How has the Iraq war made the United States more secure?

Question

Seriously. How has it made us more secure, or in a better dipomatic situation?

I do know that:
-- It has cost nearly 2,540 American lives.
-- It has cost $920 (and counting) for every American citizen -- man, woman and child.
-- It has alienated our allies.
-- It has galvanized our enemies.
-- Extreme clerics and Mullahs will us the ivasion of a Muslim nation as propoganda to get new terror recruits.
-- It has increased anti-American sentiment to unprecedented levels.
-- It has not caught the people responsible for 9/11.

But what has it done to make our nation better off? Sure Hussein was an eveil tyrant. Does that mean we ignore the UN and bomb every evil tyrant in the world?

Please, can a pro-war person tell me why we should have waged this war. Don't tell me it's because Hussein "broke resolutions." Breaking resolutions is not the basis for war. That's still a juncture where you use diplomacy.

Answer 1

Important History Lesson, from Raymond S. Kraft, a
California lawyer, that sheds light on the Big Picture!

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already under the Nazi heel.

America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its military after WWI and throughout the depression, at the outbreak of WWII there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England that was the property of Belgium and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler - actually, Belgium surrendered one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day anyway just to prove they could. Britain had been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinkin g the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.

Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of th em from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a million.

Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war.

I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And we are at another one.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-ed ucated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere. And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.
Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist.

Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for f ourteen years before America joined it. It officially ended in 194 5 - a 17 year war - and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again ... a 27- year war.

World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP - adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars, WWII cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater - a world now dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 60 minute TV shows and 2-hour movies in which everything comes out okay.

The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain,and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless we prevent them. Or somebody does.

We have four options

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

4. Or we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

Yes, the Jihadis say that they look forward to an Islamic America. If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

We can be defeatist peace-activists as anti-war types seem to be, and concede, surrender, to the Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against them.

The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

In the 20th century, it was Western democracy vs. communism, and before that Western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy vs. German Imperialism. Western democracy won, three times, but it wasn't cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against German Imperialism (WWI), Nazi Imperialism (WWII), and communist imperialism (the 40-year Cold War that included the Vietnam Battle, commonly called the Vietnam War, but itself a major battle in a larger war) covered almost the entire century.

The first major war of the 21st Century is the war between Western Judeo/Christian Civilization and Wahhabi Islam. It may last a few more years, or most of this century. It will last until the Wahhabi branch of Islam fades away, or gives up its ambitions for regional and global dominance and Jihad, or until Western Civilization gives in to the Jihad.

It will take time. It will not go with no hitches. This is not TV.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken a little more than 2,200 KIA in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 Killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

But the stakes are at least as high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms; or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

I do not understand why the American Left does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.

300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem? The US population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let's multiply 300,000 by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies in mass graves in America because of George Bush? Would you hope for another country to help liberate America?

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate where it's safe, in America.

Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places in the world that really need peace activism the most?

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.

If the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism. Everywhere the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism. And American Liberals just don't get it.

Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and lawyer living in Northern California. Please consider passing along copies of this to students in high school, college and university as it contains information about the American past that is very meaningful TODAY - - history about America that very likely is completely unknown by them (and their instructors, too). By being denied the facts and truth of our history, they are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking through the issues of today

Answer 2

I think that Makeshift has got it pretty much right with a few minor historical innacuracies (Germany declared war on the USA the day after Pearl Harbor, not the other way round).

I also see that there are silly people again referring to the fact that Bush's daughters are not in Iraq.

Firstly it is law under your constitution that a serving presidents children cannot serve in a war zone.

Secondly you have no draft so it is entirely their choice whether they go into the military or not, and all the people who are in Iraq and Afghanistan willingly volunteered for a job where they could carry a gun and get shot at. No-one forced them.

Once any child is of military age their parents can neither stop them or force them into going into the military.

The argument is silly.

Finally, both Iraq and Afghanistan is proving to be a magnet for the most fanatical terrorists to come and wage their Jihad.

Is'nt it better that they face up against our highly trained and well equipped war fighting troops 7,000 miles away where we are beating them 500:1 or would it be better if they were living in downtown Detroit or New York or London planning to blow up somebodys commuter train?

My preference is to let my army fight them somewhere else. Either that or let me take an M16 on the subway to work so that at least I can fight back when they bring the terror back to my streets.

Answer 3

It has been a disaster, as we were better off with a secular dictator in Iraq. All the explanations above have been proven wrong now. The combination of firing the Iraqi army, making sure any former Bathist's could not get a job; plus our surge which ethnically cleansed Bagdad, helped create ISIS. Once we put in a Shia government and allowed them to persecute their former masters, it created the situation we have today. We radicalize the Sunni population. We repeated the same mistake in Syria. We should have supported Assad, and helped him crush the Islamic rebellion there. Instead, we gave the Islamists a safe haven in Syria, and now you have ISIS. All very predictable, that Iraq would end up in three parts. We should have either stuck with Saddam, a natural enemy of Al Quida, or broken Iraq up on our terms. Now we are doing it on ISIS's terms. It is a joke to think we are safer now, as we are not. We are just broke, and we radicalized much of the Mid East. We will make the same mistake in Syria.

Answer 4

Contrary to democrat's belief now (not 4-10 years ago - they all viewed him a threat then, but since they can get votes, they sell out today), Saddam was a destabilizing force in the Middle East, he support suicide bombers, and Al Queda was in Iraq. He also made threats on the United States.

And, actually breaking resolutions was a basis for the war. Evidently, you haven't read Resolution 1441 which called for action if he didn't comply, and he didn't. WMD were found that he did not destroy. Granted, they were older, but they did exist, and he didn't destroy them.

He signed cease-fire at the end of the first gulf war and didn't honor it. He fired on our aircraft in the no-fly-zone while we were protecting those that he terrorized.

We must protect the homeland first, and we ARE fighting terrorists that want to kill us. That's why we are more secure. We can have an all-out debate about attacking a country that didn't attack us, and this is an "illegal war" because of this, but when did Kosovo ever attack us? When did Germany attack us during WWII? Afghanistan didn't attack us, Taliban didn't, Al-Queda did, but their associations made them guilty.

Saddam was in association with many others, and if people can't recognize him as one of the biggest terrorizers since Hitler, then someone needs a labotomy because their brain is fried and/or they have alzheimers.

Answer 5

I know that:

1. People don't just join the military for college tuition money. The military exists to defend our interests in the world, and the great people who join know that they may be called to action when they do.

2. Fighting wars isn't cheap, and we shouldn't just run away because it may cost money.

3. Our allies (with the exception of the UK) spend almost nothing on their military because they know we will jump to their defense. Knowing that they are safe makes it easy for them to be critical (See "Canada")

4. Our "enemies" aren't going to stop attacking us if we try to negotiate. There is no middle ground. The only way to stop a terrorist is to kill him or her.

5. See 4.

6. See 3.

7. The upper-level people in Al-Qaida have admitted that our operations in Iraq and elsewhere have made it more difficult for them to operate. We learned this when we killed Zarq. and found his journals, but the liberal media spent about 1 day on his journals because they want us to fail.

We did get UN authorization before the war, we also got approval from both houses of Congress (including Democrats), and Bush even gave Hussein and his sons a chance to leave Iraq and live in exile to avoid war. Do you not remember all of those trucks hauling *** out of Iraq while Clinton's inspectors sat outside waiting to get in?

I don't know why I bother, you'll never listen, and you sure won't give me best answer.

Answer 6

I think this is what happend! Bush 1st said that Sadam had nuclear weapons and he was mistreating his people, killing, torturing etc. We the good guys had to go there and bomb the hell out of that country so we could kill one man. That man is still alive and over 100,000 Iraqi civillians have died at our military and Bush's hands. The soilders were supposed to protect the people and set order. Our government has caused distruction and death beyond anything that Sadam could have dreamed of. Iraqi people do not want USA on their soil, wonder why! our soilders under the guidance of higher ups have raped, beaten, and killed thousands of children and women. Example: In march several soilders spotted a young Iraqi girl and planned the crime, first they shot the father, mother and younger sister then they raped the teenage girl and burned her after shooting her several times. And this is being called a casualty of war. And the world is supposed to love us. If the right wing movement and evangilistic christians followed a fraction of the teaching of Jesus Christ and his kindness and mercy they would never support the horror in Iraq. I do not know how they can call themselves Christian.

Answer 7

Ok, lets start by it left terrorists know that we will not tolerate the crap
2 we just made an allie out of Iraq by staying and helping the people gain the freedom that they deserve
3 we have wiped out how many top terrorist leaders?????
4 If you're actually asking this question than you should do a little more research on the topic

Answer 8

Terrorists plot to attack us and train and gather money... but we went to middle east and now they rush to attack us in Iraq. We are not fighting the Iraqi people, or Muslims, or for Oil. That is ignorant babble~!

When they can attack our Military they are dying, instead of slaughtering civilians. True, some of our people die, but for a worthy cause, NO ONE is FORCED to join the Military, are you aware of that?

As they die fighting our soldiers, their numbers dwindle, they lack the resources to attack us at home, and we uncover their plans to attempt to do so.

If Bush were a smarter man, you would see what a great battle we are fighting, how we are winning the war against Terror! It's a shame that we have such a dumb president who makes the world hate us *sighs*

Answer 9

There's no way we are more secure since sending our troops to Iraq. Any idiot could see we have more problems at home because of Iraq. Look at whats its done to our economy, Gas prices, Interest rates, not counting the expenses we incurred in rebuilding Iraq. Americans are dieing for and because of George Bush. I'm proud of our soldiers and i feel very sorry they have be so misused.

Answer 10

It has given us safety RIGHT HERE for the here and NOW, for US and OUR FAMILIES. The terrorists from over there, BROUGHT IT HERE, with the hopes of starting it here, and finishing us here. They are all about Americans DYING. I am thankful, grateful, and forever in debt to those soldiers who are risking their lives over there, so that we may STAY secure here. Sure, it is inevitable that people will die in war, and that includes our men and women who CHOSE to serve in that manner. WE don't like it, but it's NORMAL, for WAR. Who cares about the evil men like Hussein and Ben Ladin...they are doomed to a devil's hell anyway....BUT, thank GOD that we had a President smart enough to see to it that they could NOT have their war HERE on OUR SOIL. I praise God for the fact that we aren't cooped up in our homes right now, scared straight, that we may be the next ones dying, b/c the war came HERE to US.

Answer 11

It hasn't.....Bush tried to make the conection between 9/11 and Iraq.....there is no connection.

Insurgents came in to Iraq AFTER the US invaded...the US created the insurgency.

Now Bush has bigger problems: immigration, gaza, North Korea Iran, Afghanistan, and of course OSAMA who Bush has forgotten about, and we're stuck in Iraq because of Bush....over 2500 young US soldiers dead, over 20,000 injured, and spent nearly HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS.....he sucks....