We got Pelousi and Reid because of a concerted effort by Democrats to first undermine the war effort and then jump midstream to ride the anti war bandwagon they had built.
Bush screwed it up but removing Saddam was still the right thing to do.
We’d have been much better off finishing the job in Afghanistan and then attacking Iran.
On the last one I agree - Afghanistan was necessary, that’s where Osama was. Iraq was totally optional, and it was clearly the stupid thing to do. There was no good outcome, regardless of whether Saddam deserved his fate. Lots of tyrants deserve to be killed, we can’t do them all.
The concerted effort of the Dems wrote itself, because it became clear that dubya left us holding an uncleanable sack of shit. The insane hysteria of the Dems was probably counterproductive, but the futility of the invasion was so obvious that even the Dem’s flakiness was minor in comparison.
The inability of the GOP to acknowledge this made their fate unavoidable. Sorry, but these wounds were self-inflicted, we can’t blame the Dems for them. Obama made it worse, by essentially handing everything over to Iran, but that was predictable - either he cut bait or just accepted that we were there forever in a shitshow.
Forever in a shit show? When have we ever closed a military base we’ve established overseas? Our military was already stretched thin between two concurrent wars and some Neocons were actually talking about starting a third for awhile. There’s a reason we’ve gotten a reputation as a nation of “Empire Builders.” We still have permanent bases in Germany and they’re considered allies of ours for crying out loud.
Germany is just money, sausages and beer. Iraq is 75% of people who despise us, and the other 25% would happily give directions to a suicide bomber for the nearest Americans. They deserved Saddam. Unless we were prepared to act like the mongols of Tamberlane’s ilk, it was absolutely a fool’s errand to try to civilize those savages.
No argument here. It was also dumb “policy” essentially murdering Ghadaffi. But hey, can’t have a distraction too big when tearing up the Constitution. The sheep might catch on.
The failure to properly execute it doesn’t change the fact it was the right thing to do.
That’s like saying because a shooter failed to control his weapon in stopping a bank robbery made interceding wrong from the start.
Saddam was a butcher killing an average of a hundred thousand of his own people each year and was starting to work with terrorist groups targeting the US and our Allies as well as once gain threatening to reach outside his borders with his own forces again. Any one of those things justified removing him and all of them together made it a necessity, particularly since all of the available intel showed he was in possession of and in the process of restarting his WMD programs.
That we didn’t get our desired outcome due to execution failures doesn’t mean we were wrong in the beginning. We weren’t wrong, we just failed in the execution phase.
That was a huge failure from the beginning that will haunt us in decades to come.
You don’t murder your own allies and then hand the country over to your enemies.
That was a catastrophic failure from it’s inception.
We’ve closed hundreds of bases around the world in the last thirty years, particularly and primarily in Europe. Hundreds more were not “closed” but mothballed with dramatically reduced staff to keep them operational in case we ever need to once again move large numbers of troops back to the continent so we’ll have places to put them and bases to operate out of.
We’ve cut our presence in Europe from 450,000 at it’s peak to under 90,000 with an eventual goal of reducing it to around 30,000 troops permanently stationed on the continent.
Personally I’d like to see us do a major reallocation of troops with the bulk of our troops being move into two or three of the old Soviet Republics as a check on Putin’s future plans.
The further Putin spreads his tentacles the more of a death grip he has on Western Europe by controlling their petroleum, primarily their natural gas supplies.
This makes my head explode. It reminds me of the old communist five-year plans: last time, it didn’t go so well but the guilty parties have been punished and we have a much better plan this time.
We don’t have the requisite genius to do anything more than conquer or destroy that hellhole.
Well none of that is remotely true.
The failure was trying to do it on the cheap with nowhere near enough troops. That made it impossible to secure the borders and when the insurgency started our troops were simply stretched way beyond their capabilities and overwhelmed.
That left them unable to protect the civilian population which eventually turned Iraqi public opinion against us.
The other major failure was Bush again caving to the democrats and charges of “Empire” and “Blood For Oil” in turning over governance far too quickly to the Iraqis under a constitution that didn’t protect the enthno/religious minorities.
There is no national identity or sense of purpose in Iraq, it is a country created by the Brits with only British interest in mind with no consideration to the tribal nature of the various ethnic and religious groups.
Saddam needed to go and he’s gone, we just screwed the pooch on what followed.
A very large factor in that failure, was Turkey refusing to allow their territory be used to stage and launch a ground attack from the north. Had that phase been allowed, the fleeing Iraqi forces would not have had time to melt into the population and the convoys of arms (including chemical weapons) and other assets would not have escaped to Syria.
Of course if George I had not called off the first war at 100 hrs, there never would have been a second war in Iraq.
It made things tactically much more difficult in the beginning but Turkey was never a primary route for the Jihadis and insurgents. The Turks do a pretty darn good job of securing their own borders.
Even without their cooperation the take down was still the fastest ever and with a very low casualty rate for both sides compared to other invasions.
The Kurds did magnificent job of becoming our light infantry in the north and decimated the Republican Guard with the aid of US air power and Special Forces.
Definitely worth a repeat. Never leave the job half finished or you simply guarantee having to return at a much higher price.
We’re about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan.
You might want to go back and edit the quote then. 
Not sure what I did there. Weird.
I don’t agree with the Op 100% but the service to country went from defending freedom to a welfare program, when I joined I had no thought of Benefits or pay, I joined to wear the uniform, and do what I could to defend America.
The shit we pay ppl that serve is ridiculous. I sat next to a communist for a few years at work who is in the army who told me the only reason he joined is so that he could steal money from this shit hole country. Pay for his school. He is Mexican.
