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| Iraq | |
| US invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned into a grand failure | |
| 2023-03-21 | |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. Until Barky took the reins, I don't see it that way. [REGNUM] Exactly 20 years ago, on March 20, 2003, the United States inspired the invasion of Iraq, presenting the world with shaky and then refuted evidence of "the guilt of Saddam Hussein's regime, " Mais Kurbanov , an expert on the Middle East, told REGNUM. "Washington convinced the whole world that a certain powder allegedly found in Iraq indicates the development of weapons of mass destruction, and therefore the “regime” must be stopped," the source recalled. That old thing. My take is and always has been, based on the number of times Saddam fired on NATO aircraft and other violations of the ceasefire alone, was sufficient cause for war. The administration of George W. Bush was able to "push through" the outbreak of hostilities, but this did not bring success in the long run, the expert noted. The March-May 2003 campaign led to the swift surrender of the Iraqi regular army, the overthrow of Saddam and the Baath Party regime, and the occupation of the country by the Americans and their allies. But, Kurbanov notes, the military campaign that seemed victorious at first became bogged down in a protracted guerrilla war. Iraq has become an endless expenditure item of the American budget - only for the "reconstruction" of the country, the United States spent $ 44.6 billion by 2010. What began bravura ended in complete failure and the actual flight of American troops from Iraq, Kurbanov noted. "The US itself confirms the spending of 7 trillion dollars in order to allegedly liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, from weapons of mass destruction. We spent seven years, a lot of soldiers, a lot of equipment. And one fine day, the 50,000-strong army simply abandoned Iraq and moved to Kuwait to the bases of permanent deployment," the expert continued. All thanks to America's Chief Russian Torturer Barak Obama. Washington is trying not to remember the failure, including because of the complete unseemliness of the actions of American troops on the territory of the country. The United States has brought numerous troubles to the Iraqis, and some names, such as the name of the Abu Ghraib prison, have become household names. "Although initially Bush Jr. asked for an apology, but this does not help. The US has destroyed the infrastructure of the entire country. Millions were injured, prisoners were tortured in Iraqi prisons, and the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad became famous throughout the world for its torture of captives. Of course, not everything can be listed. The murder of children, devastation, destruction," Kurbanov noted. You call torture, I say US frat pledges got worse treatment. The authoritative British medical journal The Lancet gave an estimate: by 2006, the direct result of the war and occupation were the deaths of 655,000 Iraqi residents - experts included in this number people who died due to the destruction of the healthcare system, social infrastructure, due to the growth of crime. As for the actual civilians who died in the fighting, according to estimates by the British-American NGO Iraq Body Count, in 2003-2007, 128,000 people became victims of the war, of which 40,500 were in Baghdad alone. A quarter of the total number of deaths are women and children noted in the Iraq Body Count. According to a number of estimates, the total number of direct and indirect victims of the American occupation could reach 1.1 million. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I seems to recall cooked data by Iraq Body Count.
Despite the attempts of the Western world to "silence" the devastating consequences of the American occupation, "the whole world sees their true face," Kurbanov emphasizes. The Iraqi conflict lasted almost 9 years - until December 15, 2011. During this time, weapons of mass destruction, which became the pretext for the start of the US invasion, were never found in Iraq, REGNUM noted. "The image of (US Secretary of State) Colin Powell, demonstrating a test tube with alleged anthrax powder, has long become a household name as the personification of hypocrisy and the conviction of the US ruling elite in their own impunity," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov noted in February 2023 on his 20th anniversary speeches of the former head of the State Department. Now the West has been trying to prevent the discussion in the UN Security Council of the anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Vasily Nebenzya, Russia's permanent representative to the UN, said at a press conference on March 20. According to him, "dirty tricks" were used for this. The United States, repeatedly caught in a lie in recent years, no one believes anymore. The beginning of this disbelief was laid by the events in Iraq, Senator Alexei Pushkov noted on March 20 . It is increasingly difficult for Washington to get the countries of the Global South to support sanctions and the policy of isolating Russia, "in the non-Western world, almost no one buys into chatter about the West's struggle in Ukraine for freedom and democracy," the parliamentarian added. March 20, 2023 Mikhail Zakharov | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #14 Tough to imagine doing nothing after 911. Saddam was handy so we took it out on him. Afghanistan made no sense at all after bin Laden escaped across the border to Pakistan. I think it would have been more in the interest of world peace to nuke Pakistan, or at least threaten them with nukes to get bin Laden. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2023-03-21 13:54 |
| #13 And this scathing review, which one of our Readers picked up on a Muslim Brotherhood website: 650,000 Iraqi Deaths Study Exposed In fact, here is the search , which y’all will note I set only 2002-2008. Another article reveals the study was funded to the tune of £25,000 — half the cost of the research — by the omnipresent George Soros. A fact which was unethically concealed by The Lancet’s editors. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-03-21 12:35 |
| #12 Another the next year: Debunking 8 Anti-War Myths About Iraq Because it is slow to load, after all these years, a direct link to the original article, which is very useful indeed. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-03-21 12:21 |
| #11 Go to your room for that one, M. dear. :-) Just for funsies, I did a quick search of the Rantburg archives using the term Lancet. Here is one of the early ones, posted by Rafael with inlines from medical professor Dr, Steve in salmon (“it’s not pink, dammit!”) and commentary from a bunch of people who know their way around statistics. 2004-10-29 Study: 100,000 Excess Civilian Iraqi Deaths Since War |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-03-21 12:03 |
| #10 Saddam Hussein had also stockpiled bodies, particularly of babies, in morgue freezers So, he had "baby stiff warehouses" to go with the "baby milk factories." Who knew? |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-03-21 11:56 |
| #9 I determined at the time that the people gathering the the data had likely double counted bodies that were found dead, plus they could not distinguish among Iraq civilians, Iraqi civilian combatants, foreign civilians and foreign civilian combatants. A large number of formerly uniformed Iraqi soldiers who fled the battlefield found civilian clothing and joined in the fight against US forces. So also determined the committee that ended up pulling that Lancet publication. Though you forgot to mention at the time that Saddam Hussein had also stockpiled bodies, particularly of babies, in morgue freezers to haul out and add to the count when those nicely gullible — or not, given how poorly they designed their study, based on uncorroborated in-home interviews — the involved scientists were. Again, all this is collected in the Rantburg archives. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-03-21 11:52 |
| #8 Yes, yes, some of those quoted in the article below are, shall we say, not held in high esteem here. But some others are. Some of their answers may surprise you. That qualification supplied, Historians apportion blame for the Iraq war |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-03-21 09:59 |
| #7 Facts and history don't matter in our troll's world |
| Posted by: Frank G 2023-03-21 08:21 |
| #6 Serendipitously I posted this seven years ago to the day on Facebook: A fella commented on the timeline of an acquaintance about how Dubya's war in Iraq killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, blah, blah blah. He used statistics from a website called iraqibodycount.0rg as his backup. Hark with me for a moment back to the heady dayz of the American liberation battle of Iraq. That is the first time I heard of the website, so I looked into it some to see what they were doing. I determined at the time that the people gathering the the data had likely double counted bodies that were found dead, plus they could not distinguish among Iraq civilians, Iraqi civilian combatants, foreign civilians and foreign civilian combatants. A large number of formerly uniformed Iraqi soldiers who fled the battlefield found civilian clothing and joined in the fight against US forces. Remember that a large number of fighters from Syria, Iran, Jordan, Arabia, Africa and from Palestine were coming by bus, car and truck into Iraq for their chance to take a chunk of of US forces. There is no way to distinguish among them as they probably traveled without passports of ID of any kind, or had false IDs. A number of other problems with the data that I saw I can't mention here because I frankly can't recall. At the time I regarded the data, and I still regard the data as spurious and thus discredited. Now, the fella replied, and then I replied to him, but that is where I left it. I am very busy with the writing I do for rantburg.com and other things, living, etc to get into a pissing match with a young leftists replying on such data. The upshot to all this is that this is the kind f crap we are facing should a republican OF ANY KIND gets into the White House. It is best to be prepared now for the inevitable trolling that will take place over the next four to eight years. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. |
| Posted by: badanov 2023-03-21 07:39 |
| #5 Al Qaeda and Arab nationalists hated each other. The commies and nazis hated each other till it was more convenient not to - see Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact. Of course that changed a couple years later and the commies made ties with the capitalists they despised. It's all about power. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-03-21 07:34 |
| #4 What the hell were our planes even doing nosing up in range of the AAA defenses anyway? How would the US react to its airspace being probed in a similar fashion? No fly zone as part of the ceasefire that ended the 1991 war. It is very important to remind yourself that those dead American soldiers were killed by hostile enemy forces, not by Bush, nor Barky. |
| Posted by: badanov 2023-03-21 07:07 |
| #3 Al Qaeda and Arab nationalists hated each other. The illegal invasion of Iraq was based on a lie, and this has been well-known for more than a decade. It's incredible how many people still think four thousand dead Americans was a price they were willing to pay to achieve globalist objectives. How about the 30,000 that killed themselves after the war was over? You're spitting on their graves by not demanding war crimes trials for Bush, Obama and the rest of the enablers. What they did was as bad as what Russia did to Ukraine or Germany did to Poland. |
| Posted by: Hupung Untervehr9838 2023-03-21 02:51 |
| #2 If you’re going to believe Russian propaganda, there really is nothing to be done for you. But the evidence in Rantburg’s 2+ decades of archives shows otherwise. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” It’s true that we supported Saddam Hussein against the Mad Mullahs who conquered Iran in 1979. But once that war ended — in a draw, with about half a million deaths between the two — it was time to reevaluate. And after 9/11/2001 it was time to reevaluate again. So first we went after Al Qaeda’s hosts, the Taliban in Afghanistan, then after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had taken the lead in training Al Qaeda cadres in the arts of terrorism alongside other jihadi and non-jihadi terror groups at the Salman Pak facility. Iran, which hid half of the leading Al Qaeda leadership and their families after 9/11, including a couple of Osama bin Ladin’s wives and a bunch of his kids, should have been next on that punishment list, but the CIA — by deliberately and publicly lying about Iran’s nuclear bomb program — ensured that was politically impossible for President George W. Bush, and in the process enabled President Obama’s little “deal”. And in the meantime, Russia was hunting its own jihadis across the Caucasus and into Europe, taking revenge for Beslan and all the rest of the vile jihadi attacks on Russian soil. And helping Assad reconquer Syria from both ISIS and the rebels of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention Wagner going into all sorts of jihadi wars in North and sub-Sharan Africa. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2023-03-21 01:37 |
| #1 My take is and always has been, based on the number of times Saddam fired on NATO aircraft and other violations of the ceasefire alone, was sufficient cause for war. Really? For WAR? For thousands of dead Americans? Because a dictator (that WE supported!) on the other side of the planet did something we didn't like, that was justification for a Ukraine-style invasion? What the hell were our planes even doing nosing up in range of the AAA defenses anyway? How would the US react to its airspace being probed in a similar fashion? weapons of mass destruction, which became the pretext for the start of the US invasion, were never found in Iraq They knew it was a lie from the beginning and did it anyway. All so PNAC and their globalist buddies could attack a country just like German piling panzers into Poland. |
| Posted by: Hupung Untervehr9838 2023-03-21 00:57 |