Book Review: The Terrorists of Iraq 270
benrothke writes: The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting random typewriter keys for an infinite amount of time will eventually be able to create the complete works of Shakespeare. Various scientists such as Nobel laureate Arno Penzias have shown how the theorem is mathematically impossible. Using that metaphor, if you took every member of United States Congress and House of Representatives and wrote their collected wisdom on Iraq, it's unlikely they could equal the astuteness of even a single chapter of author Malcolm W. Nance in The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003-2014. It's Nance's overwhelming real-world experiential knowledge of the subject, language, culture, tribal affiliations and more which make this the overwhelming definitive book on the subject. Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
Nance is a career intelligence officer, combat veteran, author, scholar and media commentator on international terrorism, intelligence, insurgency and torture. In 2014 he became the executive director of the counter-ideology think tank the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI). | The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003-2014, 2nd Edition | |
| author | Malcolm W. Nance |
| pages | 404 |
| publisher | CRC Press |
| rating | 10/10 |
| reviewer | Ben Rothke |
| ISBN | 978-1498706896 |
| summary | Definitive text on the Iraq War written by one of the few Americans who truly understand the issue |
While it's debatable if most members of Congress could elucidate the difference between the Sunnis and Shiites; Nance knows all of the players in depth. He understands and describes who there are, what they are and how their methods work. His unique analysis provides an in-depth understanding of who these groups are and what they are fighting about.
The book details how the many terror groups formed to create the Iraqi insurgency that led to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Nance places the blame on the Bush administrations 2003 invasion of Iraq that lead to the destabilization of the country. While the war was based on faulty evidence, the insurgency was created by myriad mistakes, misperceptions and miscalculations by L. Paul Bremer, who lead the occupational authority of Iraq during the war.
A common theme Nance makes throughout the book is that the US ignored history and didn't learn the lessons of the Iraqi revolt against the British in 1920 or the events of the Vietnam War. Those lessons being that insurgents and foreign terrorist operations were much more effective despite the enormous manpower and firepower that the U.S. troops brought to bear in Iraq.
Nance details how much of the coalition's strategy was based on wishful thinking. He writes that Washington never had a realistic plan for post-war Iraq. Only Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the ex-Ba'athists has a definitive strategy for what to do in post-war Iraq. Unlike the Americans, they mobilized the right resources and persons for the job, with devastating and horrifying effects.
The book writes of the utterly depravity and evil nature of Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay. Following the first Gulf War. Qusay revealed a brutality to match both his father's and brother's. The Hussein family was responsible for the death and torture of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraq's and others.
The insurgency was and is made up of countless different groups. Some of these groups number under a hundred members, others in the tens of thousands. Nance details who these groups are, their makeup and leadership structure and what they hope to achieve.
Nance quotes Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks who described the insurgency as dead-enders; namely small groups dedicated to Hussein, and not large military formations or networks of attackers. Yet the reality was that Hussein started creating the insurgency in the months before the invasion. Rather than being a bunch of dead-enders, the insurgency was a group that was highly organized, heavily armed, with near unlimited funds based on looting hundreds of millions of dollars.
From a reporting perspective, the book details how the U.S. government made the same mistakes in Iraq as it did in Iran. Underreporting U.S. casualties, over reporting enemy losses, and obfuscating how terrible the situation on the ground was.
The term IED (improvised explosive device) became part of the vernacular during the Iraq War. The book details how the insurgency used the many different types of IED's (including human-based IED) at specific times and places for their political and propaganda goals.
Nance writes that the biggest gift the U.S. gave to Osama bin Laden was to invade Iraq. The invasion provided him with an opportunity for inspirational jihad. bin Laden envisioned a holy war with heroic men fights against desperate odds in the heart of historic Islam, just like the first battles of the Prophet Mohammed.
Nance spends a few chapters dealing with ISIS and how it came to be. There are multiple iterations of the group, which developed as the Iraq mess evolved.
The book closes with a disheartening overview of the current state. Nance writes that the Middle East is in far more danger from destabilizing collapse of states due to the effects of the American invasion today than it has ever been.
As ISIS is currently the dominant force in Iraq; Nance states that he fears ISIS will have no intention of going back to being a small insurgent group. It will attempt to consolidate captured terrain. It will offer the Sunni a chance to rule under it at the technocrat level, but that is when the pogroms will start.
In the end, Nance writes, the Islamic caliphate will attempt and fail at creating a popular Iraqi-Syrian nation out of stolen governorates. But unless confronted quickly and forcefully, it may become an isolated jihadistan from which no end of terror will spawn.
For those that want to truly understand the Iraq conflict, Nancy is eminently qualified and this book is uniquely superb. There is no better book than The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003-2014 on the subject.
Reviewed by Ben Rothke.
You can purchase The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003-2014, 2nd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available from our review library please let us know.
An intelligence officer? Well he MUST be expert (Score:5, Insightful)
career intelligence officer
Was he one of the career intelligence officers who claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or was he one of the career intelligence officers who completely didn't see 9-11 coming at all? Or perhaps was he one of the career intelligence officers who had no idea where Osama Bin Laden was until some random tipster called them up and told them his address?
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So figuring out what secretive people are doing is really hard, because they're (you know) secretive and shit; therefore we should never trust what anyone who works in the field says about the field?
FYI: actual intelligence officers didn't miss the boat on Iraq's WMD. Their boss was convinced by a con-man telling him what he wanted to hear, and their job is to back up the President. They didn't know 9-11 was going to happen the way it did, but it was pretty clear something was going to be tried by Bin Lade
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The problem was that the US, and other countries, have moved away from sending people out to gather intelligence first hand and have placed their trust in technology to gather it for them. It's a poor substitute because it can't understand the people that you are trying to gather information about. It doesn't get the nuances in messages that only two people who know one another or are from the same culture would understand.
Horse Apples! (Score:5, Insightful)
Both your position and TFA's to be perfectly clear. Members of the House, Military, and all of the various intelligence agencies are masses of people with a huge amount of collective knowledge. That "Bob" didn't know something is complete crap, because last time US Security relied on one person was... well, absolutely NEVER!
Saddam had no Nuclear weapons, and the whole story about yellow cake was fabricated by various intelligence agencies to fit an agenda. Everyone in politics and the Military knew it was bullshit, and everyone knew why it was invented by the Italian version of the CIA (which is why they attempted to hide the source). Bush was going to go to war no matter what. It was sold to the public by lots of politicians using every method imaginable (free oil, those damn terrorists, that evil dictator, etc...). The point in the propaganda game is not to convince other politicians of an action, it is to convince the public that the action is justified. That is right, the war was going to happen regardless of public opinion so it was purely justification.
Why do some people that believe politicians are stupid, do things from complete ignorance, and do things without understanding all of the possible outcomes? Well, those same people are quite frankly batshit crazy.
Re:An intelligence officer? Well he MUST be expert (Score:4, Interesting)
What is this doing on Slashdot? And what does someone have to do to get a book review published here? I wrote a review of If Hemingway Wrote Javascript [nostarch.com], which is a better book and actually related to tech. Why is this stuff showing up on Slashdot when reviews of tech books are not?
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The only thing the splurge did was get more people killed, both occupier and occupied.
Obama wanted [theatlantic.com] to extend the war, not end it. But the Iraqis refused to let U.S. forces go on committing mass murder with impunity, so Obama had to adhere to the withdrawal timeline negotiated by Bush.
And who wants to die fighting a retreating enemy?
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Obama wanted [theatlantic.com] to extend the war, not end it. But the Iraqis refused to let U.S. forces go on committing mass murder with impunity, so Obama had to adhere to the withdrawal timeline negotiated by Bush.
That's a popular theory, but it doesn't seem backed up by the evidence. It looks like Obama merely grabbed onto that as an excuse to leave. Check out this New Yorker article [newyorker.com] for example. From the reports, Obama was not pushing to leave troops, he was stalling and looking for a way out:
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said........Many Iraqi and American officials are convinced that even a modest force would have been able to prevent chaos
Obama seemed to affirm that fact when he was debating Romney [weeklystandard.com]. He said:
MR. ROMNEY: [W]ith regards to Iraq, you and I agreed, I believe, that there should have been a status of forces agreement. Did you —
PRESIDENT OBAMA: That's not true.
So it seems pretty clear Obama was against leaving a small force in Iraq.
Blaming the Bush timetable is silly.....he had several years to change the time
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Blaming the Bush timetable is silly.....
No, it's not silly. It wasn't a timetable, it was a legally binding international agreement. The Obama administration negotiated with Iraq to extend the timeline for withdrawal but the Iraqi government would not approve it. The US government could either abide by their agreement with the Iraqi government, or ignore the Iraqi government's rule of law.
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Is this in response to my comment? If so, your response is off base.
The facts are quite clear. The Bush administration negotiated a planned troop withdrawal with the Iraqi government. The Obama administration negotiated with the Iraq government to change it. The Iraq government denied the request by the Obama administration.
Your claim that the Obama administration had several years to change the agreement is true, but the Obama administration would never have had to make that attempt if the agreement
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....What the chickenhawks were squawking about was satellite photographic proof that Saddam was making new weapons.
We don't know what the satellite photos showed. They were never made public. The irony is we got our best intelligence on Iraq's WMD program from Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspections. But we ended those when we started making ultimatums to Saddam Hussein... and in doing so, lost the best intelligence source we ever had on Iraq.
My personal theory is Saddam probably thought he had WMD, even if he didn't. Saddam Hussein wasn't exactly the kind of ruler you could say no to more than once. Mussolini's though
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He didn't, but he wanted his neighbors to think so. If that seems like paranoia, just look at Libya and Syria. If Assad had a powerful military, it's not as likely that Saudi Arabia and Qatar would be sending armed "freedom fighters" over the border.
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Assad did have a powerful military. That didn't stop the Saudis.But I agree, the whole WMD excuse was made into something important by people who knew very well that Iraq was almost defenseless. As Wolfowitz said in the runup to the war 'I could take Iraq with 10000 men'.(If I recall correctly). If Iraq had been strong everything would have been different.So it was important for Saddam to appear strong. I've heard claims that oh dear Saddam fooled us into thinking he had WMD. Bollocks.
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We'll revenge their deaths when it's convenient, I guess.
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But everyone in the intelligence sector did know they didn't have WMDs. This was known, hence all the anger when the "intel" was trotted about - people knew it was nonsense. There was no "accidentally correct", just people who knew their stuff and who screamed the claims were bullshit.
Nope. You are mistaken. A New York Times journalist has been researching how she got the WMD story wrong in her reporting back in the day and she writes in http://www.wsj.com/articles/th... [wsj.com]
"There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war."
"My sources were the same counterterrorism
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By Judy Miller. Really. She's full-o-shit.
What all of the intelligence community understood was that whatever the WMD capacity was of Iraq, it was insignificant. That they were uncertain of Saddam's efforts or intents , that I can see. It's hard to prove a negative. But part of the effect of the propaganda effort was to change the question. "Saddam would like to have chemical weapons". "Saddam is trying to make them". "Saddam would make them if we normalize relations".
I think politicians on the other hand w
Substantially correct, but . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
What is meant by the U.S. government made the same mistakes in Iraq as it did in Iran.? The U.S. has not invaded Iran any time recently.
Just how the weapons became ubiquitous is also not touched on in this summary: Saddam Hussein had an armory. The U.S. forces took that armory. Then they carried on towards Baghdad, towards the major prize and *glory* (cue exciting music). One undefended armory.
One thing that totally stank is that the whole thing was then lost in U.S. party politics. The Republicans lied about having lied and all their supporters started claiming black was white and that the weapons of mass destruction had really existed. We are getting the same kind of crud now from the St Petersburg Propagandazentral with respect to the Ukraine.
Another thing that stank was the sacking of pretty much all Baath party members. Being a party member was a requirement for many kinds of job, sacking all these people created a large pool of disaffected people. This was known at the time but the idiots in charge "knew better". I found it difficult to believe that so much stupidity was not malicious.
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I assume this should be Vietnam, rather than Iran. This is from the earlier point that "the US ignored history and didn't learn the lessons of the Iraqi revolt against the British in 1920 or the events of the Vietnam War".
Certainly "Underreporting U.S. casualties, over reporting enemy losses, and obfuscating how terrible the situation on the ground was." sounds like a good summary of what was done in Vietnam.
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That Iran bit threw me, too, but I suspect he meant Vietnam.
Re:Substantially correct, but . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing that stank was the sacking of pretty much all Baath party members. Being a party member was a requirement for many kinds of job
The Baath Party was made up of people that believed in a secular society, a strong unified Iraq, and preventing Iranian domination of the Persian Gulf. Since these were also the goals of the United States, the Baath Party ban had the effect of banning from government all the people that agreed with us on the future direction of Iraq ... and now we are disappointed that somehow Iraq has become a fragmented Islamic state controlled by the Shiites in Iran.
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and after WW2 we allowed the Nazis to remain in power under a different name where in Iraq we kicked out anyone in the Baath party and made them unemployable and then wondered why people began to shoot back at us
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It should be pointed out that the people who decided to let the Nazis remain in power after WW2 were thoroughly castigated by pretty much everyone.
So perhaps the lesson learned from that episode was that letting the former government workers continue to work after we'd ousted the government was a
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According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine [naomiklein.org] part of the reason to exclude Baath party members from the Government was to simply sack nearly everyone in the Iraqi Government. The US had an agenda of privatising Iraq and freeing its markets and it didn't need a local Government to slow them down.
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That's the common Americanised view of how you could've made Iraq go better, but this is precisely the sort of ill conceived view that I suspect this book is trying to deal with.
The problem is that the Baath party was brutal. Like, really brutal. We're talking about the people who gassed the Kurds, who had no qualms with using human shields, and took no issue with putting power drills through the eyes of captured PoWs as a form of torture.
Given that, it'd be naive to think that that country wouldn't have co
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Thanks. You are correct, that should have been Vietnam, not Iran.
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You should review your history a bit- from wikipedia:
In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected prime minister. He became enormously popular in Iran after he nationalized Iran's petroleum industry and oil reserves. He was deposed in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, an Anglo-American covert operation that marked the first time the US had overthrown a foreign government during the Cold War.[92]
Infinite (Score:3, Insightful)
Monkey keystrokes and infinite time does produce the works of Shakespeare.
So let's show monkeys a little more respect than comparing them members of Congress.
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It would take longer than the lifespan of a monkey too.
It's an idealization.
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Oxymoron (Score:2)
member of United States Congress and House of Representatives ... collected wisdom
you could fit the resulting tome on a 3x5 card and still have 15 square inches of white space...
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I am not able to find that disproof (Score:5, Insightful)
The assertion that the infinite monkeys theorum has been disproved seems incorrect. Searches for the named scientist in conjuction with monkey also fail.
IOW, I suspect the entire article is garbage. I will admit that this is based on the fact the the only easily checkable statement appears to be factually incorrect, but if it's wrong where you can check, what should you believe about the places where you can't check?
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I noticed the same thing. Everything I've seen on monkey typists says that as either the number of monkeys, or the time, approaches infinity, the probability of getting a target string out of the typing pool approaches 1.
I also find it funny that in a post about a book on the Iraq debacle, the /. audience focuses on a tangential statement about probabilistics.
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I recollect Penzias making that statement that the math simply does not work in his book: Digital Harmony: Business, Technology & Life After Paperwork
http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-In... [amazon.com]
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On Wikipedia's Infinite monkey theorem [wikipedia.org] page, the very first sentence under the heading "Solution" is:
There is a straightforward proof of this theorem.
Another commenter [slashdot.org] has said that Penzias demonstrated the astronomically vast amount of time such an effort would take, but this is not a disproof of the theorem.
pages 404
Is it bad that my first thought when I read that was: "How could he not find out how many pages it had?"
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thanks. Let me see if I can find his book where (I am pretty sure) he said that.
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as in so many things, the word "infinite" makes the question both solvable and irrelevant to reality
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My use of 'mathematically impossible' was incorrect. A different term would have proven better. Thanks.
Monkey scribes (Score:5, Funny)
Empirical evidence demonstrates that it took only a finite number of monkeys a finite period of time to "randomly" produce the works of Shakespeare.
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Shakespeare was an ape, not a monkey. And he didn't have a typewriter.
Interesting inverview here (Score:3)
http://phasezero.gawker.com/an... [gawker.com]
you mean the Resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Resisting invasion and occupation of one's country does not make one a terrorist except to the invaders.
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Resisting invasion and occupation of one's country does not make one a terrorist except to the invaders.
Indeed; however, that is not entirely the case in Iraq. There were numerous groups in Iraq. All said they were doing the suicide bombing of civilians to resist America. Note how the suicide bombings of civilians never stopped once America had left.
In other words, it was terrorism with a goal of NOT resisting the evil invaders but rather to take control of the region once America had left.
Concerning IEDs and such that were killing American soldiers, I would agree with you and not call it terrorism; however,
Weird subject matter for a book on Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
1. From Slashdot's own Book Review Guidelines [slashdot.org] (emphasis mine): "In particular, we're interested in reviews of books on programming, computer security, the history of technology and anything else (including Science Fiction, cyberpunk, etc.) that fits under the "News for Nerds" umbrella."
The reviewed book doesn't seem to fit any of the name checked categories and even to fit in the more general "News for Nerds" umbrella seems to be very generous for most interpretations of what a "nerd" would be in this context (of computer, technology, science fiction and cyberpunk).
2. Here are the reviews from the past 12 months. Despite of the lack of reviewers the theme is almost always related to technology (even if as a pretext to discuss infosec, law enforcement and natsec). Curiously the same reviewer that submitted this review submitted most of the barely related ones.
You're not doing the book any favors (Score:2)
Protip (Score:2)
Protip: try to pair up your errors, and hope that one masks the other.
since when did ./ turn into boingboing? (Score:2)
can we get this without the posturing? Yeah, maybe congress is 99% populated with idiots, but what does that have to do with this book? And what does this have to do with the
Since when did slashdot turn into boingboing?
the editing department needs a high colonic, me thinks. This site is losing it's relevance.
The utter depravity of Saddam & Sons (Score:2)
I call bullshit. Sure, they were a nasty bunch but there's a lot of those around . Saddam himself was cruel but he also thought it was necessary to be so. As dictators go, he was relatively competent. That was maybe the main reason the US turned on him: too competent. Iraq had been developing itself very well and was becoming a bit too independent and too powerful.
The sadism of his eldest son was another matter.
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My first thought was Dice clickbait; but on second thought, I realized that Slashdot's readership is becoming more and more hyper-political and hyper-partisan, and that's why pure science and nerd culture posts have only the title displayed on the front page, and political, religious, or other contentious posts go in the "Top of the..." list. I blame an influx of people from 4chan and Reddit.
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Come on. This is purely a political piece. Why the hell is this on Slashdot?
The role of technology is minimal. The role of science is minimal. The role of math is minimal. The role of computers is minimal. The role of software is minimal.
This is purely a political submission. It has no place here.
Just on the IED front the ingenuity, sheer amount, and the different types of IEDs that have been found should get any pyro/electronics nerd excited. How the different tribal and religious militias interacted with themselves, the government, and the coalition is interesting as well. Hell, my Master's thesis was on the efficiency of using militia in counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd call that topic pretty nerdy. And don't forget, politics(Especially international politics) affects all of us,
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Re:Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:5, Informative)
ok...so I am not a scholar...who is Thomas Friedman?
He is a neo-con idiot, one of many, who predicted that American troops would be greeted by Iraqis as heroic liberators, and that Iraq would soon be a beacon of democracy, and pave the way for peace and love throughout the Middle East.
Re:Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:4, Insightful)
He is a neo-con idiot, one of many, who predicted that American troops would be greeted by Iraqis as heroic liberators
They were, at least by the Shia and Kurds. Of course, we fucked that up, through our own incompetence, and of course the Shia never going to be particularly happy when we got in the way of their pogrom against the Sunnis. The whole country is an artificial creation that is destined for the trash bin of history; everything we're seeing now would have happened eventually without our intervention. Fake countries rarely survive when their strongman dies. Our mistake was in being the one to break it, thus owning the problem.
Recent events (Libya) suggest that we still haven't fully digested this lesson. If you're gonna blow it up you should probably have a plan for what happens afterwards.
Re:Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:4, Insightful)
Every country is fake. We tend to forget that after they've been around for awhile. It's a form of bias. The whole anti-colonial "artificial states" argument has no substance. There's no dichotomy between "natural" and "unnatural" nation-states. The reasons why some stick around and others turn into hell holes is, like many things, not amenable to simple explanations.
Believing in such simple theories is precisely how we ended up thinking that Iraq was a slam dunk. Remember, we were told that Iraq, much like other dictatorships-cum-democracies around the world, was a modern nation with an educated elite and a large middle-class. The very things that we were told were responsible for bridging ethnic divides in successful countries everywhere.
Anyhow, it's only been 15 years. Countries like the UK, for example, took hundreds (if not thousands) of years to become non-violent. The U.S. seemed to be solid until the Civil War. Basically, how about we dispense with the lofty rhetoric and highfalutin political theories and focus on more concrete problems and solutions. History will play out in ways we haven't even begun to fathom.
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I think they did believe this would happen. They were wrong about it, but they believed it. They let their hopes create bias which overrode the intelligence briefings and common sense.
Re:Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, to be fair it likely didn't help that the current administration decided to yank nearly all US troops out of the country before the job was done, either.
No matter your feelings or opinions on how the war began or was handled during the Bush administration, you cannot deny that finishing it properly should have been a top priority no matter who started it. Consider, if the allies had withdrawn from Germany that soon after WWII, the Nazis (or a derivative group thereof) would have arisen once more, and Germany would likely still be a mess today. Instead, post-WWII the allies (for better or worse) kept occupation for years on end, slowly passing control, then autonomy, then self-defense, etc to the post-war German government ( well, governments, as we did have two of them for the longest time thanks to the USSR.)
Why this wasn't done properly in Iraq is a serious head-scratcher, especially given that Iraq was indeed an artificial country (thanks, England!), and doubly so because of the regional culture plus pre-existing secular tensions. It would have been a long, expensive road, but it was certainly at least doable.
Incidentally, it probably didn't help that Syria went straight to hell in recent years, either - or that Iran has been working like hell behind the scenes to keep things unstable. But to be honest, those only serve as stronger arguments for keeping treasure and troops committed towards reconstruction in Iraq (and maybe a bit of that towards keeping Iran's little activities clamped down as hard as possible).
Long story short: anyone who tries to place the blame for the mess on any one person or political party is an idiot. There's plenty of blame to go around on this one...
Re:Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:4, Informative)
You made a false claim. The current administration did not decide to yank troops out of Iraq. The Bush administration made an agreement with the Iraqi government on when US troops would be withdrawn. See Pact, Approved in Iraq, Sets Time for U.S. Pullout [nytimes.com]. It was, as nearly every bit of policy from the Bush administration related to Iraq, optimistic and a bad choice.
The Obama administration tried to extend the presence of US troops in Iraq, but the Iraqi government denied the request. See Despite Difficult Talks, U.S. and Iraq Had Expected Some American Troops to Stay [nytimes.com] for just one of many contemporaneous articles on the attempts to keep US troops in Iraq.
Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around, but, contrary to your claim, the reason troops were pulled out of Iraq was because of an agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government.
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The Obama administration tried to extend the presence of US troops in Iraq, but the Iraqi government denied the request.
That is not really true. Things like a lack of immunity for US troops were used as an excuse to leave. The Iraqis opened with such a position in past negotiations and gave in once sufficient money and resources were added to the deal. Its a negotiating tactic. The problem is the new administration did not want a deal, they wanted all out at any cost, so this initial position became a convenient impediment to a deal.
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The Obama administration tried to extend the presence of US troops in Iraq, but the Iraqi government denied the request.
That is not really true.
Nothing you wrote backs up that assertion. The Obama administration requested US troops be allowed to stay in Iraq after the negotiated deadline. The Iraqi government said no. Yes, the two governments negotiated, and you have your belief about how that went, but that's your belief. I'm just talking about the facts of the situation.
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The Obama administration tried to extend the presence of US troops in Iraq, but the Iraqi government denied the request.
That is not really true.
Nothing you wrote backs up that assertion. The Obama administration requested US troops be allowed to stay in Iraq after the negotiated deadline. The Iraqi government said no. Yes, the two governments negotiated, and you have your belief about how that went, but that's your belief. I'm just talking about the facts of the situation.
Actually you ignore some facts. Fact 1. No immunity was a deal breaker. Fact 2. No immunity was an opening position in past deals and was negotiated away.
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Neither of those claims are pertinent. You are discussing the negotiations, not the fact that the Bush administration made the agreement that caused the withdrawal of the troops.
Also, while the first is true, the second is false.
Quoting from Immunity for troops was Iraq deal breaker [cbsnews.com]
Look, I get it, blaming President Obama for an early troop withdrawal has become accepted truth for many. That doesn't mean it's true, though. You have two
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Also, while the first is true, the second is false ... Immunity is a standard agreement wherever U.S. forces are deployed.
No, you are misunderstanding the second. Apologies if I was unclear. When I wrote "Fact 2. No immunity was an opening position in past deals and was negotiated away." I was referring to the Iraqi position and their eventual acceptance of immunity in past deals, and which by the way they just did in Dec 2014.
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Thanks for clarifying, but the clarification doesn't help your position, which, it's become clear, is simply this: even though the Bush administration negotiated the troop pullout, it's the Obama's administration's fault that the agreement was followed.
It appears to me that the way you came to this position is because you believe that the Bush administration always intended for the agreement to be renegotiated and if the Obama administration had really wanted to leave US troops in Iraq, they could have.
T
Re: Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:2)
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The fact of the situation is that BHO was sitting in office when things went to shit. I believe it was a Democrat that said, "The buck stops here." BHO doesn't get a pass here.
Again, there's plenty of blame to go around. Blaming President Obama for the troop withdrawal, though, is blaming the wrong administration.
BTW, the Iraq situation went to shit long before President Obama took office. Anyone that doesn't acknowledge that is either ignorant or being dishonest with him/herself.
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I'm just talking about the facts of the situation.
Oops there is a 3rd fact. Fact 1. No immunity was a deal breaker. Fact 2. No immunity was an opening position in past deals and was negotiated away. Fact 3. The Iraqis granted immunity in Dec 2014.
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Your first two claims were dealt with above.
The immunity agreement given by Iraq for fighting against Daesh is different than the one required in 2011.
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Your first two claims were dealt with above.
The immunity agreement given by Iraq for fighting against Daesh is different than the one required in 2011.
Yes. The point is that the Iraqis were and still *are* flexible on the question of immunity. The 2011 failure was one of offering them an insufficient deal. The 2011 negotiations were a farce on the US side.
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Sorry, the offer by the Iraqi PM of a immunity agreement in the fight against Daesh says nothing about the willingness of the Iraqi parliament to give US troops immunity in 2011. In 2011, the Iraqi PM made the same offer, but, as even he acknowledged, it was meaningless, since the parliament had to agree. They were unwilling to agree.
Look, it doesn't matter how far afield you go trying to support your claim, you will fail. The facts really are simple and incontrovertible. Your can either choose to acce
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Why this wasn't done properly in Iraq is a serious head-scratcher, especially given that Iraq was indeed an artificial country (thanks, England!), and doubly so because of the regional culture plus pre-existing secular tensions. It would have been a long, expensive road, but it was certainly at least doable.
If the Germans had been putting IEDs under their AutoBahns for a decade after 1945, and continued to kill each other by the thousands, it's hard to imagine how we could have forced it to be the industrious, Bier drinking, techno loving paradise it is today.
Re: Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:2)
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I agree, that's why I said, "there is plenty of blame to go around".
The primary example the GP used to illustrate the point, though, was incorrect. The reason US troops were pulled out of Iraq when they were was because the Bush administration's agreement with the Iraqi government.
Your comment about President Clinton is true, but, isn't really relevant. It wasn't about invading Iraq, it was about supporting opposition groups in Iraq.
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The primary example the GP used to illustrate the point, though, was incorrect. The reason US troops were pulled out of Iraq when they were was because the Bush administration's agreement with the Iraqi government.
Its not that simple. Since the departure of the occupational forces was occurring under the next President's watch it was left to the next President to negotiate a residual force for ongoing stabilization and support of the new Iraqi government. Unfortunately that next President was not interested in leaving such a residual force behind, he wanted all out at any cost.
Your comment about President Clinton is true, but, isn't really relevant. It wasn't about invading Iraq, it was about supporting opposition groups in Iraq.
Apparently Hillary Clinton thought invasion was a valid option for regime change when it came time for her to vote in the Senate.
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Yes, it is actually that simple. If, as you stated, it was being left to the next president, the withdrawal should not have been included in the agreement.
Your understanding of what the Obama administration wanted to do is also false. They negotiated with the Iraqi government to leave troops behind. The Iraqi government said no.
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Yes, it is actually that simple. If, as you stated, it was being left to the next president, the withdrawal should not have been included in the agreement.
You are absolutely mistaken. Bush 2 negotiated the withdrawal of the combat troops that he had put into Iraq, essentially an occupational force. The withdraw was on the next President's watch. What was left to that next President to negotiate was a deal for non-combat non-occupational troops. Advisors, instructors, anti-terrorist units, liaisons for Iraqi combat units (i.e. links to US air support), stabilization forces (ex Korean DMZ), etc. An important distinction being that this residual force would be f
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No, I'm sorry, I'm not mistaken. The agreement made by the Bush administration held the force of law. It was an error to make that agreement; it, as so many other choices made by the Bush administration in Iraq, was overly optimistic. If the intention of the Bush administration was to leave behind a force, they had the opportunity to negotiate inclusion of the forces at that time. They did not. The Obama administration tried to renegotiate the agreement with Iraq and was denied.
Again, your understandi
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It was an error to make that agreement; it, as so many other choices made by the Bush administration in Iraq, was overly optimistic.
Well, yes, he was overly optimistic that the next administration would negotiate in good faith rather than engage in political theatre.
If the intention of the Bush administration was to leave behind a force, they had the opportunity to negotiate inclusion of the forces at that time.
Again, the Bush administration felt that since those forces would go into the field under then next President's watch that the next President should negotiate the terms.
The Obama administration tried to renegotiate the agreement with Iraq and was denied. Troop immunity is a standard part of any agreement when the US deploys troops to a foreign country.
You misinterpreted my previous statement, apologies if I was not clear. My reference to negotiating away the immunity issue was in reference to the Iraqis do so. Of having the Iraqis eventually agree to immun
Re: Well that was an incoherent metaphor (Score:4, Informative)
The facts are clear and incontrovertible:
You can believe whatever you want about how hard the Obama administration tried, but that doesn't change the facts of the matter; the claim made by the GP was false.
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Never understood the point of this old saw, as Clinton never tried to invade Iraq or actively depose Saddam.
Yes, they voted for it. They didn't talk about voting for it. And the only Dem to offer an unequivocal 'I fucked up' apology is persona non gratta because he only fucked one person he wasn't supposed to. [slashdot.org]
Obama, not Bush 2, responsible for ISIS ... (Score:4, Informative)
Silly...Bush 2 started the 2nd Iraq war which destabilized it all. Had he not done that, there would be no ISIS in Iraq.
Bush 2 defeated proto-ISIS (al-Quaeda in Iraq) with US troops and Sunni tribal fighters in the An Bar Awakening. Proto-ISIS sent word to al-Quaeda leadership to stop sending fighters, that the battle was lost.
Obama's desire to abandon Iraq, to not leave a residual force resurrected ISIS/al-Quaeda in Iraq. The departure of Occupational/Stabilization forces was negotiated under Bush 2 but since it would be occurring on the next President's watch it was left to that next President to negotiate any residual force that would be left. Obama had no interest in doing so. When the Iraqis said no immunity for US troops Obama used that as an excuse to bail. The fact is the Iraqis *always* open negotiations with that position and then they *always* drop it when the US adds enough money and resources to the deal. Its a negotiating tactic, but Obama didn't want a successful negotiation. If a residual force had been left behind they would not even have had to engage ISIS directly on the ground. Such a force would have access to air support and could have called in air strikes on ISIS convoys of pickup trucks with heavy weapons traveling down open desert highways. You can't really find a scenario more vulnerable to air power, see Highway of Death from the first Gulf War. So what ISIS personnel survived would have lacked heavy weapons and would have been far more easily handled by local Iraqi forces. Not to mention with US backing these same Iraqi tribal forces beat ISIS the first time around. Its only because of US abandonment and abandonment by Baghdad too did these tribal forces decide to flip and join rather than fight.
The circumstances that led to the resurrection of ISIS is entirely Obama's doing, not Bush 2's. At least for the US' share of the blame, Baghdad's treatment of the Sunnis is responsible for a share too. Of course with greater US involvement such things had been mitigated in the past, so US abandonment had a role in that too.
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This revisionist history [theatlantic.com] was already debunked in this thread before you decided to repeat it.
Obama wanted to extend the occupation, not end it. All that campaign talk about withdrawing within 16 months was a lie, just like his promises to renegotiate NAFTA, that any health care bill he signed must have a public option, and to close Gitmo.
All this Obama bashing from right-wingers, when he's been one of you all a
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This revisionist history was already debunked in this thread before you decided to repeat it.
You are mistaken. Even the article you cite states that immunity for US troops was a deal killer. No immunity was a starting position in previous deals. Iraqi politicians preferred not to have the US around in those time frames too. Yet with sufficient money and resources added to the deal those politicians reversed themselves in the past. Which in Dec 2014 they did again. In Dec 2014 they voted to grant immunity to US troops due to the ISIS problem.
The fact remain that Obama wanted all out at any cost a
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You keep making the same false claims.
Immunity for troops is part of nearly every agreement for US troop deployment in a foreign country, and was in force in Iraq before our troops left.
The immunity granted in 2014 would not have been enough to keep the troops in Iraq in 2011. The situations are different, as are the agreements. In 2011, the Iraqi parliament had to approve the negotiation, because they had approved the previous agreement. The PM could not override that.
The truth is this - though the
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You keep making the same false claims. Immunity for troops is part of nearly every agreement for US troop deployment in a foreign country, and was in force in Iraq before our troops left.
Actually you keep making the same misinterpretation, my apologies if I was not clear. No-immunity was an initial Iraqi position. Negotiating away their position is in reference to the Iraqis wanting no-immunity but eventually granting it, *not* in reference to the US position of requiring it.
The immunity granted in 2014 would not have been enough to keep the troops in Iraq in 2011. The situations are different, as are the agreements.
Of course, the point is that the 2014 agreement proves that the Iraqis were and still are flexible. That the problem was an insufficient counteroffer from the US.
The truth is this - though the Obama administration negotiated with Iraq to extend US troop presence in Iraq, the Iraqi government declined to modify the existing agreement it had made with the Bush administration.
No. The new agreement over a residual force was an entire
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Obama's desire to abandon Iraq, to not leave a residual force resurrected ISIS/al-Quaeda in Iraq.
I'm sorry, that's ridiculous.
Daesh already had a presence in Syria before we withdrew our troops from Iraq. Remember, they made their first attack in Damascus in December of 2011. Troops in Iraq would have had no impact on Daesh in Syria.
Going further, while military actions in 2007 and 2010 hurt al Qaeda in Iraq, they did not wipe out the organization. There's no reason to believe that a small force could have done what a full force could not except the desire to blame President Obama.
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Daesh already had a presence in Syria before we withdrew our troops from Iraq.
I'm not discussing Syria.
Going further, while military actions in 2007 and 2010 hurt al Qaeda in Iraq, they did not wipe out the organization.
Al-queda in Iraq told al-queda leadership not to send more fighters, that they were beaten.
There's no reason to believe that a small force could have done what a full force could not except the desire to blame President Obama.
A seriously misinformed statement on your part, both in the sense that proto-ISIS/al-queda in Iraq had in in fact been beaten by US and Sunni tribal forces and in the sense that ISIS' march through Iraq could not have been stopped with a small US force. Regarding the later a small US force would be able to call in air strikes. ISIS would not have been able roll on down the open desert highways
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CIA provided faulty information ... (Score:2)
Bush made up some evidence
No, the CIA gave him faulty information. New York Times journalist has been researching how she got the WMD story wrong in her reporting back in the day and she writes in http://www.wsj.com/articles/th... [wsj.com]
"There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war."
"My sources were the same c
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Bush made up some evidence
No, the CIA gave him faulty information. New York Times journalist has been researching how she got the WMD story wrong in her reporting back in the day and she writes in http://www.wsj.com/articles/th... [wsj.com]
Here's how Paul Krugman described it (more convincingly, to me). GWB wasn't mislead by the CIA. Cheney had convinced him to drive Saddam Hussein out of office before he heard any of the CIA assessments.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c... [nytimes.com]
Blinkers and Lies
Paul Krugman
May 16, 2015
"The invasion wasn’t a mistake, it was a crime. We were lied into war."
(First, war in Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney decided to use 9/11 as an excuse to go after a secular regime that had nothing to do with 9/1
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Bush made up some evidence
No, the CIA gave him faulty information. New York Times journalist has been researching how she got the WMD story wrong in her reporting back in the day and she writes in http://www.wsj.com/articles/th... [wsj.com]
Here's how Paul Krugman described it (more convincingly, to me).
From Judith Miller's article again:
"OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me. None of these assertions happens to be tr
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I was right. You were wrong.
How do you answer Krugman's question: "Why didn't you see the obvious back then?"
That's Judith Miller's version. This is one of those situations where credibility and accuracy counts, and don't trust her to get the story straight. She didn't before.
I read Miller's stories in the NYT during the debate over WMDs. She gave one source who verified the WMDs, but she didn't speak to him -- her handlers pointed to a guy some distance away, and told her what he said, but they wouldn't le
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Silly...Bush 2 started the 2nd Iraq war which destabilized it all. Had he not done that, there would be no ISIS in Iraq.
And if you want to blame someone over the original destabilization and insurgency that helped the original proto-ISIS / al-Quaeda in Iraq get started you really need to blame Paul Bremer. The career diplomat who was in charge of the Provisional Authority that originally governed Iraq. He disbanded the Iraqi Army on his own, without White House or Pentagon approval. So he is primarily responsible for US troops patrolling Iraqi streets and searching Iraqi homes. In past US wars and US occupations the US milit
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There was a great deal of unfounded optimism all over the place at the time. People genuinely believed that things would work out great as long as Saddam was out of power and we set up our own puppet government. Not believed it as in thinking that it would be great for the US, they believe it would truly be great for the Iraqis too. People were out in full force for the re-creation of a state, like they were reliving post WWII Germany or Japan.
One of the first early laws they tried to get implemented as
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He's like Gordon Freeman, but without the crowbar.
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