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The Shiites were already there--they make up the majority in Iraq. It was another incomprehensible measure of White House shortsightedness not to realize that an honest election in Iraq would result in a Shiite government.
What really caused the military problem was not the Shiites but the cloud of unattached Sunni fighters that had been growing since the Soviets left Afghanistan.
No...because my real question was whether that was perception or real?
If "conservatives and republicans" were that easy to fool with bigly words, would y'all have voted for Ralph Nader who claimed the first thing he was gonna do was to cut the military budget in 1/2?
I mean, it's hard to square Flynn, Bolton and the rest of the motley crew with "peace".
Your question is flawed, because you assume that the intervention question exists in a vacuum. I cannot speak for everyone, but I have long been anti-war and anti-interventionist and the fact that Trump supported such a position, in combination with other positions is why I support him.
Having a few tanks isn't the problem, wanting a bigger parade then France or North Korea is, just because his ego can't handle it. If you think about it, our fleet of Aircraft Carriers and Nuclear Submarines won't fit in a parade so we got everybody beat.
61% of Republicans still believe the Irag War was the right move because they are stupid like Trump said, at least he got something right. And they still follow him, stupid.
I have a question for conservatives here. I know you consider yourselves free thinkers, and believe that liberals are not. You see yourselves as objective viewers of fact, putting information above emotion. But I read this statistic today: 61% of Republicans believe starting the Iraq War was the right decision. That's compared to 27% of Democrats.
This is after finding out that the intelligence about WMD was wrong, after Trump campaigned against the Iraq War, and after GWB, Colin Powell, and John McCain have said that it was a mistake.
How is it that self identified Republicans are so utterly susceptible to propaganda that 17 years after "Freedom Fries" and "With us or against us" and "Mission Accomplished" almost 2/3 of you still believe the war was the right thing to do?
Why do "free thinkers" support a war just because politicians wave a flag and use the buzzword "freedom", and continue to support the war 15 years later?
Iraq was an open breeding and training ground for radicals around the Mideast.....Saddam had over 20 billion in cash to play with......he and his two worthless kids were nut jobs.......WMD could have been shoveled onto a 747 and flown out before anything was found.......lots of reasons to have Saddam gone, but we forgot the vacuum left after we croaked him.........and no matter what we do over there Islam will hate the lifestyle of the west until we eradicate them or they get us............
Iraq was an open breeding and training ground for radicals around the Mideast.....Saddam had over 20 billion in cash to play with......he and his two worthless kids were nut jobs......
That would be Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.
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.WMD could have been shoveled onto a 747 and flown out before anything was found..
No. WMD can't be manufactured and hidden. We know 'way too much all about it. Iraq simply were no stockpiles of usable WMD. All they had were old crap from the 80s that was buried because there was no way to destroy it.
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.....lots of reasons to have Saddam gone, but we forgot the vacuum left after we croaked him...
It wasn't "forgotten." During the early 90s I read three different "after Saddam" intelligence assessments, and they all accurately predicted exactly what happened. We--that is, the working Iraq analyst in the intelligence community and the State Department--knew exactly what was going to happen. We saw it happen in Yugoslavia, we knew it was going to happen in Iraq.
Your question is flawed, because you assume that the intervention question exists in a vacuum. I cannot speak for everyone, but I have long been anti-war and anti-interventionist and the fact that Trump supported such a position, in combination with other positions is why I support him.
Just looking at the headlines today.....
"Administration lays broad legal grounds for military strike on Iran"
This would be the Trump administration..and it would be a country that we had a peace treaty with.
You are more than welcome to fool yourself, but the current admin (which isn't even staffed correctly to look at stuff like this) could mistakenly walk into more decades of war with talk like this.
Both of us will be glad if they don't - but any way you look at it, the world is not getting more stable due to the Great Peacemaker Trump. There is no policy and there is no plan. If we get away without war it will be plain luck....since, again, there isn't even a Sec. of Defense and Tucker Carlson is giving Trump advice.
Note - this answers the OP. The Majority of Republicans like to see war. I am speaking in the present day...as well as in the days of GWB.
I have a question for conservatives here. I know you consider yourselves free thinkers, and believe that liberals are not. You see yourselves as objective viewers of fact, putting information above emotion. But I read this statistic today: 61% of Republicans believe starting the Iraq War was the right decision. That's compared to 27% of Democrats.
This is after finding out that the intelligence about WMD was wrong, after Trump campaigned against the Iraq War, and after GWB, Colin Powell, and John McCain have said that it was a mistake.
How is it that self identified Republicans are so utterly susceptible to propaganda that 17 years after "Freedom Fries" and "With us or against us" and "Mission Accomplished" almost 2/3 of you still believe the war was the right thing to do?
Why do "free thinkers" support a war just because politicians wave a flag and use the buzzword "freedom", and continue to support the war 15 years later?
Why did democrats support slavery and instigate a civil war? Difference of opinion.
Trump, the POTUS you hate, was opposed to the Iraq War, while Biden and Clinton voted for it. Since libs cannot face facts, they attempt to revise history to make themselves feel better about their poor heritage.
I am a conservative and disagreed with the Iraq and Afghan Wars. What should we have done?
1. Afghanistan- used fuel air bombs on troop concentrations, drones for specific strikes, and made it the play ground for our special forces. I would never have committed ground troops or attempted to occupy it. Afghanistan has been problematic for centuries, and will continue to be so.
2. Iraq- SUPPORT Sadaam and use him as a foil against the Iranians. Our real enemy in the Gulf has been Iran. Iraq was Iran's natural enemy and eliminating Hussein allowed the Iranians to occupy a power vacuum in the Gulf. Keep the two dictatorships fighting each other and keep them occupied.
WMD could have been shoveled onto a 747 and flown out before anything was found...
No. Don't be silly. Iraq's military was depleted, but they were professionals. If you have WMD, you have officers thinking long and hard on how to use them, when to use them, what units will be firing them, moving them, guarding them. And they write this sort of thing down, because that's what a plan is. Strategic assets aren't kept in a vault and unlocked on the day they're being used. That's ignoring the fact that the production facilities would be around, because WMD doesn't come with an unlimited shelf life. Nothing was found. No evidence was found.
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lots of reasons to have Saddam gone, but we forgot the vacuum left after we croaked him...
You didn't forget, you were warned - you just decided to ignore the warnings. Even long-time allies like Germany and France called it out as a problem. But noooo, Uncle Sam had gotten it into his head that he wanted to jam his wedding tackle into the garbage grinder and no lousy furriners was going to tell him otherwise. As it happened, the critics were 100% right, anyone with a career to salvage ditched the Iraqi occupation project, and the outcome was hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, a Shia government right next to Iran, the largest Christian exodus in modern time and Abu Ghraib entering the vernacular as shorthand for brutality. Oh, and Halliburton and Black Water (or whatever the mercenaries call themselves) making out like bandits.
Why did democrats support slavery and instigate a civil war? Difference of opinion.
I am a conservative and disagreed with the Iraq and Afghan Wars. What should we have done?
.
It's truly amazing how so many conservatives here say they disagreed.
What Trump says now.....since he had no votes...means nothing. As a guy who wanted to do business with Arabs, he wouldn't be - in general - for blowing the place up.
BUT, one would think you'd do your homework as to what he claimed publicly.
"Donald Trump stated falsely in Sunday night’s debate that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. He supported it.
Months before the 2003 U.S. invasion, Trump told shock-jock Howard Stern that he supported the invasion.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded, when asked in September 2002 whether he supported invading Iraq. “I wish the first time we'd done it right"
So, not only did he "guess so" that he supported the latest war, but he added that he supported the earlier one.
Do I think you will change what you say next time about this? Frankly, no. But those are the facts.
If as many "conservatives" as here opposed the war, I never met a one of them until after about 2005.
The Takeaway here is that conversatives always know how to do the right thing - years after the horse has left the barn due to them opening the door and luring it out.
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