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“Iraq & The Eight-Foot Invisible Rabbit”
Two bloggers with different perspectives debate the war on their respective sites. But it’s not your usual name-calling or demonization. Your starting point for this must read is HERE.
5 Responses to ““Iraq & The Eight-Foot Invisible Rabbit””
Outstanding work,gentlemen. Rick Moran, Shaun Mullan, Joe Gandleman, you have all given us an excellent, reasoned, thoughtful look at where do we go from here.
I agree with Rick, that the left has often been dishonest and deceitful about what it wants. Likewise, the right has not been honest or truthful about what is required to pursue its course of action, and the prospects for successful nation building in Iraq. Shaun has given us a thoughtful reply to Rick’s initial post.
Well done – thanks for making TMV worth reading.
And thank YOU!
I think there’s a bit of overgeneralizing going on here- there were also many on the right who did not see Iraq as a good candidate for Democracy- taking Bush’s mistakes out of the equation. Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote a piece stating that Iraq lacked the necessary precursors for democracy, as many countries in the ME do. Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson also saw this as an exercise in futility from the start. Gerald Ford admitted on his death bed that the Iraq War was a mistake from the start.
Even Bush’s own intelligence community warned from the start that invading Iraq would likely lead to the destabilization of the ME- which we are seeing now with three civil wars. Countries like Egypt and Iran which had nascent pro-democracy movements are seeing a repressive clamping down of those organizations.
Many of the members of Bush 41′s administration, who made the decision not to go to Baghdad in the first Gulf war, were opposed to the invasion based on those grounds, including luminaries like Brent Scowcroft. If you go back to 1991, even Dick Cheney opposed invading Iraq. From Fiasco:
“I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq. . . We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent that we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait, but the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, wasn’t anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world.”
So, its simplistic to pin the idea that invading Iraq was flawed from the start on the left- they have been far more vocal about it, but any serious analysis of our chances for success revealed that this would not be a “cakewalk” that would be over in six months, but a quagmire.
We only have to look back at the failed 12 year occupation of Iraq by the British in the 1920′s
Kritter:
I quite agree that there is some overgeneralizing going on her on both Rick’s part and my own, but for me it is important to exorcise my left-liberal demons and Rick’s post and my counter-commentary at Kiko’s House have prompted some refreshing comments insofar they they don’t tread the same well-worn road.
Jeez- I thought my comment was refreshing and well-written until I noticed how many times I wrote “from the start” in the first paragraph, LOL. I have to say that I have a knee-jerk reaction to posts that generalize what the right or the left is guilty of with regards to the war.
The most important thing to me is to learn from the past, but we seem fundamentally incapable of doing so. Bush’s mistakes are only important in that they have been covered up for so long by a campaign of misinformation, designed to maintain support for the war for as long as possible. The nation has been sold a used car, and boy is it ever a lemon!