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Ten years ago (May 1, 2003), President George W. Bush gave a speech from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq:
• 14 members of a Sunni "anti-al Qaeda" militia were killed near Fallujah while collecting their salaries in a suicide bomb/mortar attack.
• An IED in Baji killed four local policemen.
• Three Iraqi soldiers were killed after their vehicle hit an IED near Fallujah.
• Three civilians died in a car-bombing in Husseiniya, directly northeast of Baghdad.
• A car bomb near Ramadi killed two local policemen.
And this is after a rough week even by Iraqi standards, with a near-rebellion in the Sunni north leaving over 200 dead in several cities, and many unresolved security issues.
For those who would like to "intervene" somehow in Syria, it might be worth remembering that Iraq's sectarian mix is actually fairly simple compared to the Syrian emulsion. Iraq mainly consists of Shia in the south and center of the country and Sunnis in the north and west. The Kurdish north is mainly Sunni, but has its own interests. There are also an array of largely powerless religious minorities such as Christians, Yazidis, and Mandeans.
Compare that to Syria, where the mainly Sunni-led rebellion is running into all kinds of trouble trying to take over areas populated mainly by "regular" Shia, Alawites (usually considered a Shia branch, and associated with Syria's ruling clique), Druze, Sunni Kurds (who - as in Iraq - have their own interests apart from non-Kurdish Sunnis), and the various Christian sects.
Before beginning a "mission," it might be wise to remember previous experiences in the region...
Darn, that tired adage is the title of the thread.
Not really sure what you mean. History is history; you can't change the specific historical figures involved in it. The point, though, is a cautionary one - plunging into wars in the Mideast has a lengthy, mostly unhappy history for the US. Iraq is one example, but we could also go back to the Lebanon intervention of late 1982 to early 1984. Something to remember as the Syria "debate" continues to roil.
Ten years ago (May 1, 2003), President George W. Bush gave a speech from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq:
• 14 members of a Sunni "anti-al Qaeda" militia were killed near Fallujah while collecting their salaries in a suicide bomb/mortar attack.
• An IED in Baji killed four local policemen.
• Three Iraqi soldiers were killed after their vehicle hit an IED near Fallujah.
• Three civilians died in a car-bombing in Husseiniya, directly northeast of Baghdad.
• A car bomb near Ramadi killed two local policemen.
And this is after a rough week even by Iraqi standards, with a near-rebellion in the Sunni north leaving over 200 dead in several cities, and many unresolved security issues.
For those who would like to "intervene" somehow in Syria, it might be worth remembering that Iraq's sectarian mix is actually fairly simple compared to the Syrian emulsion. Iraq mainly consists of Shia in the south and center of the country and Sunnis in the north and west. The Kurdish north is mainly Sunni, but has its own interests. There are also an array of largely powerless religious minorities such as Christians, Yazidis, and Mandeans.
Compare that to Syria, where the mainly Sunni-led rebellion is running into all kinds of trouble trying to take over areas populated mainly by "regular" Shia, Alawites (usually considered a Shia branch, and associated with Syria's ruling clique), Druze, Sunni Kurds (who - as in Iraq - have their own interests apart from non-Kurdish Sunnis), and the various Christian sects.
Before beginning a "mission," it might be wise to remember previous experiences in the region...
And I thought everything was OK in Iraq. Isn't that why Obama pulled out?
That kind of presumes that staying in Iraq for a longer period of time would have avoided these issues. How would you erase a Sunni-Shia resource/government control battle with 20 or 30 or 50 years of occupation as opposed to nine? It's one of those flaws that seems built into the nature of the country itself.
Not really sure what you mean. History is history; you can't change the specific historical figures involved in it. The point, though, is a cautionary one - plunging into wars in the Mideast has a lengthy, mostly unhappy history for the US. Iraq is one example, but we could also go back to the Lebanon intervention of late 1982 to early 1984. Something to remember as the Syria "debate" continues to roil.
...or perhaps to the escalation of the Afghanistan war in 2009 and beyond?
Sure. I think most observers regard the Afghan "surge" as an expensive way to enforce a stalemate, if not an outright failure. Other interventions have the potential to go haywire if the level of involvement is increased. Syria has more potential than most due to the complexities of its civil war, and the stridence of the pro-interventionists. If they had their way, we'd have been in Syria since early last year at the latest.
It's good to remind them now and then of just how badly these things can go, even if they seem promising at first.
"Mission Accomplished" is a good example of that because things did indeed look okay at that moment... but not for much longer. The coalition fatality numbers tell the story:
Coalition fatalities as of May 1, 2003:
United States - 140
United Kingdom - 33
Total - 173
Coalition fatalities between May 2, 2003 and November 2011 (official US withdrawal date):
United States - 4,345
United Kingdom - 146
Italy - 33
Poland - 23
Ukraine - 18
Bulgaria - 13
Spain - 11
Denmark - 7
El Salvador - 5
Georgia - 5
Slovakia - 4
Latvia - 3
Romania - 3
Australia - 2
Estonia - 2
Netherlands - 2
Thailand - 2
Azerbaijan - 1
Czech Republic - 1
Fiji - 1
Hungary - 1
Kazakhstan - 1
South Korea - 1
Total - 4,630
Grand total - 4,803
After a promising start, it turns out that the fatalities up to "Mission Accomplished" were only 3.6% of the eventual total. Something to remember when anyone of either party starts agitating for America to "do something" in Syria or elsewhere.
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