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2023-03-21 Iraq

US invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned into a grand failure

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Posted by badanov 2023-03-21 00:00|| || Front Page|| [10 views ] Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 00:57|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 01:37|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 02:51|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 07:07|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 07:34|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 07:39|| Front Page Top

#7 Facts and history don't matter in our troll's world

Posted by Frank G 2023-03-21 08:21|| 2023-03-21 08:21|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 09:59|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 11:52|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 11:56|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 12:03|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 12:21|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 12:35|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2023-03-21 13:54|| Front Page Top

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