingly.
 
Agreed. How?
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I would say we are fumbling and bumbling along the right path, more or less. Create a (errr somewhat) stable environment in which the Iraqis can form a democratic government while training Iraq forces (along with people to lead those forces) to replace the US troops propping up the Iraqi government and providing national police/military functions. When that is complete, we'll have an Iraq that can run its own damned country without our help, except for maybe some training personel. Personally, I think it would be better to encourage a three state Iraqi confederacy.
 
Personally, I think it would be better to encourage a three state Iraqi confederacy.
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I may be mistaken, and please correct me if I'm wrong....but didn't tube-ee endorse this same course of action?

If that's the case, maybe we should be fighting for the dissolution of Iraq instead of it's unity....
 
IDK. I'm not the only one of this opinion. If you mean the seperation of Iraq into three autonomous entities, then I would say no. I think it would be better to support a "united" Iraqi confederacy. However, I can see why administering/training/securing three Iraqi states as opposed to one would be a much bigger PITA at this point.
 
Martigan,
That's not a bad idea in itself. I'd say that anything we can do to maximize our own national security after this debacle is worth pursuing, even if it is a bigger PITA.
 
An extra 100 billion a year for national security after we get out of Iraq should buy a lot of security. Of course, a good bit of that would be infrastructure, so it probably wouldn't have to be purchased every year, but you get the idea.
 
I don't know what the future Iraq will look like, one state, loose confederation, or three states. I do know that that decision will be made by Iraqis, without regard for US interests or opinions, and, if history is any guide, it's likely to be made by the victors (if any) following a long, nasty civil war in which lots of innocents die.

That'll be true (or not) regardless of whether or not we're there. We've got nowhere near the force levels required to prevent it, and without a draft, which won't happen, we don't have the bodies.

I just don't see any good (from the US persepctive) outcome on the horizon. Stay or go, it won't matter. So we should go. If that's "defeatist", then I guess that's what it is, but that's what I see. I'd rather see Iraqis killing each other than killing each other and us. And those are the only two likely alternatives I see there. If I thought that there was a probablity of our presence creating a good outcome in Iraq, I'd support staying in and making that happen. I don't.

Would it be better to start leaving now, or to set up specific objectives for the Iraqi government, with a set reduction of our presence as each one is met, I don't know, but what we're doing now isn't working. When what you're doing isn't working, you change what you do... you don't keep doing it and hope for different results.

--Shannon
 
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