So, after killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqis & leaving their country in a mess, American leadership is essentially saying, "oops, my bad."
When every sane person from Alaska to Australia & Russia to Chile was uttering the same mantra that attacking Iraq is a huge mistake, American leadership not only turned a deaf ear & blind eye to those sane voices, but they forced / incentivize their allies to join them in this non-sense of a war. Did those sane people had any more intelligence about Iraq than American CIA & British MI6 & all those other spying agencies US has around the world?
As I posted a picture & quote from the 2012 movie, Emperor, recently in my blog, in which a friend of Emperor Hirohito of Japan summarizes the past 100 or so years of international land occupation & warfare, to General Fellers (Matthew Fox). He said that Japan took the Singapore & Malaya from British, & Philippines from the Americans, who themselves took it from the Spanish. Britain & Portugal had long ago occupied Chinese territory (Hong Kong & Macao). But nobody ever tried to convict French, Dutch, British, & American leadership for their wartime transgressions, but Japan does the same thing (which was wrong, of course) once (in World War 2), & Americans are looking very intently in trying to punish the Japanese leaders.
Fast forward a few more decades & Iraq invades Kuwait & Russia annexes parts of Ukraine & US & its allies start talking about illegal land grabs & defending the freedoms of Kuwaitis & Ukrainians. But did Americans think about the Iraqi freedoms when they attacked Iraq & killed thousands of innocent civilians & turned that country in a mess, & all based on lies & deceptions?
Even if we forget about Iraqis for a minute, then what about all those American taxpayers who dutifully paid taxes, while living on meagre incomes themselves, & their own government leaders threw away their taxes, amounting to in the billions, in foreign lands, in international wars, from which US gained nothing, except, perhaps, creating more lone-wolf terrorists & terrorist organizations (ISIS)? What about those almost 5,000 American soldiers who died in Iraq fighting a war based on lies & with no positive results?
All those billions of dollars would've reduced education costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've reduced / eliminated healthcare costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've created millions of jobs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've helped American businesses in raising minimum wages (while American government would've reduce the burden of mandatory increased wages through subsidies etc.). All those billions of dollars would've made the lifestyle of Americans much better, all the while creating no terrorists in foreign lands.
In America, the common perception is that a victim doesn't get justice until the criminal is punished, in whatever way punishment befits the crime. In American corporate culture, when an employee makes such a huge mistake where billions of $$$ are sunk in a venture & receives no benefit whatsoever out of that venture, he/she is summarily fired from his/her job.
It seems to me that the rules of life for American leaders is quite different than American public. While one gets punished for a small mistake, the other goes scot-free for killing thousands of Iraqis & Americans, throwing away billions of its own citizens' hard-earned money, & helped in creating a much bigger menace in such terrorist organizations as ISIS & lone-wolf terrorists. This is American democracy & freedom hard at work.
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A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.
Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans & countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.
Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more & more Republican politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.
It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, now favoured to win her party’s nomination, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in the Senate. That vote, & her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.
In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain & simple.”
What might seem a hard truth for a nation to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say — even Bush’s brother.
The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured ... into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian & dean of the Hofstra University school of communication.
Or as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”
Santorum didn’t always see the war that way. He voted for the invasion as a senator & continued to support if for years. ...
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a Republican candidate in 2008, said invading Iraq had been “the right decision.” But on his way to winning the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney said the war never would have happened if US & world leaders had realised Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction.
It’s an easier question for presidential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid & the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio & Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 & so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress.
All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
They didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a declared Republican candidate, who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. ...
Former President George W. Bush & his vice-president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal & unpredictable dictator made the world safer.
In his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, Bush said he got a “sickening feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction & he knew that would “transform public perception of the war.”
But he stands by his decision.
The war remains a painful topic that politicians must approach with some care.
Jeb Bush, explaining his reluctance to clarify his position on the war’s start, said “going back in time and talking about hypotheticals,” the would-haves & the should-haves, does a disservice to the families of soldiers who gave their lives.
When he finished withdrawing US troops in December 2011, Obama predicted a stable, self-reliant Iraqi government would take hold. Instead, turmoil & terrorism overtook Iraq & American leaders & would-be presidents are struggling with what to do next. The US now has 3,040 troops in Iraq as trainers & advisers & to provide security for American personnel & equipment.
For the most part, the public & the military — like the politicians — are focused less on decisions of the past than on the events of today & how to stop the Daesh militants who have overrun a swathe of Iraq & inspired terrorist attacks in the West.
“The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 & 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the aftermath,” said retired US Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a top assistant to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad during that increase of US troops in Iraq.
“Those mistakes were huge & compounded the original error of going into Iraq in the first place,” said Monsoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “There’s plenty of blame to go around. What we need is not so much blame as to figure out what happened & use that knowledge to make better decisions going forward.”
When every sane person from Alaska to Australia & Russia to Chile was uttering the same mantra that attacking Iraq is a huge mistake, American leadership not only turned a deaf ear & blind eye to those sane voices, but they forced / incentivize their allies to join them in this non-sense of a war. Did those sane people had any more intelligence about Iraq than American CIA & British MI6 & all those other spying agencies US has around the world?
As I posted a picture & quote from the 2012 movie, Emperor, recently in my blog, in which a friend of Emperor Hirohito of Japan summarizes the past 100 or so years of international land occupation & warfare, to General Fellers (Matthew Fox). He said that Japan took the Singapore & Malaya from British, & Philippines from the Americans, who themselves took it from the Spanish. Britain & Portugal had long ago occupied Chinese territory (Hong Kong & Macao). But nobody ever tried to convict French, Dutch, British, & American leadership for their wartime transgressions, but Japan does the same thing (which was wrong, of course) once (in World War 2), & Americans are looking very intently in trying to punish the Japanese leaders.
Fast forward a few more decades & Iraq invades Kuwait & Russia annexes parts of Ukraine & US & its allies start talking about illegal land grabs & defending the freedoms of Kuwaitis & Ukrainians. But did Americans think about the Iraqi freedoms when they attacked Iraq & killed thousands of innocent civilians & turned that country in a mess, & all based on lies & deceptions?
Even if we forget about Iraqis for a minute, then what about all those American taxpayers who dutifully paid taxes, while living on meagre incomes themselves, & their own government leaders threw away their taxes, amounting to in the billions, in foreign lands, in international wars, from which US gained nothing, except, perhaps, creating more lone-wolf terrorists & terrorist organizations (ISIS)? What about those almost 5,000 American soldiers who died in Iraq fighting a war based on lies & with no positive results?
All those billions of dollars would've reduced education costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've reduced / eliminated healthcare costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've created millions of jobs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've helped American businesses in raising minimum wages (while American government would've reduce the burden of mandatory increased wages through subsidies etc.). All those billions of dollars would've made the lifestyle of Americans much better, all the while creating no terrorists in foreign lands.
In America, the common perception is that a victim doesn't get justice until the criminal is punished, in whatever way punishment befits the crime. In American corporate culture, when an employee makes such a huge mistake where billions of $$$ are sunk in a venture & receives no benefit whatsoever out of that venture, he/she is summarily fired from his/her job.
It seems to me that the rules of life for American leaders is quite different than American public. While one gets punished for a small mistake, the other goes scot-free for killing thousands of Iraqis & Americans, throwing away billions of its own citizens' hard-earned money, & helped in creating a much bigger menace in such terrorist organizations as ISIS & lone-wolf terrorists. This is American democracy & freedom hard at work.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.
Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans & countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.
Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more & more Republican politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.
It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, now favoured to win her party’s nomination, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in the Senate. That vote, & her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.
In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain & simple.”
What might seem a hard truth for a nation to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say — even Bush’s brother.
The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured ... into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian & dean of the Hofstra University school of communication.
Or as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”
Santorum didn’t always see the war that way. He voted for the invasion as a senator & continued to support if for years. ...
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a Republican candidate in 2008, said invading Iraq had been “the right decision.” But on his way to winning the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney said the war never would have happened if US & world leaders had realised Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction.
It’s an easier question for presidential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid & the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio & Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 & so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress.
All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
They didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a declared Republican candidate, who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. ...
Former President George W. Bush & his vice-president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal & unpredictable dictator made the world safer.
In his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, Bush said he got a “sickening feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction & he knew that would “transform public perception of the war.”
But he stands by his decision.
The war remains a painful topic that politicians must approach with some care.
Jeb Bush, explaining his reluctance to clarify his position on the war’s start, said “going back in time and talking about hypotheticals,” the would-haves & the should-haves, does a disservice to the families of soldiers who gave their lives.
When he finished withdrawing US troops in December 2011, Obama predicted a stable, self-reliant Iraqi government would take hold. Instead, turmoil & terrorism overtook Iraq & American leaders & would-be presidents are struggling with what to do next. The US now has 3,040 troops in Iraq as trainers & advisers & to provide security for American personnel & equipment.
For the most part, the public & the military — like the politicians — are focused less on decisions of the past than on the events of today & how to stop the Daesh militants who have overrun a swathe of Iraq & inspired terrorist attacks in the West.
“The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 & 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the aftermath,” said retired US Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a top assistant to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad during that increase of US troops in Iraq.
“Those mistakes were huge & compounded the original error of going into Iraq in the first place,” said Monsoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “There’s plenty of blame to go around. What we need is not so much blame as to figure out what happened & use that knowledge to make better decisions going forward.”
