where did we go wrong in Iraq?

Question

Years ago, I supported the invasion of Iraq -- to my mind, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, guilty of mass murder, just like Hitler. But years on, the Iraq war had not played out like WWII. What am I missing in my thinking? I thought taking out Saddam would be like taking out Hitler. But I'm missing something... can you point me in the direction of some websites that have info on this topic? Thanks.

Answer 1

Once Saddam was out of power we had no plan for how to replace him. We just sort of let it collapse into chaos with no single person or group in charge. No police or law enforcement to keep it safe as a new government was put into place.

Answer 2

The War in Iraq went wrong from the moment we took Baghdad. The people rejoiced that Saddam Hussein was out of power and they rejoiced in the streets. Then things went all wrong.

We did not have enough troops to police the territory, and people looted businesses, looted museums, looted and then crime abounded. No one was left to serve as police, or government, or anything. There was no services, etc.. and the people blamed the American military.

Insurgencies were springing up. At first most of them were associated with Sunni (Saddam Hussein) resistance, but later there was plain sectarian violence, Sunni, Shia and Kurds all fighting eachother for power. Then Islamic militants saw a power vacuum and an opportunity to take over the country.

The strategy of the Islamic militants was to make the infidel invaders the target of their scorn. If they could win the minds and hearts of the general population then they would win the battle for Iraq. This is continuing today.

Where did we go wrong? America underestimated the number of troops necessary to restore order. America over estimated the support they would get from the Iraqi people. America underestimated the difficulty it would experience in getting the various Iraqi fractions to work together for a common good. America paid no attention to religion in the area as a force to be used against them. In short, the intelligence and planning for this war was just wrong.

Answer 3

WW2 involved thousands of men & women from many Nations joining together to defeat a fascist dictator and his gang, in Europe, and to end the domination of the Japanese Empire in Asia and the Pacific..

Nobody took out Hitler, he committed suicide rather than face the music, the combatants of all the Allied Forces in WW2 were fighting an enemy who wore a uniform and who militaryintelligence were able to track and locate.

With regards the Iraqi conflict only a small number of countries bothered to turn up for the show, and a few of those were very quick to be pulled out by their political masters in the relevant home countries when they saw that it was not going to be a cakewalk.

The enemy is mostly ex-"Saddam Insane" Republican Guards and Muslim Fundamentalists who do not wear a uniform and who specialize in sneak attacks from amongst the civilian population, even against the civilian population, these methods are being used to destabilize and create fear amongst the local population to sway them into believing that the real enemy is the US and Allied Forces.

People (including the moderate Muslim's) are slow to realize that the Fundamentalist have only one agenda, the complete domination of the world, all people dancing along to the sound of their drum, no pity or forgiveness will be shown to any person including their own secular Muslim brothers, if you fail to dance instep with them, then you will dance on the end of a rope.

Their dream is to turn Civilization back a thousands years to control and dominate, to wipe out any other form of religious belief or thought that contradicts their perverted view of the world, the will restrict the rights of women, to have any say in family life, or in fact to have any rights at all, women are mere chattels to be traded for favors, like cattle and ship.

At some point in the world a stand has to be made and that time should be now, do you really think if the Americans and their Allies were to leave now, it would all be over? Not a chance, the terrorist attacks will only escalate, and someday they will use the dirty bombs or Chemical weapons its only a matter of time.

And we know from the Fundamentalists past history they don't care about any collateral damage they inflict!!!

Answer 4

That is a very nobel reason for wanting to remove someone from power, but in the real world men like Hussein are common, they abuse their power and their people for their own benifit. We should have never invaded Iraq, period. From the word go I knew there was no weapons there, if there were Hussein would have used them or they were destroyed in the embargo and bombings carried out during the Clinton administration. At the very least the US should have waited for the UN inspectors to finish. Hussein's Iraq was never a threat to the US or any of their neighbors, Hussein couldn't even control the Kurdish areas to the North, how is it Iraq is a threat when Hussein couldn't even control the whole of his country. It was a flawed hypothisis from the get go.
I'm glad you have seen the light. It makes me hopeful that the US can come together and get our troops out of Iraq and let the Iraqis decide their own future.
Peace

Answer 5

If you thought it was going to play out like WW II, then that's where your problem is. The third-generation war went much better and was over in a matter of weeks. WW II was a transitional war with second- and third-generation aspects that lasted years.
The problems with Iraq started with the timing. We went in "with the army we had," to paraphrase Rumsfeld, and we'd almost completely divested our military of the civil affairs people we needed, had woefully inadequate military police, and the list goes on. Even security functions traditionally done by USMC had been outsourced for years to outfits like Blackwater. Each for its own reasons, the Republicans, the Democrats and the Pentagon have a long-standing tradition of not wanting to prepare for or fight a fourth-generation war. The initial response of the administration was to deny that there was one, and operations were handled in an old-fashioned way by non-experts, because that's what we had. It's a matter of the old "if all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails" scenario.
Actually, though, in fourth-generation warfare terms, things haven't really gone so badly. The time-lines are always in decades, and the political process in Iraq must progress at its pace, with the military action subordinate to the politics.
William Lind, the originator of the concept of fourth-generation war, is one you should google. I'd also recommend Col. T.X.Hammes' book, "The Sling and the Stone."

Answer 6

The biggest problem with equating Iraq and WW2 is that Saddam, for the most part kept to himself. He was not intent on gaining control of the middle east after Desert Storm. He was mainly concerned with his own power base at home.
In the case of Iraqi Freedom the US took on the role of the aggressor. This is not the same as aggresively fighting a mad man who had already conquered continental Europe and was obviously hungry for more.

Answer 7

When we started a war that MOST of our allies were against and didn't have a clear cut objective to give to our troops. War is about the achievement of milestones. At which milestone do our troops know they have achieved absolute victory in Iraq and can look forward to coming home, just like their Grandfathers did when they shook hands with the Red Army in Berlin in 1945? There are none, ...because there is no plan of any kind to tell them or the rest of the world what our final objective is in Iraq; there never has been and there never will be. But God bless every one of them, ...they still stay, ...and they fight, ...and they die, ...all for a people who seem like they could care less about freedom.

Answer 8

who says USA made the wrong decision by going there? taking out Hitler was different because the Germans were lovers of democracy and freedom since they have had it long before Hitler came to power. however never in the history of any Arab nation there has been any democracy, the word doesn't have any meaning to them. so they translate freedom as a chance to get money and power because it is not often they get these chances. often their leaders rip off their balls for saying that they were dictators. however not all is bad in Iraq, the people we went to Iraq for are still happy that we went there but their voices are not heard because only bombing and killing makes news. in the Kurdistan region not a single US troop has ever been killed. so this shows that even if it was only for them it was worth it, the Arabs can learn from them. the trouble is not the people of Iraq, its the neighboring countries outside Iraq. ask any person that is from Iraq they will say they don't want any violent. but Iran, Syria, Jourdan, Turkey etc.. are all countries that have interest at keeping US pinned down in Iraq, so they send their people to keep the unrest going. what would the people of US say if US government declared war on all of them? there is no problem with a US citizen saying no to their leaders, but there is everything wrong with saying our interests are not worth fighting for. there are non US citizens that fight for our interest in Kurdistan and Afghanistan, if we didn't fight for them we wouldn't be US.

Answer 9

When Hitler was removed--by his own hand, there were no cockroaches hiding in the woodwork ready to start a 4th Reich.

Hitler attempted to make government the religion. For the last 1400 years in the Middle East the religion has been the government. We have seen some Muslim clerics trying to carve out their own little Husseindoms. And they use the same terror tactics Hussein did.

I think nobody really understood how tenacious these maggots would be. Perhaps nobody knew they were there. They were able to stay hidden from Hussein... or they'd be dead. He'd not have stood for anybody harboring the thought of usurping his power and authority.

These clerics backed by foreign invaders have been able to stir up some of the people with this "holy war" thing. We thought that when Hussein was out of the way, the people would just form their own government , thank us for our help, and we'd be out of there.

In Iraq, we're no longer fighting a government. That fight is over and the victory won. Now we find ourselves having to fight 1400 years of dogma. We also seem to be fighting against a thousand years of anger resulting from the Crusades.

The Iraqi people, perhaps the Muslims n the Middle East in general, are not stupid. They have been kept ignorant. The clerics have been n charge of what is true, what is false, what is good, what is bad. Then along comes technology. People begin to see for themselves what is true and what is not. Some of it conflicts with the religious dogma. Naturally some of the less flexible clerics feel threatened. Nobody like to be proved a liar.

The way I understand it, two sects, Sunni and Taliban. seem to believe that it's ok to kill other Muslims (not so according to the Qur'an) if they disagree with you. These "righteous" zealots get around the Qur'an by condemning as non-Muslim those who disagree with them... in much the same way Christian religious sects condemn to hell anybody who disagrees with them. The difference is that, by and large, Christians are not generally fanatical enough to hasten the reality of that condemnation. Muslim clerics have their followers so keyed up that they'll do anything.

These clerics (probably only a very few of them) do not want Iraq to be country with a central government. They would probably rather have a feudal system of government in which the feudal lords (clerics) kick the poop out each other during the week and on holy days, meet peaceably, tell war stories, and try to form alliances.

Unfortunately, this is hindsight. Knowing what we know now, we might have tried a different approach, but it's too late for that now.

Protesters vomit "They should have known." How? The Iraqi people... even if they knew... wouldn't talk for fear of Hussein. The maggots rotting in the woodwork wouldn't talk... for the same reason. What about our "experts" with Ph.Ds in Middle East culture? They know nothing but what they've learned from books written by professors who knew nothing but what they learned from books written by people who knew nothing.....

Protesters vomit, "Bring the boys home now." As usual protesters demonstrate their stupidity... and their anti-American feelings. If we could pull every troop out of Iraq today, three things would happen. (1) The cockroaches would declare a victory. Granted it was given them by the American protesters, but they'd claim a military victory. They would say, "We drove the infidels from our land. Clearly this is so. We are here. They are not." (2) They would begin their reign of terror. "Remember what we were able to do to you when the US was here to protect you? Well they're not here now..." (3) The lives lost in Iraq would simply be flushed down the toilet. These men an women died to help a country become free. By pulling out and allowing another Husseindom to take over, they will have died for nothing.

Protesters vomit, "Diplomacy. Give it a chance." We tried that for over 10 years. Hussein laughed in our face. Even some of our supposed allies broke the UN-imposed sanctions against him.

Protesters vomit, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" Well, we knew he had them... he got some from us. He used some of them against the Kurds. We knew he wanted more... and more powerful. We believed he was working on chemical or biological weapons.

There was a threat. Every time Hussein launched a missile, Israel dove for their safe rooms. Southern Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia were even concerned. He held much larger countries at bay with the threat. Syria and Iran would love to get their hooks into Iraqi oil... why do you think they're supplying the insurgents?

Where are they? Nobody knows. Perhaps they have become inert over the years and are rusting away in some bunker buried in the sand. The point is that enough people believed he had them, and knew he had the willingness to use them, that there was a threat.

If somebody breaks into your house and you perceive a threat to your life, you have the right to use whatever means to stop the intruder... whether he had a weapon or not. Some lame- attorney may try to argue that he didn't have a weapon, or that he was only kidding, or that he had his fingers crossed. Doesn't make any difference... there was a perceived threat.

So it was with Hussein.

Protesters vomit, "He didn't have the delivery system to get a weapon to the US." Here's how... put a dirty bomb in a suitcase and sneak across the Mexican border. Who knows... for irradiating the San Francisco Bay area, we might make the guy a citizen.

Protesters vomit, "Hussein had noting to do with Al-Quaeda." Not even going there. There are so many links they were almost in bed together.

Answer 10

upon toppling the govt we disbanded the republican guard. They were out of a job and joined the insurgency, we should have kept the army of Iraq together and made them police their own. When the army was disbanded America was bound to the safety of the Iraqi people until a new govt and police forces could be established.

In a nutshell, the white house overestimated what the capabilities of the US military were and hence we are stuck in this God-forsaken debacle where we are only there because we can't leave and we cant leave because we went in. And now every soldier that dies is seen as a reason to stay and not a reason to come home. Its a Vietnam mindset that if 5,000 die you have to send 10,000 to go fight and die so the first 5,00 don't die in vein, and then you have to send 20,00 so the 10,000 wont die in vein and well you get the picture.