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Iraq - was it worth it?


Awol

Was Iraq worth it?  

115 members have voted

  1. 1. Was Iraq worth it?

    • Yes
      27
    • No
      83
    • Iraq, where's that?
      6


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Here's an example in Afghanistan of the sheer simplicity and lunacy of these Labour nutzis.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...78,00.html

At Camp Price in Gereshk, British paratroop commanders are frustrated that despite being in place two months they are yet to offer any help to the local community. “Our credibility is at stake here,” said Major Paul Blair. “After a while people are going to start saying you came and promised to help us but what have you actually done?” The main problem is that the British mission is led by a “triumvirate” of military, Foreign Office and Department for International Development (DFID) personnel — and the latter is insisting any development must come through its auspices rather than the military.

Last Sunday I watched the triumvirate in action at a school in Gereshk where Colonel Charlie Knaggs, Susan Cronby from the Foreign Office and Wendy Phillips from DFID had all flown in for a meeting with local elders.

In a stunning indication of the enormous distance between thinking in London and reality on the ground, someone has come up with the idea of making a film to show locals. It comprises five minutes of the underwater BBC series Blue Planet, followed by a message from the governor of Helmand and the coalition forces, followed by five more minutes of Blue Planet.

The tribal leaders of Gereshk sat in utter bafflement as images of whales and dolphins were projected on the wall.

“Let’s turn this off shall we?” said Major Blair, looking embarrassed.

The same in Iraq. It's the labour party trying to force there ideology on to other parts of the world.

What the local village elders wanted to hear: We can help with the well/clinic/school

What they got: You need democracy, equality, womens' rights etc (with PowerPoint presentation including Blue Planet clips)

Gender the local village elders wanted briefing them: male

What they got: female

Style of brief the local village elders wanted: friendly, informative

What they got: harangue

Result: a lot of confused, upset and angry village elders

a lot of confused and embaressed soldiers

two Foreign and commonwealth Office/Department for International Development idiots wondering why everybody was staring at them

Another success for the Labour party and their complete lack of understanding of local norms, culture and customs.

To kill insurgencies or atleast isolate them you get the local populace on you're side, the labour loons failed to do this and is why Iraq went tits up and it's why Afghanistan has gone tits up.

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Hard to get how fathom how they had to absolutely destroy Iraq to kill Saddam. Surely a few precision strikes would have killed Saddam and those loyal to him. This would have paved way for the democratic movement, or even a new movement for the Iraqi people.

Basically bombed the country back a century, destabilizing it completely and lost plenty of soldiers for some imaginary rockets which never existed.

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Hard to get how fathom how they had to absolutely destroy Iraq to kill Saddam. Surely a few precision strikes would have killed Saddam and those loyal to him. This would have paved way for the democratic movement, or even a new movement for the Iraqi people.

Basically bombed the country back a century, destabilizing it completely and lost plenty of soldiers for some imaginary rockets which never existed.

The Iraq war was a disaster in my view, however the idea that US and UK forces 'destroyed' Iraq or bombed it back to the stone age are just plain wrong. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi's who have been killed since the invasion have been killed by other Iraqi's or jihadi volunteers. They were the ones suicide bombing markets, schools etc, not the coalition.

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How about lack of electricity? Faltering infrastructure?

Whether Iraqi's have been killed by other arabs isn't really what I'm getting at either. It's the destabilization of the entire country which I find a problem. The entire invasion should and could have been handled differently, which could have led to an easier aftermath.

Anyway, just how I see it.

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How about lack of electricity? Faltering infrastructure?

Yeah, like in Basra where the blokes were going around digging up the cables to get to the copper, complaining they couldn't get electricity then stealing it again, if it was replaced at all.

The lack of planning for the occupation was criminal and politically motivated in both the US and the UK. The Iraqi's themselves made the situation many times worse.

The yanks (state department) had the reconstruction plan all worked. However when the war began it was thrown in the bin by Bush and full control given to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, who then sealed Iraq's fate by stating "we don't do nation building" - as if there was ever going to be an alternative.

In the south our numbers were drawn down to ludicrously low levels immediately after the end of the war fighting phase because Blair was scared of UK forces taking casualties and generating bad publicity for a war he knew the public weren't really behind. This crippled the British forces ability to keep law and order - the yanks had disbanded all Iraqi police, army and government posts - leaving less than 10,000 soldiers to police the second biggest city in Iraq, the surrounding towns and cities and the Iranian border. Mission Impossible doesn't even begin to describe what they were asked to do.

The plan to follow up the military action with reconstruction in our sector never materialised because Clair Short had blocked DfID from liasing with the MoD, FCO and other agencies because of her personal feelings that the conflict might be illegal. Result, chaos.

To top it all Chancellor Gordon consistently blocked requests for more and better kit and men to stabilise the situation, even after the insurgency kicked of properly in 2004 - as well as reducing the helicopter budget by 1.5 billion, the reason we are now losing men unecessarily in Afghan.

This isn't meant to be a lecture but there is such a widspread lack of knowledge in this country as to what actually happened in Iraq and why it went wrong that it's worth explaining once in while.

Best solution would have been for Tony not to lie to the country, launch an illegal war and drag the international reputation of the UK through the dirt. I believe a few people had the same idea at the time.

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No it was just yet another bizarre socialist war.

Socialist?

For the last few years the rather dejected armed forces have referred to themselves as the Islington armed labour group. The extreme egalitarian policies they try to employ in Iraq, Afghanistan is causing many deaths on both sides. Socialism is probably the ideology in history most marred in war and death because of it's static idealogy.
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No it was just yet another bizarre socialist war.
Strangely enough the war was launched by the right wing nutters - all the faintly left wing or centrist governments were against it. When the right wing nutters were replaced in spain, australia and you might even argue the uk and usa - the tropps were withdrawn.
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Hard to get how fathom how they had to absolutely destroy Iraq to kill Saddam. Surely a few precision strikes would have killed Saddam and those loyal to him. This would have paved way for the democratic movement, or even a new movement for the Iraqi people.

Basically bombed the country back a century, destabilizing it completely and lost plenty of soldiers for some imaginary rockets which never existed.

The Iraq war was a disaster in my view, however the idea that US and UK forces 'destroyed' Iraq or bombed it back to the stone age are just plain wrong. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi's who have been killed since the invasion have been killed by other Iraqi's or jihadi volunteers. They were the ones suicide bombing markets, schools etc, not the coalition.
Bombing it back to the stone age maybe a misstatement, but the uk and usa govts bear responsibility for what followed. They dismantled the army, the police, judicial service and the system of govt. You could argue that they were unlucky, but when everyone, yes everyone told them that a land invasion would result in civil war then it would appear that their actions were malicious not just unfortunate. They spent three years denying there was civil war and spent the time since claiming it was getting better - yet still there is the equivalent of 2-3 7/7's each week in the country. Now that the troops have left, it's off the media radar - the west have done their oild deals and washed their hands of the aftermath.
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No it was just yet another bizarre socialist war.

Never heard Tony Blair described as a socialist let alone George Bush.

We seem to be very good at the initial fighting bit - shame we don't seem to have a clue as to what to afterward.

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Now that the troops have left, it's off the media radar - the west have done their oild deals and washed their hands of the aftermath.

You know I have a lot of respect for your opinions Gringo but I'm afraid the above is just plain wrong. Yes the media have backed off now that US troops have withdrawn from the cities, but the idea that they have washed their hands of Iraq just isn't factually correct - as the 130,000+ US soldiers still serving there can testify.

When tough decisions needed to be made Labour cut and ran; the yanks faced up to their mistakes, put more blokes in (surge 2007) and - compared to what had gone before - stabilised the country. Our strategic failure was essentially due to a government trying to prosecute a war through the prism of public opinion polls - a crass and naive road to go down - and also interfering in the military decision making process on the ground. Labour wanted to micro manage a situation they were in no way qualified to understand, resulting in a well documented cluster ****.

You know I agree with you that the whole thing was bollocks but it isn't as simplistic as you are making out.

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It was basically America's war, and for that I was against it.

So just because it was "America's war", you were against it?

Is that the only criteria you used to evaluate the pros and cons of the war?

I was completely against the war, because it was WRONG.

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No it was just yet another bizarre socialist war.

Socialist?

For the last few years the rather dejected armed forces have referred to themselves as the Islington armed labour group. The extreme egalitarian policies they try to employ in Iraq, Afghanistan is causing many deaths on both sides. Socialism is probably the ideology in history most marred in war and death because of it's static idealogy.

Even if all that were true, it wouldn't make the war in Iraq a 'socialist war'.

A 'socialist war' started by George W. Bush et al, supported by Tony Blair. That's either plain daft or one of the great conspiracy theories in our time.

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  • 1 year later...

I don't suppose this will surprise anyone, though it will have been denied vehemently ast the time, if any dribs and drabs of information about what was happening leaked out.

A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him."

The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".

A Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times this week that under its procedure, when reports of Iraqi abuse were received the US military "notifies the responsible government of Iraq agency or ministry for investigation and follow-up".

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.

The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

Iraq Body Count, the London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, says it has identified around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths from the data contained in the leaked war logs.

Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.

No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.

However, the US figures appear to be unreliable in respect of civilian deaths caused by their own military activities. For example, in Falluja, the site of two major urban battles in 2004, no civilian deaths are recorded. Yet Iraq Body Count monitors identified more than 1,200 civilians who died during the fighting.

Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers, plans to use material from the logs in court to try to force the UK to hold a public inquiry into the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians.

He also plans to sue the British government over its failure to stop the abuse and torture of detainees by Iraqi forces. The coalition's formal policy of not investigating such allegations is "simply not permissible", he says.

Shiner is already pursuing a series of legal actions for former detainees allegedly killed or tortured by British forces in Iraq.

WikiLeaks says it is posting online the entire set of 400,000 Iraq field reports – in defiance of the Pentagon.

The whistleblowing activists say they have deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals. They were accused by the US military of possibly having "blood on their hands" over the previous Afghan release by redacting too few names. But the military recently conceded that no harm had been identified.

Condemning this fresh leak, however, the Pentagon said: "This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment."

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I voted No. It's good that Hussein was deposed, but that should have been done first time.

This. Damn right-wingers in America can't get anything right.

Give it a rest. You think US policy is really driven by what flavour President is in the White House? Did Regan get it wrong when he spent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy? Are you happy Obama increased the US troops levels in Afghanistan? Do you think the Middle East would have reacted better if US and UK forces (no one else would have carried on) had driven to Baghdad in '91?

America looks after its own interests first and any national government worthy of the name does the same, but when some disaster strikes in the world who are the first country people scream for to go and help?

America isn't perfect but I'd rather live in a world where they are making the rules than China or the Russians, if you look at historical periods when the democracies were not ruling the roost it wasn't quite so rosy. I heard Singapore was a pretty unpleasant place to live under Japanese rule, remind me who defeated them again?

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I voted No. It's good that Hussein was deposed, but that should have been done first time.

This. Damn right-wingers in America can't get anything right.

Give it a rest. You think US policy is really driven by what flavour President is in the White House? Did Regan get it wrong when he spent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy? Are you happy Obama increased the US troops levels in Afghanistan? Do you think the Middle East would have reacted better if US and UK forces (no one else would have carried on) had driven to Baghdad in '91?

America looks after its own interests first and any national government worthy of the name does the same, but when some disaster strikes in the world who are the first country people scream for to go and help?

America isn't perfect but I'd rather live in a world where they are making the rules than China or the Russians, if you look at historical periods when the democracies were not ruling the roost it wasn't quite so rosy. I heard Singapore was a pretty unpleasant place to live under Japanese rule, remind me who defeated them again?

Sorry, I'm talking about the Bushes, sorry for the overgeneralisation.

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