We'd list Iraq a WIN if these things had happened... If Obama had pushed for a new and approved SOFA and left enough US forces in Iraq that we could have pulled out and stopped the "Occupation" stage yet prevented the subsequent lawlessness and rise of ISIS, Iraq would be relatively peaceful and we'd be able to call it a "win." What other steps would have made Iraq an undeniably clear cut victory for the USA?
The Iraqis refused to allow US troops to stay in Iraq unless they could try them in Iraqi courts. What evidence do you have they would have backed down from that?
10,000 dead Americans by 2020 for what? There was never any sort of victory possible because the immediate post invasion occupation was botched by imbecilic amateurs. Victory, and any semblance of ever restoring order to Iraq became impossible the minute that Rumsfeld decided that US soldiers would not stop the looting. They lost the respect for authority and with that the power necessary to take control in those first days and that is something that was never recovered, and never could be. We opened a Pandora's box because there was no actual plan for the occupation of Iraq so it was left to the amateur's and ideologue's ad-hoc improvisations and a driving need to "do things differently" and their demented activities made it impossible to ever put that genie back in the bottle no matter how long we stay or how many troops we put there. If some professionals had been in charge the massive social rifts those idiots created by driving wedges to divide the Iraqi population into Sunni and Shia and Kurd would never have happened. How long would you expect us to stay in Iraq? We occupied the Philippines for 60 years and they never stopped fighting us.
The Iraqis were reportedly willing to if the U.S. was willing to keep a substantial force in Iraq (23,000 troops at minimum). The Iraqi govt. was NOT willing to got to bat to get approval for a SOFA that gave U.S. troops immunity for only the 3,000 troops the Obama Admin. was willing to keep there.
Staying out would have been a 'victory'. As it is everything about Iraq from the invasion to now has been an unmitigated disaster, and a foreign policy blunder of epic proportions which will remain an indelible skidmark on America's reputational Y-fronts forever.
I notice that a few conservatives here like to ignore the "Pottery Barn rule" and pretend that Mr Bush's war was two pieces, the war, and the "occupation stage". Of course, this is a bit like saying that WWII ended with Dunkirk. Are you listening to yourself? First of all, Iraq is not a US colony, although the right wing seems to be fuzzy on that point. Second, how can one say that victory is ending the "occupation stage" with an occupation?????????? Of course, the other answer to your query on conditions for declaring a US victory would have been if the Bush adminstration had succeeded in placing Iraq's oil resources under the control of Exxon, Shell, Chevron and BP.
I used taht Pandora's Box analogy a lot in 2002 and 2003. There was never any question in my mind that a war in Iraq was a fool's errand, and Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush were determined to be the perfect fools! The war was lost even before it started.
Psssst . . . would you also declare that nothing Nixon did when he replaced LBJ was Nixon's fault in regards to Vietnam because Vietnam was LBJ's war?
What does that have to do with anything? Where do these far right wing nuts get the notion that the US can just decide how other countries conduct their own affairs. Where do you get the idea that the American public was willing or able to afford to continue a large scale military occupation? What's really pathetic about this persistant claim is it's obvious folly. The US could not maintain order in Iraq with an occupation force of 85,000. The country fell apart, and only the "surge" with troop levels well over 100,000 damped the war down to a dull roar. Now wingnuts and Bush dead enders are all insisting that the US should have defied the government we installed in Baghdad and continued the occupation. Of course, not one of them will admit that the lesson of the immediate past is that it would take an army of well over 100,000 to do the job PERMANENTLY, nor do they seem to notice that the US was in economic free fall at the time. The notion makes no sense at all!!!! The Iraq war was never won.
This is the absurd noting that the right clings to. There isn't much evidence to support it. Besides, the history of the Iraq war pretty much makes it clear that an occupation force of 23,000 would have been helpless to contain the civil war in Iraq. We couldn't keep the lid on with nearly four times as many troops between 2003 and 2006. They would have wound up like the Marines in Beiruit. This is the kind of narrow minded, ignore the reality thinking that made the Iraq war the disaster that it was in the first place!
Might makes right. The most powerful of nations always ride roughshod to some extent over the less powerful. You never actually studied history? All the rest of your hysterical objections could as easily be answered . . . and so why do you pose them in the first place? But the money bit. Yes. Between them Bush and Obama have dropped this nation into a fiscal pit of doom to the collective tune of nearly 19 trillion dollars of national debt. Each man had different motivations for this but the end result will be the same . . . no longer a super power.
What Dayton3 said about the negotiations was quite widely reported in the media at the time and you would know about that if you had been paying attention. The whole thing fell apart because the Iraqis were not willing to extend immunity from prosecution to US forces any longer. It had a lot to do with the US not prosecuting anyone for war crimes behaviour despite incontrovertible evidence of hundreds of egregious actions. Politically, due to massive public rage at the lack of prosecution of US forces for obvious criminal activities, the Iraqi government was not in any position where continued US occupation without accountability for US forces was possible. The US knew this but demanded it anyway.
We did win Iraq because we met our stated goals. Rebuilding Iraq into a democracy was never a stated goal, that was just something we did.
No, I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. We were F***** the second we went in there. ISIS or some type of other force was going to rise the moment we pulled out, if that was 5 years ago, now, or 20 years from now. When you go to war with religious people and occupy their country for over a decade the cut wound is so deep that we have caused that nothing could be done. The only way we "win" is by taking over the country. Other than that we lost, cause literally nothing has changed. If anything it has gotten worse, cause they did not have extremist groups like ISIS before we came along. And having SOFA would have not stopped anything, there was ready lawlessness in Iraq, you do not need to go far and deep to find this information. You watch any documentary from National Geographic or PBS, or BBC, you can see that we never had control outside large cities. It would require to much man power and money that the US does not have nor would the public want to spend that money on probably the most pointless war. People would just die there for literally no reason at all. Moving all of our forces out, and stepping back is the best thing we could have done.
Except our goal was to topple Saddam and remove any WMD's if they existed. We did that. Its a win. Find me a source before the war that said one of our mission statements was to rebuild Iraq.
Then our goal/objective was irrational and a lie. Many reports came out from the Bush administration that clearly stated that there were indeed WMD's no "if they existed". And a large part of the reason why we went in also was fighting the war on terror, what did Iraq do? Nothing, it was Afghanistan, the Taliban that was attacking the United Sates. And why did we need to stay there for years and years after we so called had our "win". You are basically saying that if we had to amputate a finger, but accidentally cut off a persons arm we still won cause the finger is gone. Thousands of lives, billions of dollars, a horrible relationship with the medial east has been built, along with over 15 or nations fighting the "infidel" cause we went to war and did not know when or how to stop the bleeding we caused. We did not win s***.
Truly...your ability to foresee that which could have prevented the degradation of Iraq would have been a fantastic asset. One is left to wonder why you did not provide this amazing and profound advice to those capable of following your astounding plan of action, so many lives would have been saved and the region allowed to flourish in peaceful harmony. As for what could have been done, well...it would seem you already explained it, though I believe that never going over there in the first place would have done the trick.
Funny that didn't seem to be the case when Bush's team actually negotiated the SOFA agreement. Maybe a little historical revisionism going on here! - - - Updated - - - Finding the imaginary WMD's. Or maybe eliminating the imaginary terrorists in Iraq.
