[Pops]

The main lesson learned is that the US can wage perpetual war as long as we sub out most of the work to private "contractors" and don't bother the middle and upper classes with the details.

This might come as a surprise to many, since the sheer number of contractors used in Iraq was often overshadowed by events. By 2008, the US Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq – and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization is unprecedented in modern warfare.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opi ... ontractors

The Military-Industrial Complex: war for profit IOW, is here to stay.

Drift by Rachel Maddow lays this out fairly well.

[Plantagenet]

Report from Syria today that chemical weapons ---WMDs------were used in Syria.

[Beery1]

I always thought the war was a stupid mistake. My opinion hasn't changed.

[Plantagenet]

If we weren't such a hypocritical bunch we would admit this is about oil and we would simply station American droves over ALL the world's oil fields and pipelines. A few soldiers on the ground and we're good. Don't even have to occupy all those damn desert countries.

Why do you think Obama hasn't ALREADY stationed drones there? That seems to be current administration policy. Including drone use INSIDE the USA

[mmasters]

A million dead iraqies, totally worth it!

[Tanada]

If Saddam Hussein had let the UN Inspectors go everywhere they wanted to go and given them everything they wanted then Iraq would have been declared WMD free. Sanctions would have been lifted, the No Fly Zone would have been removed and Saddam would probably still be a living dictator today. Oil would have been put on the market a lot faster and without the huge loss of life that has taken place over the last Decade plus since the anniversary of the invasion. There would not have been the ambiguity of the war distorting oil markets and far fewer people would be saying Peak Oil Does Not Exist.

[Beery1]

If Saddam Hussein had let the UN Inspectors go everywhere they wanted to go and given them everything they wanted then Iraq would have been declared WMD free. Sanctions would have been lifted, the No Fly Zone would have been removed and Saddam would probably still be a living dictator today.

I think that's a pretty naive view. 'Iraq declared WMD-free'? How do you prove a that? It's impossible. There was no way the inspectors were ever going to be able to declare Iraq WMD-free - it couldn't be done, because they could never be everywhere even if the Iraqis had given them access to everything they wanted to see (which the Iraqis were doing, albeit 'too slowly' for the US government, due to BUREAUCRACY, not opposition). All the inspectors could ever have done was declare that they hadn't found any WMDs, which they did! But their findings were ignored and downplayed. Also, the US government did not allow them the time they needed EVEN THOUGH the inspectors were NOT prevented from gaining access to Iraqi installations.

Surely you remember how set on war the Bush administration was. Don't you remember the story about the babies in incubators killed by the nasty Iraqis? All fabrication because the administration wanted a war.

The inspectors were a sideshow. No one wanted them to find anything - they were just in there to incite the Iraqis to deny them entry to anything - didn't matter what. Any excuse to go to war. In an interview on BBC 1 on 8 February 2004, Dr. Hans Blix, the leader of the inspection commission, accused the US and British governments of dramatizing the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In short, it was a set-up.

[Buddy_J]

A million dead iraqies, totally worth it!

Being on the right side of a conflict is admittedly something Americans are very good at.

[Keith_McClary]

If Saddam Hussein had let the UN Inspectors go everywhere they wanted to go and given them everything they wanted then Iraq would have been declared WMD free. Sanctions would have been lifted, the No Fly Zone would have been removed

The NeoCon-Likudists would have concocted evidence that some Iraqi scientist was doing research remotely related to rocketry, explosives, nuclear, etc. Just like they do with Iran today. Saddam was ambiguous about WMDs because he thought it would be a deterrent to aggression.

What are the odds that Saddam would have been overthrown or died by now without the aggression? Millions of lives would not have been destroyed.

Oil would have been put on the market a lot faster

That's assuming he opened up Iraq to US OilCOs and funnelled the proceeds to Wall Street banksters. If he didn't he would have the same fate anyway, like Gaddafi.

[Ferretlover]

It was a waste of lives: 190k (Iraqi & invading forces) .
It was a waste of US funds: 2.2 trillion dollars
It was another example of the (primarily) US Republican party trying to rule/own the world--using lots of military toys to do a job that one good sniper could have managed.

Has it created new oil? No.
Has it changed demand destruction? No.
Did it make like better for the Iraqi people? No.

Ithought it was stupid then, and I still think it is stupid.

[Plantagenet]

I think the big lesson from Iraq is that while the USA is really good at quick military incursions to produce regime change, we are terrible at long occupations.

The war to topple Saddam only lasted a few weeks, and produced relatively few US casualties. It was the subsequent 7 years of US occupation of Iraq that was disasterous. Similarly, the war to boot out the Taliban and Al Qaida in Aghanistan was over very quickly and was a great success....but 11 years later here we are in 2013--- still occupying Afghanistan, and still wasting blood and treasure there. Lengthy US occupations like those Bush did in Iraq and now Obama is doing in Afghanistan are stupid.

Obama's war in Libya in 2011 is a much better model for future US foreign wars. It harkens back to the model from the middle to late 20th century of prior short-lived US military incursions to effect regime change. The "quick war" model succeeded in places like Panama and Reagan's invasion of Grenada or Clinton's bombing war against Serbia or even the elder Bush's war to liberate Kuwait: Go in quick with the military, do the job of toppling or severely damaging the evil foreign regime, and get out as soon as possible leaving a new and presumably more friendly foreign regime in place.

The lessons of Iraq are very important to understand, as the issue of WMDs is back with us today. In both Syria and Iran Obama is under pressure to use military force to deal with their WMDs. If the US does get militarily involved in Syria or Iran, hopefully Obama will go for the quick in-and-out strategy as he did in Libya rather than getting us bogged down in another lengthy occupation like Iraq or the ongoing 11-year-long occupation of Afghanistan.


Will the USA use military force to deal with WMDs in Iran?

[Pops]

Richard Perle said on Morning Edition this morning that the part he wanted to do, remove Sadam, went perfectly well, but:
"you can say we left it [Iraq] broken, I think we left it...open for opportunity."

It makes me ill. He takes no blame whatsoever "everyone said SH had WMDs" even though the yellow cake document for example was discredited within 24hrs, the admin continued to point to it.

When I think about the tea party congresspeople and the POTUS wannabes on the stage in the republican primaries a year ago and realize that Bush II and the senior congressmen at the time were relatively moderate in comparison, my stomach kinda turns over.


If you can stomach it:
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/20/174812898 ... e-iraq-war

[Pops]

Iraq war and its aftermath failed to stop the beginning of peak oil in 2005

It is now 10 years that the coalition of the willing, err… peaking (US peak 1970, UK peak 1999, Australia peak 2000) invaded Iraq. This was not just an oil war. It was a peak oil war. GW Bush and Cheney were oilmen. In his famous 1999 oil-is-not-leisurewear speech Dick Cheney identified the Middle East as the place where the “prize lies”. While Saudi Arabia was at peak or approaching peak, Iraq had under-produced oil for 20 years and production in the 90s was capped by UN sanctions because of Saddam ruling Iraq. The idea was to get at Iraq’s “easy” pre-peak oil to push the global peak a couple of years into the future.

But oil wars don’t solve any problems, they only create new ones. One blow-back of the Iraq war is the situation in Iran where (again) sanctions accelerate Iran’s 2nd and last oil peak. So as oil production in Iraq finally goes up, Iranian oil production goes down. The net difference is a meagre +200 kb/d in 2012. Thus 10 years down the track, still no lessons have been learnt. Instead of implementing projects which get us away from oil like rail electrification, the world is even more addicted to oil now than it was 10 years ago.

h/t Resilience.org

[Plantagenet]

Thats right, Pops. Iran is like Iraq revisited. Once again we've got an oil-rich country subject to a boycott, that supposedly is a threat due to WMDs. Is the issue really the WMDs, or is somebody looking hard at how to get at Iran's oil for the west.

Here we go again.

[Plantagenet]

Iran will be a cake walk, easy-peasy just like Grenada. All we need to do is roll up our collective sleeves and grab a pipe wrench.

Maybe you are right, psarr, but I doubt it would be that easy.

Iran has sophisticated Russian air defense systems and the nuclear facilities are distributed at sites across the country---including some in deeply buried bunker systems. And unlike Grenada or Obama's most recent war in Libya, I doubt the US would design a military campaign for Iran to produce regime change----the goal would probably be just try to derail Iran's nuclear program.

And as Pops just pointed out, is the issue in Iran really the WMDs or is somebody after Iran's oil? Iran today has a lot of similarities to Iraq prior to the Bush invasion----once again we've got an unfriendly oil-rich regime in the ME which supposedly is a threat to the USA because of WMDs----once again we've got the USA talking about "red lines" that must not be crossed and giving ultimatums. Its like the run up to the Iraq war all over again.

I'll bet the strategy for dealing with Iran is part of what Obama and Netanyahu are talking about in Israel right now