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[Two_Scoops]

So, the new study from John Hopkins came out a while ago, saying that over 600,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the beginning of the Iraq War. 600,000 civilians have died, it really blows my mind, I gave myself a minute to think about it and that's like the entire population of the city I live in x2. People who were just trying to scratch out a living, people essentially not too different from any of my neighbors save their location. I let my mind ramble longer and remembered an interesting rule of thumb of how for everyone 1 killed, 2 are left seriously wounded. I did the math and that's 1.2 million people whose lives are forever changed, that 1.2 million people might be missing arms or legs and in a country like Iraq that usually means that they won't be able to provide a living for themselves much less a family. Then more thinking and internet usage led me to find the estimated population of Iraq 28.8 million people, that's more than twenty million people living in fear everday for their lives, afraid that this day they won't come back home. Well we ousted Saddam, right? That's gotta be worth something. Well we're close to breaking even, Saddam has caused an estimated 500,000 Iraqi lives, now keep in mind this is only Iraqi lives, of course this number is only a rough estimate adding the ~100,000 Kurds that he killed and the ~375,000 Iraqis that died in the Iran-Iraq war. So, I felt I should just ask this board, was it worth it, and is it still worth it?

[Drygioni]

oh jeez im sorry i posted this in the wrong section, i meant to do it under history im sorry  .

No worries, a mod can change it.

As for the question posed, I'm hesitant to answer because no matter what I say, there are a huge number of counter-arguments. Basically, I do not think it was worth it, but I'll understand if people counter that by saying Saddam would (eventually) have caused more deaths or committed further potential atrocities.

Another huge factor is the death and destruction the Iraq War has caused beyond the actual war theatre. It's arguable, certainly, but it seems likely that the Iraq War has acted as a catalyst for disillusioned young men and women to fight what they perceive as an increasingly hypocritical, imperialistic West. There are sources for this but I really don't have time to go giraffeing for them.

Yeah, I know I made a hash of this answer.

[Choop]

Saddam was under control. More importantly, Saddam kept local and sectarian leaders under control, who then kept the people under control. I'm not claiming to agree with the level or style of control, but Dubya had no business shipping off our troops and airmen&women and marines over there.

<rumsfeld>Does that mean I'd rather see Saddam back in power? I don't really know.</rumsfeld>

One thing I'd agree with is that Democracy might not be so alive and well within the borders of the US. Turnout has trended downward for the last how many elections? Last month's elections certainly had the best of late, but a single election doesn't change a trend. Our politicians are as divisive as ever, and the media only seem to be helping them to divide the people into factions (sects?). Globally the US is less and less respected and more and more reviled, as are our allies, whose politicians seem more in line with our government then their own people.

It's really frustrating, and I almost hope the American Empire falls, as we as a civilization have been exhibiting massive hubris.


Edit: Oh shit. When you don't hear from me anymore the CIA read this post and came for a visit. I love you all!

[jough]

Freedom costs a buck 'o five.

I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords.

[littlefallsmets]

What I think we're still not at yet as a nation yet is... the realization that there was NEVER a practical way to make Iraq into the thing the neo-cons thought it was going to be turned into in a matter of months.

Idiots looking to get into this office or that office (Christ, how disappointing is John McCain lately?) are still saying "oh, well, if we had done this, if we had done that, it COULD have worked". If we had just killed another half million up front, if we had just put in another half million Americans up front, etc etc.

The amount of troops that would've been required to stabilize Iraq... is more than the entire American military at once. All the missles and warships and Stealth bombers in the world aren't going to stop the street-to-street guerilla religious war that was clearly going to happen.

Those kinds of things are only even delayed by... dudes with guns on every street corner. And we could never have had the number of dudes with guns to send over there without a draft on a scale larger than Vietnam... a draft that the American people would've never accepted for long.

Let alone the fact that we were... supposedly looking for an actual bad guy in Afghanistan and need to still have troops in Korea and actually have SOME troops stateside in case something else goes wrong and etc etc.

And let alone the fact that... the sectarian civil war would've come whenever that boot came off the throats of the Iraqi people, whether that was in two years, five year or twenty. Memory lasts longer than lifetimes in places where there's nothing left to hold onto other than memory.

Millions of American soldiers in Iraq for a generation at least was the only way to bring the end that the neo-conservatives claimed to want. And that sort of commitment was fundamentally impossible... the Republicans would've been out on their asses in 2004 instead of 2006 if that had been the strategy and... the people actually doing the thinking for them knew that, deep down.

Putting forth their agenda through the support of the Protestant Fundamentalists who wanted twenty million dead Muslims and the Business Sociopaths who liked the idea of a trillion tax dollars in their pockets would only last so long and stretch out so far.

At the end of the day, aliens could land on this planet and give us paradise but... if it was given by force, we'd rebel and figure out a way to determine our own fate again, for better or for worse. It's human nature to pull for self-determination above all else.

Why did we go in thinking that the Iraqis were somehow less than human in their instincts?

Because they were largely Arab? Because they were largely Muslim?

Freedoms given to them by the barrel of a gun would be rejected and... when that was done, all the rage of three ethnic factions forced together by post World War jerrymandering and the iron fist of a dictator were going to bubble up and turn into something ugly.

Had Sunni and Kurd and Shia risen up together and, by their own efforts, taken down Sadaam... maybe the scenario been different. Because it would've been their own unity and their own human pride that did it.

Why did we think they wouldn't have pride? Christ, I mean, they were living in a totalitarian regime, what did they have left but personal pride and the memory of hundred thousand past hells?

Two men are having a fight. A third guy, no badge, no authority, comes in and punches them both to stop fighting... or worse, beats up the cop who was stopping the fight to begin with because he didn't like the cop's uniform. Is everybody gonna play nice afterwards?

Nah, they're gonna beat up the third guy and go back to kicking each other's asses.

American didn't have... and shouldn't have had... the political will toward operating Iraq as a police state for the next forty years and didn't have the political will toward the other option toward ending the Iraq situation which would've involved wiping out most of the population and not leaving one stone on top of the other. One is untenable, one is monstrous.

Short of those options, Iraq was unwinnable from the moment it started.

Didn't take a genius to see it, honestly, and it took a head full of alterior motives to not see it.

[theinevitable]

Two men are having a fight. A third guy, no badge, no authority, comes in and punches them both to stop fighting... or worse, beats up the cop who was stopping the fight to begin with (by killing them and torturing their families) because he didn't like that the cop was basically a complete asshole who was doing really shitty things to people in every facet possible. Is everybody gonna play nice afterwards?

fixed that for you. I generally agree with the rest of it, but, shit. What really makes me sad is that sometimes I get the impression that Bush really thought it was going to be this great thing and the Iraqis would love us and be free and he'd get to feel like a knight in shining armor.

If he were actually a southerner, he would know that people don't like having troops forcing freedoms on them. (although southerners seem to support this war a bunch. huh. "support our troops + president" sticker next to confederate flag sticker.)

[pmcd9]

It's taken 6 years, but 'Bush is a fuck*ng Moron' is finally front page news.

As usual Jon Stewart said it best "It's great that they put together a study group, but the test was three years ago."

[KeithHernandez]

I gave you a can for something Jon Stewart said, but, now that I realize this(right after I did it), I will not take it away.

[AugustWest]

It's taken 6 years, but 'Bush is a fuck*ng Moron' is finally front page news.

As usual Jon Stewart said it best "It's great that they put together a study group, but the test was three years ago."

It's fascinating -- somewhere between 33 and 60% of us citizens have realized Bush was a moron all along.  Of course, the most important measure of this question was posed in 2004, and 49% of us voiced our opinion that he's a fuck*ng idiot.

That's one of the oddities of our system, I guess.  One vote more than 50% and you get 100% of the power.  And we're so polarized that the 50% of us who are agin him think he's a complete and total imbecile while the other half thinks he's got some sort of divine guidance.

I hope, or wish, that the rest of the world would realize this about us.  A very slim margin put this goon into power (both times).  Virtually the same number of us are constantly appalled by his actions.

This works on an internal level too.  You blue staters will characterize the rest of the country as an homogenous mass of red.  Even in the reddest of states the difference is only 8 or 10%.  That means that there are millions of blues in every red state (and conversely, millions of reds in your oh-so-enlightened blue state!).  Don't be a regionalist.

[theinevitable]

This is especially true in states such as Missouri. I have learned that on a map, it is basically all "red" counties save 2 small clusters of blue-- representing Kansas City and St. Louis.

also: the idea that republican-majority areas are called "red" is hi-larious.

[AugustWest]

Well, just suppose a county has a population of 100,000.  55% Red and 45% blue.

That means that there are 45,000 blues in that county.

That's not zero.  We exist, dammit!

WE ARE HERE! WE ARE HERE! WE ARE HERE!

/Horton

[littlefallsmets]

What it comes down to for me is...

I am an American citizen who has no confidence in George Bush's leadership and I believe he was both elected and re-elected under false pretenses... the suppression of a recount in Florida the first time around by a Supreme Court beholden to his father in a state run by his brother the first time and by voting machine fraud in Ohio by a company beholden to his handlers the second time around.

But if China came in and deposed him, burning down half the country and occupying us for five years to do it? It wouldn't be worth it and I'd be royally pissed off about the entire affair.

Any American could get their heads around that analogy but, like, no one has explained Iraq that way.

Why has no one explained Iraq that way?

[theinevitable]

because "some people think he cheated in the election" is not the same as "he gassed people, and had rape rooms." It is/was a more extreme situation. And people like to believe you can help someone without them getting pissed at you. Most of America is/was under the general conception that Iraqis were not at all happy under Saddam, and that they would be happy to be "rescued."

I seem to recall there being a poll of Iraqis which basically said "thanks for saving us from Saddam, he sucked. Now get the fuck out of our country."

[AugustWest]

because "some people think he cheated in the election" is not the same as "he gassed people, and had rape rooms."

True. 

But cf: tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians are dead as a result of his actions.  Also, he had Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Extraordinary Renditions.

[littlefallsmets]

The basic point isn't the difference in scale between the domestic wrongs of Sadaam Hussein or a George W. Bush. Clearly, Hussein abused his own people at a factor of squares-and-more in comparison to what Bush has done to his own people. That side of the question isn't what I'm concerned with.

My point is that the self-determination of a people is the self-determination of a people.

History's bourne this out. People will kill and die for generations for the right to be stepped on by a devil of their own devising over a devil they don't know even if the devil they don't know puts them in a lesser kind of hell.

A lasting societal change can only come from within, the forces of self-determination will rend anything else asunder. There's an extent to which you can pressure or expedite a process from the outside, of course, but the moment you go in and give it to them by the barrel of the gun, unprovoked?

That's the moment you've lost. You cross that line, anything you accomplish will be lost the moment you stop forcing it at that gun's barrel. People, nations, do not want to be treated as children in the face of another group of people. The need for that essential equality of dignity on a collective subconscious level trumps in time.

A Hitler, a Hirohito... at the end of the day, their own cultural memory showed that these types of men made the first move, started the goddamn fight and... this is fundamentally important in why a Germany or a Japan came back together relatively quickly or relatively well.

That we were the aggressors, the ones that blew the whole thing to hell... Iraq will forever be able to look upon us as focal point of blame, they'll never have to reconcile amoungst themselves or with themselves, they're able to carry forth the righteous indignation of the victim and... that righteous indignation devolves (not having to examine any history other than America killing a half million by fire and steel) into splinters of who is the "real" victim group and... abracadaver, we have civil war.

The Sunnis are to blame for propping up Sadaam, perhaps. The Kurds are to blame for their neutrality, maybe, the Shia for encouraging the Americans to rain down and their brothers to trickle in aid from Iran or Syria or so on.

The scale of... this figurehead or that figurehead's atrocities is of the highest human value and of the highest historical value but... bares perhaps less on the collapse of an occupied nation than we might care to admit.