Middle East Trump makes way for Turkey operation against Kurds in Syria

[HistoryMinor]

In official statements, Erdogan said it's temporary. Russian and Assadist reply is "it better damn be". Putin is ballsy enough to press the matter, and i'm not sure if Erdogan would be willing to have that "hybrid war", without NATO support at that.

Muslim Brotherhood is it's own massive international organisation with its own ideas, it can't be sold on neoottomanism, but it may want the transaction to go the other way.
Grey wolf types? I'd say it's a toss up, they won't get high if the neo-sultanate gets too islamist, they know it, and they will resent it.

Yes, it's a total mishmash, a very delicate balance of factors that will probably fall apart horribly once the balance of pressures keeping it together changes definitely enough. Their situation over many years may have been crappy, but stable in its way of being crappy...

1. Call me when Erdogan gives back Idlib.
2. Turkey is the last important supporter of the MB left, they're the ones who saved Al Jazeera and constantly check Egypt.
3. Grey wolves just need prey, so long as they have gays and kurds to kill, they'll be supportive.
4. Now we'll never know.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Engineering open fighting between Russia and Turkey in Syria would unambiguously be the best outcome we could realistically hope for at this point, you are correct about that.

Very unlikely, Russia is trying to woo Erdogan, so they will avoid war with Turkey

Can I get a basic summary on Assad?

He is the spare who trained for an unexciting optometrist career, but then the hair splattered himself in the car accident and he got called back to Syria. He was unable to build up his own powerbase before his dad died, so he had to rely on the old guard when he ''took power''. There was a bit of power struggle soon after, he lost and was reduced to empty figurehead. After civil war broke out he gradually vanished from public life, until Iran got more involved and their advisors told him to harden the fuck up. It is unclear how much power he actually holds right now. And his possible successor is his surviving brother, commander of the 4th armored division, who is renown for being a psycho (most notably, shooting his brother in law during an argument), but has been rarely seen in public since bomb attack during high level meeting left him crippled.

 

[Deleted member]

@PsihoKekec War has a logic of its own. Miscalculation rapidly increases in circumstances like these.

 

[Christi]

Turkey has been consistently refusing to do anything for us since 2002. If we had managed to launch a multi-division invasion from the North we might have successfully overrun the Sunni triangle before Saddam's insurgency plans could be implemented. The moment they refused to assist in the invasion of Iraq (whatever you think of the logic or morality of that invasion), our interests started to diverge and have kept diverging.

No. We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place and not wanting to get involved in that mess doesn’t make them bad allies.

If you ask a friend to play Russian roulette with you and guys and they say “no.”
That doesn’t make them a bad friend.

Iraq was a boondoggle that wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

They let us house our bases and nukes. So they’re a thousand times more useful then the Kurds
Are we supposed to abandon an actual NATO ally?
For a state less group who we have to fight multiple countries for to get their state?
No.

 

[Arch Dornan]

Very unlikely, Russia is trying to woo Erdogan, so they will avoid war with Turkey


He is the spare who trained for an unexciting optometrist career, but then the hair splattered himself in the car accident and he got called back to Syria. He was unable to build up his own powerbase before his dad died, so he had to rely on the old guard when he ''took power''. There was a bit of power struggle soon after, he lost and was reduced to empty figurehead. After civil war broke out he gradually vanished from public life, until Iran got more involved and their advisors told him to harden the fuck up. It is unclear how much power he actually holds right now. And his possible successor is his surviving brother, commander of the 4th armored division, who is renown for being a psycho (most notably, shooting his brother in law during an argument), but has been rarely seen in public since bomb attack during high level meeting left him crippled.

He sounds fucked.

I suppose such is the way it goes with being a dictator.

Either you grow balls or you get executed by your subjects or sponsors.

 

[Deleted member]

No. We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place and not wanting to get involved in that mess doesn’t make them bad allies.

If you ask a friend to play Russian roulette with you and guys and they say “no.”
That doesn’t make them a bad friend.

Iraq was a boondoggle that wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

They let us house our bases and nukes. So they’re a thousand times more useful then the Kurds
Are we supposed to abandon an actual NATO ally?
For a state less group who we have to fight multiple countries for to get their state?
No.

That's your interpretation of the situation in Iraq. Be that as it may, the Turks could have taken measures to stabilise the situation, and been considerably rewarded for it. NATO itself has become watered down almost to the point of ineffectiveness.

As for the nukes, that's a benefit to Turkey. We don't need them there. They've insisted on it from the 60s to provide a nuclear deterrent for Turkey so they don't have to have their own... If they were ever facing a soviet invasion and we refused to launch, they'd make sure it happened.

 

[Christi]

That's your interpretation of the situation in Iraq. Be that as it may, the Turks could have taken measures to stabilise the situation, and been considerably rewarded for it. NATO itself has become watered down almost to the point of ineffectiveness.

As for the nukes, that's a benefit to Turkey. We don't need them there. They've insisted on it from the 60s to provide a nuclear deterrent for Turkey so they don't have to have their own... If they were ever facing a soviet invasion and we refused to launch, they'd make sure it happened.

That is the fact. Iraq was a boondoggle that wasted trillions. It resulted in thousands of American deaths and injuries. Tell me what we got for it?
What did we get in the end? An Iraqi that is favoring Iran more then us.
The Turks don’t have to do anything about Iraq. They saw it was stupid and have to live in the region so washed their hands of it.

The nukes are a benefit to us too. It says “ we can reach out and touch you from multiple places in the world” to anyone thinking of nuking the US and nuking Turkey to get to them. Pisses off Turkey.

 

[Scottty]

Don't ask me how reliable this source is, but I found this:

Russian warning pauses Turkish Syria operation. US pullback from E. Syria, too, opens door to Iran - DEBKAfile

The Syrian army’s arrival at embattled Kurdish towns in the north east, backed by Russian threats, seemingly halted the Turkish

www.debka.com

The Syrian army’s arrival at embattled Kurdish towns in the north east, backed by Russian threats, seemingly halted the Turkish army’s advance. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, only minor isolated incidents were visible. Although Turkish President Recep Erdogan boasted on Monday, Day 6, “We will not back down,” he also said, “We are coordinating with the Russians,” and praised their “positive approach.”
For now, therefore, the Turkish army looks like sidestepping direct clashes with the Syrian army, which has meanwhile entered Manbij and prevented the Turkish army from moving in. Kurdish forces remain in control there, as well as in the towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al Ayn, which Turkish sources on Monday claimed had fallen.
On Tuesday morning, it looked as though the Turkish president had paused for reflection before deciding if and how to proceed with his operation, in the light of the Russia/Syrian threat to his forces. He needs to calculate how far he can go against the Syrian army without incurring Russian military intervention. He understands that President Vladimir Putin will not put up with an artillery attack on Russian forces like the one “mistakenly” directed against US troops at the outset of the Turkish drive into northeast Syria last week.

 

[Francis Urquhart]

That is the fact. Iraq was a boondoggle that wasted trillions. It resulted in thousands of American deaths and injuries.

It's not a fact, it's an opinion, one that has much to be said for it but remains an opinion.

Looking at the situation in detail, the original mistake goes back to 1991 and ODS. We didn't finish the job then and we paid for not doing so for a decade afterwards. We should have thoroughly wrecked Iraq's military machine then instead of letting most of it survived relatively intact. We then compounded the error by getting involved in nation-building, a flawed concept if ever there was one. Attempting to reconstruct a country's entire social, political and cultural outlook is a process that is doomed from the start. It's not an error that we were alone in making; the Russians tried it in Afghanistan from 1979 - 1989 and failed equally badly.

(as a sort of by-the-way, there is an extremely good Russian TV series called "The Caravan Hunters' about a paratrooper unit in Afghanistan. Very well done),

We should have known better. If we want to rule a country, we should do it the way the Romans did; preserve the social, political and cultural infrastructure and use it to our own advantage. That means we end up working through the established authorities and power structure. The alternative is the "punitive raid" strategy where if somebody annoys us, we go it, smash and destroy everything in sight - then leave. The US is very good at the smashing and destroying part, its the leaving afterwards we seem to have trouble with.

Tell me what we got for it? What did we get in the end? An Iraqi that is favoring Iran more then us.

For all the failures in Iraq (which it would take a PhD thesis to describe) we were doing reasonably well by 2008 and Iraq was developing into a relatively stable state. The insurgency had largely failed and an a working/credible social order was evolving. The disaster truly came when Obama pulled out. His basic Middle East strategy appears to have been to dump the alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia and establish one with Iran. Pulling out of Iraq was part of that process and was a gesture to Iran. One that was never reciprocated.

The huge problem was not going into Iraq, it was what we did and what we didn't do when we got there.

The Turks don’t have to do anything about Iraq. They saw it was stupid and have to live in the region so washed their hands of it.

That wasn't their logic. Their actions were based on a perception that if Iraq was invaded and occupied, the US would follow the Roman occupation principles and work through the well-organized and well-established social, political and cultural institutions. Of those, the strongest and best-organized were the Kurds and as such they would inevitably dominate evens in Iraq, That would make an independent Kurdistan almost inevitable and THAT would mean a full-blown Kurdish insurgency in eastern Turkey. They didn't see it as "stupid", they saw it as an existential threat.

The nukes are a benefit to us too. It says “ we can reach out and touch you from multiple places in the world” to anyone thinking of nuking the US and nuking Turkey to get to them. Pisses off Turkey.

That's not true. Those damned things are liability we would like to get rid of. We can reach out and touch anywhere anytime in a wide variety of ways. Forward-based nukes are the least desirable of those ways and give us the most problems. That's why we have pulled them out of everywhere we can. (Another by-the-way, its long been said with complete accuracy that the first US casualty of World War Three would have been the US officer with the second key to the forward-deployed nukes around his neck. Even the British had the poor guy followed around by a large soldier with a wrench.)

The correct response to the question "Are there nukes at Incirlik" is NCND. Anything else is hypothetical.

 

[Christi]

It's not a fact, it's an opinion, one that has much to be said for it but remains an opinion.

Looking at the situation in detail, the original mistake goes back to 1991 and ODS. We didn't finish the job then and we paid for not doing so for a decade afterwards. We should have thoroughly wrecked Iraq's military machine then instead of letting most of it survived relatively intact. We then compounded the error by getting involved in nation-building, a flawed concept if ever there was one. Attempting to reconstruct a country's entire social, political and cultural outlook is a process that is doomed from the start. It's not an error that we were alone in making; the Russians tried it in Afghanistan from 1979 - 1989 and failed equally badly.

(as a sort of by-the-way, there is an extremely good Russian TV series called "The Caravan Hunters' about a paratrooper unit in Afghanistan. Very well done),

We should have known better. If we want to rule a country, we should do it the way the Romans did; preserve the social, political and cultural infrastructure and use it to our own advantage. That means we end up working through the established authorities and power structure. The alternative is the "punitive raid" strategy where if somebody annoys us, we go it, smash and destroy everything in sight - then leave. The US is very good at the smashing and destroying part, its the leaving afterwards we seem to have trouble with.



For all the failures in Iraq (which it would take a PhD thesis to describe) we were doing reasonably well by 2008 and Iraq was developing into a relatively stable state. The insurgency had largely failed and an a working/credible social order was evolving. The disaster truly came when Obama pulled out. His basic Middle East strategy appears to have been to dump the alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia and establish one with Iran. Pulling out of Iraq was part of that process and was a gesture to Iran. One that was never reciprocated.

The huge problem was not going into Iraq, it was what we did and what we didn't do when we got there.



That wasn't their logic. Their actions were based on a perception that if Iraq was invaded and occupied, the US would follow the Roman occupation principles and work through the well-organized and well-established social, political and cultural institutions. Of those, the strongest and best-organized were the Kurds and as such they would inevitably dominate evens in Iraq, That would make an independent Kurdistan almost inevitable and THAT would mean a full-blown Kurdish insurgency in eastern Turkey. They didn't see it as "stupid", they saw it as an existential threat.



That's not true. Those damned things are liability we would like to get rid of. We can reach out and touch anywhere anytime in a wide variety of ways. Forward-based nukes are the least desirable of those ways and give us the most problems. That's why we have pulled them out of everywhere we can. (Another by-the-way, its long been said with complete accuracy that the first US casualty of World War Three would have been the US officer with the second key to the forward-deployed nukes around his neck. Even the British had the poor guy followed around by a large soldier with a wrench.)

The correct response to the question "Are there nukes at Incirlik" is NCND. Anything else is hypothetical.

No. It is a fact. We went in because of the threat of WMDs. We found the WMDS there were old are to small to be a threat.

ASHINGTON — The U.S. wars and military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $5.9 trillion since they began in 2001, according to a new study.
That total is almost $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently completed 2017-18 fiscal year.

Department of Homeland Security.”
It breaks down like this, according to Crawford and the report:

• Total U.S. war-related spending through fiscal year 2019 is $4.9 trillion.
• The other $1 trillion reflects estimates for the cost of health care for post-9/11 veterans.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs will be responsible for serving more than 4.3 million veterans by 2039.

America has spent $5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a new study says

The report, from Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, also finds that more than 480,000 people have died from the wars and more than 244,000 civilians have been killed as a result of fighting. Another 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.

www.cnbc.com

Trillions lost. Thousands of personel injured or dead for what?
The "WMDs" discovered were no threat to us or our allies.
You don't need some bs PHD thesis to note that. Just looking at the facts.

 

[DarthOne]

No. We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place and not wanting to get involved in that mess doesn’t make them bad allies.

If you ask a friend to play Russian roulette with you and guys and they say “no.”
That doesn’t make them a bad friend.

Iraq was a boondoggle that wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

They let us house our bases and nukes. So they’re a thousand times more useful then the Kurds
Are we supposed to abandon an actual NATO ally?
For a state less group who we have to fight multiple countries for to get their state?
No.

Exactly this. Enough with the Wilsonian idea that America is supposed to get involved in nation building and the spreading of Democracy across the world or some such nonsense. That idea was stupid in 1918 and has only largely continued to be so. Only really contributing to god only knows how lives lost and billions of dollars misspent.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Exactly this. Enough with the Wilsonian idea that America is supposed to get involved in nation building and the spreading of Democracy across the world or some such nonsense. That idea was stupid in 1918 and has only largely continued to be so. Only really contributing to god only knows how lives lost and billions of dollars misspent.

Well, it did work, once, in Japan and Germany.

 

[Francis Urquhart]

No. It is a fact. We went in because of the threat of WMDs. We found the WMDS there were old are to small to be a threat.

The situation was much more complicated than that. WMDs were the most easily "presented " rationale for removing Saddam Hussein but they were very far from the only one. That's a fairly common situation; a situation that needs handling for a complex variety of reasons but they would all need detailed explanations some of which would compromise valuable intelligence data. So, a relatively simple explanation that is one of the key points is presented.

Think of it as a trial. There is a huge amount of evidence that simply never gets mentioned in media coverage of the trial and instead coverage concentrates on a few key points.

The problems and issues that led to the invasion of Iraq were byzantine in their complexity. One was the realization that Schwartzkopf had blundered badly in signing his cease-fire agreement in 1991 and effectively left half the job undone. Therefore, there was a "put it right" mentality that failed to recognize the time for doing so had passed and that any new action was separate from ODS,

Another was that the Iraqi government was creating trouble across the Middle East and was using claims that much of its chemical and biological weapons arsenal had survived as had the core of its nuclear ambitions. Now, there's an interesting theory around that Saddam Hussein actually believed his own propaganda (and international intelligence data - of which there was a lot) that his chem/bio/nuke stuff had survived. He was a victim of the echo-chamber effect in that people told him what he wanted to hear and he never realized most of the arsenal he was depending on didn't exist.

Having said that, there were substantial inventories of chemical and (apparently) biological weapons around though. Just before the invasion large truck convoys left suspect facilities and headed for Syria. What was in those convoys remains unknown but its a good bet they contained the working arsenal of chem/bio.

It also appears that the chem/bio was being consciously used by the Saddam Hussein government as a bluff and they went out of their way to support and promote the idea that there was a major secret Iraqi arsenal. Unfortunately, they bluffed too well and got taken seriously. There's a lesson there.

Another issue was that Saddam Hussein was a really unpleasant person and there was a general feeling that the world would be better off without him. Bush certainly regarded removing him as a moral imperative. Which tends to suggests a moral sense is a serious disadvantage for a politician. The treatment of minority groups in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's leadership was seen as another reason for going in, especially as the botched end to ODS had facilitated that oppression (look up the Marsh Arabs for example).

Yet another was that the sanctions regime against Iraq that was basically putting a straight-jacket on Hussein's plans was crumbling and wouldn't survive more than another year. That meant the clock was ticking and the window for military action would close.

Yet another was that the DoD under Rumsfeld had been spending a fortune on advanced weaponry under his "transformation" effort. He was pushing hard the idea that all this investment would mean that an invasion would be quick, cheap and over in a few weeks. Since Rumsfeld got almost everything wrong, its not surprising that turned out to be another example.

We can go on for a very long time about this but the point is that the situation leading up to the invasion of Iraq was a very complex one. Trying to say that WMD were "the cause" and the fact we found less there than we had expected (we found quite a bit by the way, much more that popular accounts suggest) proves it was a failure etc ignores most of the story. Which is quite typical of course. The operation was a failure, nobody denies that, but we came closer to success than is now remembered and the failure wasn't going in, it was what we did when we were there.

So, the original statement is an opinion, not a fact. As I said, it is a supportable opinion and a good case can be made for it but it is not a fact.

 

[Bacle]

Well, it did work, once, in Japan and Germany.

Those were done under different geopolitical circumstances and we also had to effectively bomb those countries to the ground beforehand.

The situation was much more complicated than that. WMDs were the most easily "presented " rationale for removing Saddam Hussein but they were very far from the only one. That's a fairly common situation; a situation that needs handling for a complex variety of reasons but they would all need detailed explanations some of which would compromise valuable intelligence data. So, a relatively simple explanation that is one of the key points is presented.

Think of it as a trial. There is a huge amount of evidence that simply never gets mentioned in media coverage of the trial and instead coverage concentrates on a few key points.

The problems and issues that led to the invasion of Iraq were byzantine in their complexity. One was the realization that Schwartzkopf had blundered badly in signing his cease-fire agreement in 1991 and effectively left half the job undone. Therefore, there was a "put it right" mentality that failed to recognize the time for doing so had passed and that any new action was separate from ODS,

Another was that the Iraqi government was creating trouble across the Middle East and was using claims that much of its chemical and biological weapons arsenal had survived as had the core of its nuclear ambitions. Now, there's an interesting theory around that Saddam Hussein actually believed his own propaganda (and international intelligence data - of which there was a lot) that his chem/bio/nuke stuff had survived. He was a victim of the echo-chamber effect in that people told him what he wanted to hear and he never realized most of the arsenal he was depending on didn't exist.

Having said that, there were substantial inventories of chemical and (apparently) biological weapons around though. Just before the invasion large truck convoys left suspect facilities and headed for Syria. What was in those convoys remains unknown but its a good bet they contained the working arsenal of chem/bio.

It also appears that the chem/bio was being consciously used by the Saddam Hussein government as a bluff and they went out of their way to support and promote the idea that there was a major secret Iraqi arsenal. Unfortunately, they bluffed too well and got taken seriously. There's a lesson there.

Another issue was that Saddam Hussein was a really unpleasant person and there was a general feeling that the world would be better off without him. Bush certainly regarded removing him as a moral imperative. Which tends to suggests a moral sense is a serious disadvantage for a politician. The treatment of minority groups in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's leadership was seen as another reason for going in, especially as the botched end to ODS had facilitated that oppression (look up the Marsh Arabs for example).

Yet another was that the sanctions regime against Iraq that was basically putting a straight-jacket on Hussein's plans was crumbling and wouldn't survive more than another year. That meant the clock was ticking and the window for military action would close.

Yet another was that the DoD under Rumsfeld had been spending a fortune on advanced weaponry under his "transformation" effort. He was pushing hard the idea that all this investment would mean that an invasion would be quick, cheap and over in a few weeks. Since Rumsfeld got almost everything wrong, its not surprising that turned out to be another example.

We can go on for a very long time about this but the point is that the situation leading up to the invasion of Iraq was a very complex one. Trying to say that WMD were "the cause" and the fact we found less there than we had expected (we found quite a bit by the way, much more that popular accounts suggest) proves it was a failure etc ignores most of the story. Which is quite typical of course. The operation was a failure, nobody denies that, but we came closer to success than is now remembered and the failure wasn't going in, it was what we did when we were there.

So, the original statement is an opinion, not a fact. As I said, it is a supportable opinion and a good case can be made for it but it is not a fact.

While there were secondary reasons for the invasion, let's not pretend it wasn't sold to the public via the WMD threat.

And let's also not pretend that it was a waste of lives and treasure which has only made things worse for everyone. Sure, Obama undid a lot of forward progress with his moves, but even without those blunders the situation was not likely to stay stable in the long term anyway. We either should have gone all the way during Desert Storm, or not gone back in at all.

 

[Francis Urquhart]

While there were secondary reasons for the invasion, let's not pretend it wasn't sold to the public via the WMD threat.

My point is that the reasons why something is sold to the public are often not the reason why the decisions were taken. In fact, they very rarely are and it often takes a lot of digging to find what was really happening. OIF was a good example of that and a lot of the necessary records are buried under security classifications. I wouldn't say that WMDs were the primary reason for the actual decision (although, as you say, they were a major reason in justifying it). If somebody really twisted my arm, I'd say that the real primary reason was recognition that the end of ODS had been botched and Bush II wanted to put right what his daddy had screwed up. By the way, that sort of motivation rarely ends well.

And let's also not pretend that it was a waste of lives and treasure which has only made things worse for everyone. Sure, Obama undid a lot of forward progress with his moves, but even without those blunders the situation was not likely to stay stable in the long term anyway. We either should have gone all the way during Desert Storm, or not gone back in at all.

It's necessary here to distinguish between motivation and execution. Even going from public records, its apparent that the rationale for OIF was far more complex than the simplistic "He's got WMD" conveys. One can make cases both ways for whether the motivation was justifiable or not and that's typical of these situations. these things are rarely 90/10 decisions. More usually they are 55/45 and OIF was a classic case.

However, in terms of execution, the whole operation was fundamentally misconceived and most of the failures there fall on Rumsfeld. He promised that his new transformational technology would allow the operational to be carried out quickly, cheaply and with minimum cost in human lives. Quite a few people believed him which was a pity. It didn't have to be that way; the operational doctrines for controlling a country after invading it are known back to Roman times. We didn't even consider using them. That's where I would level my criticisms rather than at the decision to go in. If we had considered what invading and occupying Iraq would actually involve, the blood and treasure expended would have been a lot less.

One simple example, we disbanded the Iraqi Army and sent it home. We should have hired it.

Your last line is absolutely true and I have no argument with it. That's both our opinions and I'd be happy to work with you defending them.

 

[ShieldWife]

Iraq was an absolute disaster, sold to the American people with lies. The biggest one wasn’t even weapons of mass destruction, it was the idea that Iraq was somehow tied to 9/11. Of course, they didn’t overtly say that Iraq was involved in 9/11, but they exploited post 9/11 hysteria to generate the will to attack Iraq.

A big mistake does go back to 1991, but it wasn’t that we didn’t go far enough. Our mistake was going into Iraq at all and making an enemy of our long time ally in the region, a secular leader, a nationalist, who was probably the only guy who could keep the region stable.

We should have minded our own business in 1991 just like so many other times, because none of our military adventurism around the world has made us or the world any safer.

The Iraq war(s) cost us trillions when we are already going broke. What else could we have used those trillions on? Paying down the national debt, tax cuts, health care, scientific research, choose your favorite issues and you can fund them with the fortune that literally went up in smoke. What did we get for our sacrifice, a failed state and haven for terrorism?

Also, Middle Easterners are humans too and over a million innocent civilians have been killed in our crazy and immoral regime change wars. Millions more have been plunged into chaos and poverty, millions turned into refugees who in turn become a danger to nations they flee to.

How many 10’s of millions of people living in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, or elsewhere have legitimate reasons for saying they hate America - not because our freedom, culture, or our religion, but because we have brought ruin to their nations or murdered their families?

 

[LordsFire]

Iraq was an absolute disaster, sold to the American people with lies. The biggest one wasn’t even weapons of mass destruction, it was the idea that Iraq was somehow tied to 9/11. Of course, they didn’t overtly say that Iraq was involved in 9/11, but they exploited post 9/11 hysteria to generate the will to attack Iraq.

A big mistake does go back to 1991, but it wasn’t that we didn’t go far enough. Our mistake was going into Iraq at all and making an enemy of our long time ally in the region, a secular leader, a nationalist, who was probably the only guy who could keep the region stable.

We should have minded our own business in 1991 just like so many other times, because none of our military adventurism around the world has made us or the world any safer.

The Iraq war(s) cost us trillions when we are already going broke. What else could we have used those trillions on? Paying down the national debt, tax cuts, health care, scientific research, choose your favorite issues and you can fund them with the fortune that literally went up in smoke. What did we get for our sacrifice, a failed state and haven for terrorism?

Also, Middle Easterners are humans too and over a million innocent civilians have been killed in our crazy and immoral regime change wars. Millions more have been plunged into chaos and poverty, millions turned into refugees who in turn become a danger to nations they flee to.

How many 10’s of millions of people living in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, or elsewhere have legitimate reasons for saying they hate America - not because our freedom, culture, or our religion, but because we have brought ruin to their nations or murdered their families?

You are going way too far with this. There is certainly some limited degree of culpability on America for bumbling with a number of things, but the primary responsibility absolutely lies on the people who actually butchered their neighbors, both local and regional.

Also, something I very specifically will address, is how Desert Storm in 1991 had a very important role that a lot of people may not realize. The Iraqi military in 1991 was huge for a regional power, with large amounts of soviet equipment and manpower. It was very much a military modeled on soviet-style doctrine.

Desert Storm was the first large-scale implementation of new doctrines and technologies that had been on the rise since the end of the Vietnam War. The international perception (with some justification) was that the Vietnam War was a humiliation for the USA and the US Military, and it was the last major military involvement the USA had with anything for 15 years.

Desert Storm was a crushing defeat for the Iraqis. Their soviet-style military didn't just lose, it was destroyed like it was barely even there. The kill/loss ratio for the American-lead coalition forces were one hundred to one. That is, for every coalition soldier killed, one hundred Iraqi soldiers were killed. For every coalition soldier injured, one hundred Iraqi soldiers were injured.

Not a single of the US's premier combat aircraft (F-15) was defeated in combat. Not a single of the American's premier tanks (M1 Abrams, I think A1 variant at the time) were destroyed in combat.

It is very important to understand this in one specific context:

The USSR had not actually dissolved yet.

Was it crumbling? Yes. Was it likely to collapse soon regardless? Yes.

But do not underestimate the impact this had on the Soviet Leadership, who absolutely were watching. Do not underestimate the impact this had on Soviet military leadership. Do you think that the break-up of the USSR would have been so relatively bloodless, especially given how insanely militarized the bloc was, if it had not been abundantly clear that trying one last military effort to kick things off would have been absolutely futile?

Desert Storm established that the US military was no longer a peer to the red army, it was the unquestioned master of the battlefield.

Yes, the US had a technological edge against the Iraqis, but they had to project power all the way to the far side of the world, a not-inconsiderable disadvantage, and it's not like the entire soviet military was using their latest hardware either. Sure, the Soviets probably told themselves they'd do better than the Iraqis. They were almost certainly right, too.

But if they improved the kill/loss ratio by an order of magnitude, that'd still put them at 10:1 losses. That's not just not sustainable, that's a point where your men will shoot you if you don't surrender.

I'm very specifically keeping this post restricted to this issue. Don't think that by any means I'm claiming this is sufficient reason (or even a reason considered at all at the time) for Desert Storm in 1991, but it's absolutely a positive effect that came out of it.

 

[ShieldWife]

It’s highly questionable whether or not the Iraq war has any effects on the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The idea that the USSR would decide to fight it out against the western democracies but were deterred because of our performance in Desert Storm strains credulity and I’d need some evidence, such as statements from former Soviet leadership, to think that there would have been a substantial difference.

It’s all highly speculative, though demonstrating strength to an uninvolved third party is hardly a justification for war.

 

[Morphic Tide]

It’s highly questionable whether or not the Iraq war has any effects on the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The idea is that the Soviet military forces would have been much more involved in the post-breakup bloodshed, but Desert Storm demonstrated that NATO would be able to trivially destroy them if such things occurred.

 

[Francis Urquhart]

The idea is that the Soviet military forces would have been much more involved in the post-breakup bloodshed, but Desert Storm demonstrated that NATO would be able to trivially destroy them if such things occurred.

This is covered in detail in the last parts of The Fifty Years War by Dr. Norman Friedman. The impact of the growing generations of precision-guided munitions was exactly as Lordsfire described it. The Soviet leadership realized that the rate these weapons were proliferating undermined the whole way they had planned to fight a war against NATO. Even worse, (for them), the way their industry was built, they couldn't match these developments. This was a stunningly horrible development for them They'd been aware of the operational effects of PGMs for years but ODS showed them that the operational impact of these weapons was for greater than they had thought. What's really useful about Dr. Friedman's books is that his footnotes are copious (almost small essays in themselves) and he diligently sources everything. If you want a more popular source, there's a Russian-made film on Youtube that makes an assessment of what would have happened if the Soviet Army had fought in Iraq in place of the Iraqis. Even though that analysis rates the Russian tanks and artillery as superior to NATOs and their troops as better trained ("Ours are better" being almost the Russian national anthem) the PGMs meant they would have lost and lost very badly.

The difference is, in the old days, we worked on how many aircraft sorties would be required to destroy a given target. Now, its how many targets can we destroy per aircraft sortie.