Generational Dynamics World View

[Warren Dew]

(06-28-2017, 02:36 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(06-28-2017, 09:08 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: The Iraq invasion not being about oil doesn't mean it wasn't about unfinished business.  One of the views of the Gulf War was that we should have enforced the no fly zone in the south to prevent Saddam Hussein from putting down a popular rebellion there.  The fantasy was that the popular rebellion would have led naturally to an enlightened, democratic government.

So you buy my conclusion that the Iraq war was about trying to spread democracy in the Middle East? I *know* you are my age. Did you vote for Bush in 2000?  Aren't you a Republican? If this spreading Democracy was not what you wanted from a Republican administration, did you then vote for Kerry in 2004 (who did run on ending the Iraq debacle) or Bush?  If Bush, why?

The Iraq war is not separable from the Gulf War; they were basically the first half and the second half of the same conflict and have to be viewed as a whole.  That said, the reasons for and against getting out of a war are not necessarily the opposite of the reasons for getting into the war; we get into Vietnam because we wanted to stop the spread of Communism, but the reason for getting out was not that we decided Communism was a good thing after all.

The really stupid war was the Gulf War; at the time Iraq was aligned with us and Kuwait mostly against us, so coming in on the side of Kuwait made no sense.  In addition, our intervention was bad, not good, from the standpoint of oil production.  I attribute that to GHWBush having fantasies of refighting WWII against dictators with moustaches.

The Gulf War and the subsequent sanctions against Iraq were a humanitarian disaster; the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of children every year, as well as, likely, a comparable number of adults.

Different people had different justifications for the Iraq war.  For me, ending the humanitarian disaster of the sanctions was the best one.  GWBush likely believed in the WMD justification, or a variant that held that Saddam Hussein would restart nuclear weapons development if sanctions were lifted, which doesn't seem to me unlikely.

The "democracy" justification was likely not the primary driver for many people for starting the Iraq War, but once the war started, it became the exit model.  And while I think that an enlightened democratic government happening naturally was never in the cards, I do think that up until the 2010 Iraqi elections, a less than enlightened democratic government heavily supported by US influence was possible.  It was only when the US allowed Al Awlaki to maintain control after losing an election that continued democratic government in Iraq became impossible, and we had to switch to an exit model that turned Iraq over to Iran as eventually happened.

I did vote for GWBush, though I wasn't a Republican at the time.  I didn't trust Gore to focus on environmentalism to the exclusion of the normal Democratic move towards bigger government and more socialism.  I didn't actually vote in 2004 due to a last minute business trip that didn't give me enough lead time to get an absentee ballot, but I would still have voted for Bush because (a) his economic policies were working well, and (b) the "US propping up democracy" Iraq exit model seemed better than just abandoning Iraq to Iran. In general I have tended to vote more on domestic policy than on foreign policy, although that is changing as the crisis war approaches.