There question is not whether there will be problems if the US leaves, but whether our staying there will make things any better. There may be problems if we leave over the next year, but there will also be problems if we stay around for five years or ten years. There’s also an excellent chance these problems will be even worse there after a longer period of American occupation. There’s also the cost which will be paid for remaining longer.

To some extent, Iraq has become flypaper to these knuckleads. I just read that 40 of the radical Palestinians in Lebonon went to Iraq to fight the Americans. Well that is 40 fewer that the Lebanese army has to deal with. We are cautioned by the experts that Iraq is a “training ground” for terror much the same as Afghanistan was for al Qaeda. I’m not sure I buy this. Aside from the roadside bomb, what effective tactic have they acccomplished? Certainly one cannot say much for the learning curve of a suicide bomber. They HAVE learned that spectacular marketplace bombings and 24-hour news cycles are a good way to convince squeamish westerners to throw in the towel.

For the Iraqis in many ways it is the year zero. General Patreaus said that a helicopter flight over Baghdad opened his eyes to how much activity and commerce actually goes on in spite of the carnage we hear about every day. John Burns, NYT beaureau chief, said that it is like looking at a kaleidoscope. You get a different picture every time; some of them hopeful, others pessimistic.

I have great fear that the Iraqi people are going to be abandoned in the current political climate. So much is at stake. I wish every member of Congress who is entertaining the idea of withholding funds or de-authorizing the war could take a moment and see this video:

Link

Chuck

What would have happened in Iraq if we hadn’t gone in is hypothetical. Regardless, the important point is that we wouldn’t be the cause. We also wouldn’t have the presence of the United States military there which inflames the conflict creating more problems than we would have seen if Iraq collapsed on its own.

A couple of things if I may. Resolution 1441 was a direct response to Iraq’s failure to comply with the cease-fire agreements of the Gulf War, I hope we can at least agree in that. In all, Iraq was not in compliance with a number of SC resolutions since the end of hostilities. Some legal experts have even argued that these were actually self-enforcing; and as such should not have required an additional resolution. A few points of interest did emerge from Powell’s “Dog-and-pony show”: The Iraqi authorities were caught on air trying to mislead U.N inspectors (nothing new there), and the presence of Zarqawi was established. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on.

Regarding the power vacuum issue, I’m afraid I have less faith in the international community than you. It took Clinton’s strong leadership and NATO to intervene in Bosnia, and it was done without the approval of the UN. I don’t recall Boutros Galli going on TV and calling that an “illegal war”. China’s blocking of resolutions against Sudan’s Darfur genocide shows just how ineffective the UN continues to be to this day.

In the current war we have the United States acting contrary to the international community in declaring it has the right to invade another country.

Breach of the cease fire agreements and other justifications for the war you give were not those used by Bush to justify the war. Bush fails based upon the justifications he provided.  Even if these were used to justify the war, it wouldn’t excuse the many mistakes made, including going to war before finishing the job against al Qaeda, failing to create a true international coalition, and failure to have a plan for after Saddam was removed.

If Saddam had been overthrown internally we may or may not have had the same power vacuum. There wouldn’t have been the destruction of the infrastructure as occured when the US invaded. Either way, it wouldn’t have been caused by the United States. It is not a valid defense of what the US did to Iraq to claim that maybe it would have happened anyways. Plus, if Iraq slipped into chaos due to Saddam being removed by an internal enemy, the response could have been international. We wouldn’t have the problem of inflaming the problem of terrorism by having a situation of the US being seen as waging a war on a Muslim country.

And what if Saddam had been overthrown by his domestic enemies? Talk about a power vacuum, there would have been a true sectarian war, not the current “war of sectarians” that we are observing now. Don’t forget that one of the successes of OIF was the election of a legitimate government, no matter how imperfect. It is now our job–everyone’s job– to do all we can to support and defend it. One of the things Ambassador Khalilizad said that I found interesting was that he was constantly amazed at the diversity of the groups asking for his help in resolving disputes. That was because they knew that they could not get what they wanted by force.

“bear any burden, pay any price”

Supporters of the war often try to extend this to say the war was justified because Saddam violated UN sanctions. This argument quickly breaks down due to the lack of support by the UN for the war. A decision to go to war based upon violations of UN sanctions must be made by the UN. The US cannot unilaterally make this decision and use the UN sanctions as cover.

Goal was undoubtably the major goal for most neocons and backers of the war. However, I’m not certain this was the main goal in Bush’s mind. There’s no way to prove it, but I’ve always suspected that deep down Bush supported the war on a more personal level. Bush went through life as a serial failure, who was repeatedly bailed out by Daddy’s friends. Now he was President (The Decider/The Commander Guy). He thought he was no longer a failure. (The old idea of being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple). Daddy couldn’t get rid of Saddam. Saddam even threatened to kill Daddy. Bush decided he would get rid of Saddam, and had plenty of people willing to go along because of oil.

2 – The no-fly zones and embargos would never work. Would more UN sanctions be effective? As you said, they were never tried. The important thing is to procede in a consistant process so that if it fails, the world body agrees everyhing possible was tried.

3 – The overthrow was never in doubt. The post-war was never planned and were a disaster from day 1.

4 – We left a world worse off then the one that existed before. Add in Quantanimo and abu Graib and we have been a negative influence.

The real goal all along was the oil. As soon as the oil contracts are signed, Bush will declare victory and move the troops to guarding the oil infrastructure.

1) Not met by Saddam yet, but I will grant Chuck that it is possible that at some time Saddam might have crossed the line here.

2) Bush failed to give other fair means a fair trial. Evidence such as the Downing Street Memos show that, even when Bush was claiming he would go thru the UN and seek a non-military settlement, he had already decided to go to war.

3) Prospects for success were poor based upon the plans of the Bush administration.

4) Bush failed on this count, as was inevitable in light of 3.

Bush very well might have gotten international approval over time. At the time Bush announced that the time for diplomacy had ended and started the war, countries such as France were not willing to go along but were basically asking for another few months. If the inspections continued, they probably would not have given approval. However, if Saddam had gone too far in being uncooperative, this could have changed things.

Here are the principles:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

In my opinion, if Bush was a capable, honest president, he could have gotten a just war provision to change regimes. However, the Decider had no intention of trying. This lack of ability doomed the Iraq mission before it started and may doom in advance future legitimate missions.

If not for Bush, 9/11 and Iraq would not have become connected. Whether Saddam ultimately should have been taken out was a totally separate question from how we should have responded to 9/11.

If not for 9/11 we might have still had the war for two reasons.

First reason is that Bush wanted this from the moment he took office and was looking for an excuse. He brought up toppling Saddam in his first cabinet meeting. Right after 9/11, after he finished My Pet Goat, his first questions to his national security advisors was whether Saddam was involved and he was obsessed with finding a connection even when advised there was no such connection. If not for 9/11, Bush might have found some other excuse.

The second reason is that Saddam might have continued to be Saddam. Ultimately there might have been a strong enough international concensus that he needed to go. While Bush used 9/11 as the reason for the war, in actuality 9/11 was a reason why we should’t have gone to war. It was more important to finish off al Qaeda. However, if 9/11 hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have had that reason not remove Saddam. However, if this was to be done, it needed to be done as an international effort, and needed to include the support of Muslim states so that this wouldn’t be seen as a US vs. Muslim war. We also needed a reasonable plan for after Saddam was remeoved to avoid what has happened.

In reality, these conditions would have made it very difficult, which is why Bush I and his people were against removing Saddam, and why Clinton never tried. As long as we had some degree of inspections and could keep Saddam from doing anything worse than he has, we probably would have stuck with containment.

“Clinton has contradicted himself on this issue,”

That could apply to both Bill and Hillary. Still, people often use quotes from Bill (while he was President) to justify the war, and such quotes do not provide justification. Regardless of the problems he described with Saddam, he refrained from starting such a war.

Kaplan is really waging a strawman argument against the memos. He’s portraying them as being more significant than most claim they are, and then argues they are not that significant. Sure, most of what was in the memos was nothing new. We’ve had further evidence of the same. Kaplan sees that as reason to put down the memos. I see this as making them part of an overall body of evidence which demonstrates how Bush intentionally fixed the evidence to make the case he wanted to make.

There’s also been a lot written on the interpretation of “fixed.” Most evaluating the papers do not agree with Kaplan’s interpretation.

You can always find people who will twist things around to try to make Bush look innocent. If you look objectively at the facts, and apply Occam’s raxor rather than engaging in intellectual gymnastics to explain away the facts, but far the most likely interpretation of the facts is that the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq from the start and was intentionally distorting the intelligence to present its case. The memos also make it clear that Bush was planning to go to war when in public he was claiming to still be working towards a diplomatic solution.