Could Iraq have been successful if things had been done differently?

[Quixote1818]

I am not condoning the war by a long shot however I can't help but wonder if we had done the following things, if things would have possibly turned out OK in Iraq.

1. Brought in 300,000 troops and prevented looting and have better control of things.
2. Allowed France and other country's that didn't help with the fighting to help rebuild Iraq
3. Not disbanded the Iraq army
4. Helped Iraqi company's do the rebuilding instead of relying so much on Halliburton.
5. Not tortured Iraqi citizens or killed civilians in cold blood.



Sometimes I wonder if that would have changed the outcome. I lean toward it still having been a mess but you never know. It it was never worth all the death and risk, especially since it was started on a lie.

[Demeter]

1. NO

The only way it could have been better would have been to take out Saddam (if one absolutely had to) and go home. Better would have been not to create the lies that justified the invasion in the first place, and not going in the first place.
Better would have been a Supreme Court that let all the votes be counted.

[sandnsea]

2. If we'd done Afghanistan right

Then as we did Iraq correctly in the way you outlined, the hope presented by Afghanistan would have propelled Iraq forward too. But since the Bushies fuck up absolutely everything they touch because that's what corporatism does, there really was never any hope with any of it. You just can't build governments when you don't believe in government. That's the bottom line, here at home and around the world.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. If the U.S. had used the money being wasted in Iraq

to rebuild Afghanistan in a sustainable way, such as rebuilding the infrastructure with the labor of ordinary Afghan nationals and organizing grassroots projects in the villages, it would have won friends throughout the Islamic world.

It was our moral obligation, since it was U.S. funding of the Mujaheddin against the Afghan Marxist government that led said government to call for Soviet intervention (yes, Virginia, they were INVITED in) and set off 20 years of civil war.

(Not only that. Osama Bin Laden and the other radical Islamists, including the Taliban, came out of those anti-Soviet guerilla movements. Your Karma at work.)

[sandnsea]

19. I agree

Putting aside the war lies, can you imagine this kind of incompetence at any other time in our history?? Iraq is certainly a horror, but Afghanistan is a national disgrace every bit as shameful as Katrina. I really don't understand what's wrong with this country, it's falling apart around our ears and either people don't notice or don't know what to do about it.

[gulliver]

3. An America-friendly democracy blooming in Iraq...

... created by force. A pipe dream. The GOP is stupid.

[CJCRANE]

4. Hard to say.

For instance, would the invasion of Poland have been more successful if Hitler wasn't a Nazi?

I think the name "shock and awe" gives away what it was about.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

7. Yes it was about SHOCKING the world with our AWEsome power...

although showing how helpess we are against a low tech resistance is now having the opposite of the intended effect.

[MasonJar]

5. It was not our job to find out. We should not be pre-emptively

attacking any other nation.

[OzarkDem]

6. No

It was a no-win situation from the beginning. It was being handled the best way possible before the invasion.

[GeorgeGist]

8. Successful immorality???

Dream On.

[rock]

9. No. To see why try this:

Ask the question: Could the (imagined) invasion of Britain have been successful if things had been done differently? No, that would have been wrong.

[madrchsod]

10. yes

you pretty much summed up what we should have done but i`m not sure they really wanted to stablize iraq after they reached bagdad

[PresidentWar]

11. Beligerent military interventionism is always wrong!

So let's not sugarcoat this by wondering how a crime could have better been pulled off.

[jaxx]

12. No. There was no reason to go there.

[Ksec]

13. No

Iraq is too divided .

[leesa]

14. No. The invasion was illegal, it wouldn't have mattered. We were

legally and morally in the wrong so it wouldn't matter how many troops we had or how long we pinned them down. The outcome would have been bad. We are the bad guys.

[mmonk]

15. Even if it was successful, we would be considered

an international beligerent in some circles. Also, they would have moved on their next target immediately and some point would get bogged down in resistance anyway. I also believe you can't do a wrong thing right.

[karynnj]

16. Sure, if there was no invasion

Alternative made up scenario

1. In fall 2002, the UN inspectors were inspecting everywhere, including presidential palaces. They identified Iraq's most technologically advanced missiles as illegal. They flew too far WITHOUT a payload, but Iraq claimed they would be in bounds if the pay load was added. The Iraqis gave in and destroyed the missiles - an event Saddam hid from the Iraqi news media for fear it would weaken him. (this is still real)

2. In late fall, Tom Friedman had a column suggesting maybe Bush was "crazy like a fox" and was using the fact that he seemed crazy enough to trigger a war in this area as a lever to effect change. Unfortunately, Bush was simply crazy.

Start of Alternative Reality)
3. By March, 2003, it was far clearer than in Oct 2002 that the inspectors were having considerable success. As Bush started to speak of war as certain, Bill Clinton, in a joint news conference with GHWB, Colin Powell, and Chuck Hagel all joined Al Gore, John Kerry and Howard Dean who were calling on the President not to go to war. Colin Powell's speech was perhaps the most compelling as he spoke of wanting to rectify the damage he had done in saying things he knew not to be true.

4. Surprisingly, the NYT then fired Judith Miller and took responsibility for publishing lies that influenced the Congress and the public in favor of war. The WP then changed its position as well.

5. The Senate then held emergency sessions and passed a resolution that required Bush to let the inspectors continue their work and to withdraw many of the troops already sitting in the Persian Gulf to eliminate the bogus reason why the attack had to happen immediately (the soldiers were there and it would soon get too hot.)

6. With the majority of people against war, the investigations eventually had an official result of exposing the crimes against the Iraqi people of Saddam, though showing he had no WMD. The UN agreed to lift sanctions if Saddam and his sons were not leading the country. Saddam, due to perceived weakness, lost substantial power in Iraq, and the promise of better times without the sanctions, agreed to leave with his sons. Some people bemoan that the successor government led by Tariq Aziz* was still Baathist, but it is secular and it is a counter to the Islamic Republic in Iran.

7. The bad news for Democrats - Bush ran on National Security and on having removed Saddam. He then made a huge point that he improved the lives of poor Iraqis who had suffered greatly in the 10 years of sanctions. Though this was acoomplished in spite of him, it was true.

Picked for this fiction - because he was one of the few names I knew and he is Christian - so not Sunni or Shiite. The point being any resultant government would have been one we were not going to like, but it would not have to be an Islamic Republic.

Comments: This fiction didn't happen because the media was still dominantly for war - including some of the papers we trusted most. The leaders who could have had the most effect if they spoke out didn't. The Clintons, Colin Powell (who could have dramatically left the administration and spoken out), and leading Republicans, like Scowcroft, GHWB, Lugar, and Hagel who likely had problems with the war didn't speak out. The media ignored those who did speak out at that point - notably even Gore, Dean and Kerry, who were Democrats of some stature.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. Absolutely not

When the Busheviks invaded a country that had not harmed the U.S., there was NO WAY they could have avoided pissing the population off and causing chaos. No way.

Remember after the invasion there were news clips of Iraqis giving the "thumbs up" sign to U.S. troops. It turns out that that gesture in Iraqi culture means the same as our middle finger salute. (Should have been a clue that NONE of the people giving the "thumbs up" gesture looked happy.)

Saddam Hussein was the type of dictator who left most people alone and was cruel only to his political opponents. (That's the secret of a successful dictatorship. Don't interfere in everyday life too much and the vast apathetic majority won't even notice that they have no political freedoms.)

The invasion could only make the average Iraqi's life worse. It has definitely worsened the lot of Iraqi women, who have lost the rights they had under Saddam Hussein.

[LevelB]

20. Maybe, but who can say?

I told folks I work and go to church with that this war was not needed. I also said it would take a huge effort and a long time (I remember telling my children that the final outcome would be determined by people not yet born), but that the fuckwits in charge were not smart enough to win it - and that would surely cause our eventual defeat.

Not saying it was right or necessary, it was not and I said so from the start. I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach when I saw Gephardt and Daschle do a joint press conference stating that they backed Bush on this. I DID feel like it was just barely possible that we could get to a better Iraq because we have a lot of talent and resources, but that we would be fatally handicapped by Bush and his cabinet. I do not think we will ever know the answer to OPs question - because we are led by idiots.

B.

[sutz12]

21. I seriously doubt it.

I'd give it a very weak maybe. But the truth is, we took out the most stable secular muslim nation in the area. Saddam didn't really have any love for the hard line fundie muslims, including al Qeada(sp).

Once he was out of power, it was pretty well fore-ordained that the country would dissolve into sectarian violence. He was an asshole, but he was the biggest asshole on the block and didn't brook any terrorist rivals. When we got involved, we found the only way to try to quell the violence is by using the same methods that Saddam did. We, being from a more 'enlightened' culture, could never be as effective as Saddam was. For all of abu Ghraib, and the massacres and murders, by and large our troops are just not engrained into the kind of ruthless bastards the Republican Guard were.

When you open a can of worms, things will get all crawly and messy.

It's Bush's war, but we're left with the mess.

[jmowreader]

22. There is a very slight possibility

Just before Bush invaded, Saddam Hussein announced that he'd step down and he, Uday and Husay would leave the country if the United States wouldn't make war against his country. We didn't listen.

If you would have wanted Iraq to be successful, here's how you'd have done it.

FIRST, take Saddam up on his offer. And I've got the perfect place to put him: Los Angeles. Ship him to LA with $250,000, give him a paint store or something, and let him live out his days without Cuban cigars, power, prestige or great wealth such as he's accustomed to. That should be punishment enough.

SECOND, deploy 250,000 troops into Iraq, but put all of them on the Iran-Iraq border. Without nutcase Saddam hanging around, it's certain that the Iranians would try to walk in and take over. A quarter-million American troops should be enough to solve the problem.

THIRD, ask the French (who have more credibility in Iraq than we do) to establish a caretaker government for a period of 48 months.

FOURTH, select 500 of Iraq's best-and-brightest and send them to the United States to major in political science at 50 of our best universities. If you want the Iraqis to have a democratic government, perhaps they need to know how one works. This is the most important thing we could have done to foster a transition to democracy in Iraq. There is exactly one democratic Muslim state--Turkey. Everything else is either theocracy or monarchy--and the monarchs are theocratic too. Oh, there was a secular dictatorship too...but the guy who was running it is in jail.

FIFTH, select the next-brightest 500 and send them to the US to go to business school.

SIXTH, lift the embargo. This you'd actually do on the day Saddam gets on the plane to go to California.

SEVENTH, get the infrastructure that went to hell while the embargo was in effect back in operation.

EIGHTH, make sure they have an oil refinery. Right now, in order for Iraqi drivers to have gasoline and diesel, someone has to pay a refinery outside Iraq to take Iraqi crude, refine it to petroleum products then send the refined products back to Iraq.

NINTH, how about some high tech industry for Iraq?

and TENTH, once everything is running properly in Iraq, remove the US border guards.

[Bluebear]

23. It could NEVER be successful based on the WMD lie.

The mission was to disarm Sadddam and protect America from the "mushroom cloud" or deadly nerve gas attacks. Since the WMD's did not exist, there could be no "success" as that was the only aim of the invasion as sold to the American public.

[NNN0LHI]

24. Ask yourself if you could have ever "gotten over" Shock And Awe?

Here is "Shock And Awe" :


http://www.alternet.org/story/15027/

Shock and Awe: Guernica Revisited

The concept of Shock and Awe was first developed by the Pentagon's National Defense University (NDU) in 1996 as part of the "Rapid Dominance" strategy. The strategy was first used in Afghanistan. In their 1996 NDU book, "Shock and Awe," authors Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade wrote of the need to mount an assault with "sufficiently intimidating and compelling factors to force or otherwise convince an adversary to accept our will."

With an unsettling air of appreciation, Ullman and Wade invoked the haunting images from "old photographs and movie or television screens the comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I. Those images and expressions of shock transcend race, culture and history."

Shock and awe also were the emotions that Americans experienced on Sept. 11, 2001. Now, like the 9/11 terrorists, Bush and Co. are planning a similar act of almost unparalleled ferocity -- a devastating premeditated attack on a civilian urban population.

Bush seems determined to follow in the footsteps of Hulagu Khan and Tamerlane, the Mongol warlords who laid bloody waste to Baghdad in 1258 and 1401.

But destroying Baghdad will not uncover hidden chemical, biological or nuclear weapons (if, in fact, any exist). Destroying Baghdad will not capture, topple or kill Saddam Hussein. Shock and Awe's expressed goal is simple: in the words of Harlan Ullman, to destroy the Iraqi people "physically, emotionally and psychologically."

Ironically, this was also the goal of the Nazi strategists who destroyed Guernica. The town had no strategic value as a military target, but, like Baghdad, it was a cultural and religious center. Guernica was devastated to terrorize the population and break the spirit of the Basque resistance.



There is your answer.

Don

[Uncle Roy]

25. There wasn't even a REASON for the war, much less a moral justification...

It's hard to imagine what "successful" even means under those circumstances

[leftchick]

26. NO

The Brits tried the same thing a century ago and it had the same results. Look for an Arab uprising against the west part II.

[KoKo]

27. No!!!!! and if you don't know why...I'm too tired to explain it to you....

Peace!

koko