Did the invasion of Iraq accomplish anything, other than making lots of money for

[raccoon]

Halliburton and their ilk?

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

1. No, but really isn't that all that matters?

[madokie]

2. And the murder of thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqi

That is the crime here. Money can come and go but life is finite

[stultusporcos]

3. It created multiple generations of new terrorists!

The blowback from America’s Iraq and Afghanistan’s Excellent Adventure will come back to haunt us some day.

Just like it always does when we monkey around with other countries for their resources.

People love to spew never forget 9/11, well we sowed the seeds for another one some day.

Perhaps people will learn something after the next 9/11 like event.

[newfie11]

4. Made a great poster for terrorist recruitment nt

[Victor_c3]

5. It helped me get some good disability benefits from the VA

[pinboy3niner]

8. Wars are great for that

All of us pinko commie shot-up, blown-up vets get our disabilty handout entitlements. Yay!

[bemildred]

6. It was great for the government of Iran, and the Kurds.

Good and bad for a few others, Turkey for example.

Not so much for anybody else. In fact pretty bad for everybody else.

[karynnj]

7. It probably was a factor in the total destabilization of the Middle East

This was the goal of the neocons. A goal that to me seemed equivalent to throwing all the puzzle pieces of a difficult puzzle that you were struggling to put together up into the air and hoping that the puzzle would be easier once you did that. The neo cons were not altogether wrong in initially trying to grab credit for the Arab Spring. (Note how quickly they abandoned that claim as the governments did not magically become idealist, Utopian democracies.)

It also made Iran more powerful and removed the biggest region "check" to it.

You can go back further and ask what was the real impact of the first gulf war, which even people like Senator Lugar refer to as a war for oil, was. Many of the jihadhis were radicalized because we maintained troops in Saudi Arabia.

You can go back further than that, and ask what the effect of the proxy wars associated with the cold war did. It did seem cheaper and lost no American lives to arm the Mujahadims to fight the Soviets.

You can go back further to the colonial times and consider the impact of the British policy of putting a minority population in all the positions of power that they allowed the "natives" to have and then leaving. In places which had democracies, the subjected majority often then became the power. (One example is Sri Lanka.)

[bemildred]

9. Yes, British colonial habits and caste politics were very pernicious in the long run.

A recipe for violence. Most of them have already blown up a time or two. And then there is us, the permanent explosion.

Syria was French, but it's the same deal, minority rule, for the loyalty to the colonial master, and a recipe for killing when the master leaves.

That gets far too little attention, the shitty job of colonial rule they did.

They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace. -- Tacitus