US-Iraq/war/invasion

the President he's got his war folks don't know just what it's for no one gives us rhyme or reason you have one doubt they call it treason - Roberta Flack, 1969 "Compared to What"

Overview

This page is about the United States invasion of Iraq, which took place during George W. Bush's presidential administration.

The invasion got rid of Saddam (which very much needed to happen) but has resulted in a very expensive quagmire and greatly harmed the United States:

• US military readiness has plummeted to dangerous levels
• the US economy has been dangerously weakened
• global opinion of America has suffered greatly

There should probably be a separate article about the US occupation of Iraq.

Nicknames: Messopotamia, The Iraqi Horror Picture Show (although this latter might better describe the Abu Ghraib abuses or the use of torture during GWB administration in general)

Reference

• Wikipedia:
  • 2003 invasion of Iraq
  • Legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq
  • Events:
    • 2002-10-16 Iraq Resolution: the official "declaration of war" required before military force can be used
    • 2006-12-06 report released by the Iraq Study Group
• Iraq editorials at Salon.com
• AfterDowningStreet.org: "nonpartisan coalition ...[working]... to pressure both Congress and the media to investigate whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war"
• Fatalities & Wounded
  • Iraq Body Count: civilian fatalities
  • Iraq Coalition Casualties: military fatalities & injuries

Related Pages

• The US invasion of Iraq is part of the Bush administration's War on Terror
• US justifications for invading Iraq
• The US occupation of Iraq, with no timetable (much less a plan) for exit, is an example of an endless crisis
• Balkans vs. Iraq: a day-and-night comparison of the two interventions

Alternatives

...as opposed to "staying the course" without clear goals, much less a plan.

• 2007-01-17 The Bring Our Troops Home and Sovereignty of Iraq Restoration Act of 2007 by Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey

Effects

• The absurd overcommitment of United States resources to the Iraq war has resulted in both plummeting US military readiness and increasingly poor US veteran medical care.

news of effects

• 2006-10-12 'Huge rise' in Iraqi death tolls: "An estimated 655,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the US-led invasion, according to a survey by a US university."
• 2006-03-20 Top Ten Catastrophes of the Third Year of American Iraq
• 2005-07-18 Invasion was boost for Al Qaeda

The Republicans largely continue to stand behind the war effort, a position which is now in stark disagreement with their 2000 Party Platform:

The 2000 Republican Party Platform says:

When presidents fail to make hard choices, those who serve must make them instead. Soldiers must choose whether to stay with their families or to stay in the armed forces at all. Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.

from The New Yorker:

Ron Suskind, in his book The One Percent Doctrine, claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that "bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection." Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance.

News Articles

• 2007-05-27 U.S. Security Contractors Open Fire in Baghdad: "Employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm under contract to the State Department, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days last week, and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said."
• 2007-05-09 Retired Generals Challenge GOP in Ads: "Three retired generals challenged a dozen members of Congress in a new ad campaign Wednesday, saying the politicians can't expect to win re-election if they support President Bush's policies in Iraq." The generals in question are Maj. Gen. John Batiste (ret.), Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (ret.), and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark (ret.); the ads were created by VoteVets.org.
• 2007-04-22 Iraqi PM criticises Baghdad wall "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has asked for construction to end on a concrete wall around a Sunni enclave in the capital, Baghdad."
• 2007-04-21 Latest US solution to Iraq's civil war: a three-mile wall to encircle an isolated Sunni district on the otherwise Shia bank of the Tigris river
• 2007-04-19:
  • Pentagon Can Pay for War Through June
  • Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy by Nancy A. Youssef: "Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces."
  • Pentagon Confirms President Misstating Funding Facts In Iraq by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
• 2007-04-06 US Defense Secretary evaluates Iraq and the political climate
• 2007-02-21 UK and Denmark announce troop withdrawals from Iraq
• 2007-02-19 Leaving Iraq: Apocalypse Not by Robert Dreyfuss: "Much of Washington assumes that withdrawing from Iraq will lead to a bigger bloodbath. We need to question that assumption."
• 2007-01-15 Today's Must Read: Bush officials are finally, maybe, easing gently out of denial regarding the ghastly mistakes made in Iraq in 2003.
• 2007-01-14 Shock and oil: Iraq's billions & the White House connection
• 2007-01-13 'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans' "As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed."
• 2006-12-07 ISG Report: Bush Administration ‘Significantly Underreporting The Violence In Iraq’: the Bush administration has actually been filtering out the bad news in Iraq by underreporting violence "in order to suit the Bush administration’s policy goals."
• 2006-12-06 Iraq Study Group Report: Iraq could be on a slide towards chaos
• 2006-12-04 Kofi Annan: Iraq situation much worse than civil war
• 2006-12-03 Rumsfeld memo recognizes need for 'major adjustment' in Iraq
• 2006-11-04 War simulation in 1999 pointed out Iraq invasion problems
  • Hawker Hurricane [1] said:

    Quoting Stefan Jones:

    "Oh . . . I get it. 1999. That was a Clinton era war game, yielding lessons only of use by an administration mired in old-fashioned reality-based thinking."

    That is pretty close to the truth. Politically, they couldn't afford to send 400,000 troops to Iraq for the 2-5 years it would take to do the mission... So, they decided that it wouldn't take that many troops or that long. The decision wasn't based on new facts or better stratergy, it was based on what was politically feasible. "The Truimph of the Will" covers it as a concept. And now the NeoCons who said it could be done that way are blaming BushCo for failing...

• 2006-11-03 Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office: Stuart Bowen has apparently done his job too well.
• 2006-10-18 Baker: No 'magic bullet' for Iraq
• 2006-10-17 Iraq reality check: The cost in lives lost
• 2006-09-28 Heralded Iraq police academy a 'disaster' by Amit R. Paley, The Washington Post
• 2006-09-17 Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post Staff Writer
• 2006-06-07 Officer says he won’t fight in ‘unlawful’ Iraq war
• 2005-11-17 Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania calls for a change of direction
• 2005-09-19 $1 billion missing from Iraq's defence ministry
• 2003-10-02 Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War: Study Finds Widespread Misperceptions on Iraq Highly Related to Support for War

Reports

• 2007-05-28 A soldier in Iraq asks in despair: Why are we here? by Donald Hudson Jr.: "I have been serving our country’s military actively for the last three years. I am currently deployed to Baghdad on Forward Operating Base Loyalty, where I have been for the last four and a half months."
• 2004-09-29 Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi reports from Baghdad

Other Opinions

• 2007-05-04 Bush-Congress bickering limits options in Iraq by Leonard Pitts, Jr.: "In a way, it all comes down to a question of which imperative you want to betray. It is, after all, imperative that we supply our soldiers while they stand in harm's way. It is also imperative that we not keep them uselessly in harm's way. It is imperative that we not sacrifice our troops to an open-ended, ill-defined mission. It is also imperative that we not leave Iraq a lawless incubator for terrorist strikes."
• 2007-05 A failure in generalship by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling: comparison with Vietnam; analysis of the situation
• 2007-03-07 Beyond Quagmire: A panel of experts convened by Rolling Stone agree that the war in Iraq is lost. The only question now is: How bad will the coming explosion be? (Experts: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, Nir Rosen, Gen. Tony McPeak (retired), Bob Graham, Chas Freeman, Paul Pillar, Michael Scheuer, Juan Cole)
• 2007-02-16 The Single Darkest Day in the History of the US: strongly anti-withdrawal blog entry. Seems to make some strange equivalences, but perhaps this could be useful in understanding the pro-Bush mindset?
• 2007-01-22 "The Iraq War and the Sicilian Campaign" by Brent T. Ranalli, Part I and Part II: a history lesson from 415 BC, in which Athens, a "superpower" of the day, was ultimately destroyed by over-investment in an ill-considered war
• 2006-12-03 How Our Civilization Can Fall by Orson Scott Card: offers a reasonable-sounding argument for the US to remain in Iraq, based on historical civilization-wide crashes. The difference between this and other arguments against leaving Iraq is that it suggests a possible model for what the US should be doing there, with historical data to back it up.
• 2006-11-23 Roads, good intentions, etcetera by Charlie Stross (blog entry, with comments)
• 2006-11-16 Iraq: The War of the Imagination by Mark Danner
• 2006-10-30 The Only Issue This Election Day by Orson Scott Card explains why we are nation building in Iraq, and why it is the only worthy path.
• 2006-08-13 Lies and Catastrophes by Orson Scott Card in defense of the Iraq war and Bush; synopsis:
  • A Democratic congressman recently used the word "catastrophic" in reference to Iraq, "but catastrophe is a word that requires there be widespread sudden damage" so the congressman must mean something else (first 12 paragraphs)
  • This is because "he was selling something", i.e. "He was trying to persuade the American people that the Iraq War was a dire mistake, a disaster" which can only (and must) be ended "by withdrawing our troops by the end of the year." (2 short paragraphs)
  • Withdrawing our troops in that manner, however, would be a catastrophe because:
    • "all the people who have taken bold action for democracy in Iraq would be left high and dry in the tribal and religious war that would certainly ensue. The citizens of Iraq would be slaughtered by local enemies who think nothing of blowing up each other's mosques, weddings, and funerals."
    • "all our enemies would be greatly emboldened by such a proof of our irresolution." Our enemies would learn that "If you kill American citizens and soldiers long enough, they give you everything you want. Since they were killing Americans before we liberated Iraq, it is hard to imagine that they would stop."
  • People who favor withdrawal from Iraq only do so because "they think we are somehow the cause of the war. We were bad, and so they hate us; if we become good, then they will be nice to us." (straw man argument –Woozle) This is not at all true; they hate us because we are prosperous.
  • The rest seems to be devoted to exploring the meaning of "lying" with regard to Bill Clinton vs. George W. Bush; further fisking needed.
• 2006-08-10 The Guns Of August by Richard Holbrooke
• 2006-07-23 In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam: also makes some comparisons with the Balkans
• 2006-07-17 Iraq's Reconstruction a Boondoggle by Design by Joshua Holland, AlterNet
• 2006-07-12 Exchanges with Mr. Bailey, a high school student (who may or may not have been actually a meme spammer)
• 2005-12-01 Lying about the War: "truth became the first casualty in their campaign to whip up support."
• 2005-08-30 Just one question for opponents of the war by Dennis Prager
• 2003-01-21 One of the More Nauseating Images by Harold Pinter
• 2003-01-19 Saddam will not be deposed by sweet reason or sanctions: pre-invasion opinions from a number of prominent Britons
• 2002-08-26 MoveOn petition against invading Iraq

David Brin

From http://www.davidbrin.com/neocons.html :

• Over a thousand Americans lost, with more dying almost daily and no end in sight.
• Uncounted (and secret) numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths.
• Scandals; poorly supervised thugs ruining our reputation for decent behavior.
• A Western Alliance in shambles.
• Relentless lies; intervention justified by fabricated evidence reminiscent of Tonkin Gulf.
• Plummeting readiness levels — our military is being used-up.
• Utterly divisive of American public (possibly a desired goal), repeating the social effects of Vietnam (Editor's note: further enhancing Bush's existing divisiveness)
• Clever incarceration tricks overused as bludgeons, wrecking credibility and undermining due process.
• Incompetent preparation and handling of the aftermath, featuring rapid deterioration of political, economic and social life in Iraq
• Worldwide acceptance of US moral leadership plummeting.
• And the fundamental strategic outcome — provoking a radicalized Islam, further stirred by Saudi-funded Al Jazeera Network and Saudi-funded religious schools, from Morocco to Mindanao, threatening a pan-Islamic coalescence into Jihad mentality for the first time in a thousand years.

Humor

• Apple Presents the iRack from MadTV
• We Want Iraq (originally written for the 1992 Gulf War)

Quotes

• "I thought they were out of their minds, once I realised that they weren't kidding. The most inappropriate, the most counterproductive thing we could've done would've been to invade Iraq and I rather thought that was self-evident." – Richard A. Clarke, former US Counter-Terrorism Advisor [2]

Trivia

• "Drat Saddam, a mad dastard!" is a palindrome.