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You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Commentary / Asshole / Twenty Years Gone

Twenty Years Gone

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A lot of Iraq war retrospectives on the 20th Anniversary. Here is one that I think is one of the best piece of blogging ever done, Operation Desert Snipe from April of 2003:

The Snipe Hunt is an American folk tradition, a rite of passage for the novice outdoorsman … an elaborate practical joke which ends with the initiate crouching alone in the woods, in the dark, literally “holding the bag”, waiting for the nonexistent Snipe.

What if we sift through all the sand in Iraq without finding WMDs? (That means hundreds of tons, as advertised … not lab samples, training rounds or inventory strays.) We’re alone in the woods, in the dark, holding the bag. Paraphrasing NYT’s Tom Friedman, we will have gone to war on the wings of a snipe.

Too early to call it a night. It’s a big desert, our last candle hasn’t flickered out, and the mocking call of the snipe still echoes hauntingly in the distance, but … the original standard WMD thesis is strictly defunct.

Saddam Hussein had extensive, active, advanced, clandestine chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. UN inspectors couldn’t find WMDs because they were inept, or corrupt, or because Saddam played the shell game so masterfully. US intelligence pinpointed dozens of high-value target sites, hundreds of intermediate-value sites and thousands of low-value sites. Chemical and perhaps biological weapons were deployed to commanders in the field, who had orders to use them against invading Coalition forces. Special Forces teams were dropping in to secure and neutralize high-value sites in advance of the ground assault, with high-tech analytic Mobile Exploitation Teams (MET’s) close on their heels.

Six weeks ago, it was beyond the pale to suggest otherwise. Today the man in the street doesn’t exactly care much about WMD’s … but he’s curious. The men in the hawk’s nest — and some of their media enablers — care a lot. Alternative explanations are being spun out so rapidly, they’re not even kept on the same page.

In public, Bush and Blair — as they must — still insist WMDs will turn up. Behind closed doors, staff are obliquely, deniably huffing into trial balloons, testing branches of the contingency that never earned a spot of Rumsfeld’s contingency sheet. What if there are no WMDs?

A Washington Post embed reports analysts here and in Washington are increasingly doubtful that they will find what they are looking for in the places described on a five-tiered target list … strategy is shifting from the rapid “exploitation” of known suspect sites to a vast survey that will rely on unexpected discoveries and leads.

Come what may later on, Blair’s dossiers, Powell’s “solid intelligence”, and Rumsfeld’s “bulletproof evidence” are dead letters. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Operation Desert Snipe is a marvelous case study in one of CP’s pet themes — collective self-deception. The plot spoilers were there all the time. “Everybody” was so sure, and so wrong. Down the page, we’ll retrace the divergent arcs of evidence and attitude that brought us to this pass, and we’ll sample some of the surviving alternative theses … but first, a rundown of Truth or Consequences.

Second, my retrospective from 2008. Nothing has changed:

I see that Andrew Sullivan was asked to list what he got wrong about Iraq for the five year anniversary of the invasion, and since I was as big a war booster as anyone, I thought I would list what I got wrong:

Everything.

And I don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but I do sort of have to face facts. I was wrong about everything.

I was wrong about the Doctrine of Pre-emptive warfare.
I was wrong about Iraq possessing WMD.
I was wrong about Scott Ritter and the inspections.
I was wrong about the UN involvement in weapons inspections.
I was wrong about the containment sanctions.
I was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the Middle East.
I was wrong about this making us more safe.
I was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq.
I was wrong when I stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath.
I was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps.
I was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the Middle East.
I was wrong about dissolving the Iraqi army.
I was wrong about the looting being unimportant.
I was wrong that Bush/Cheney were competent.
I was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators.
I was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors.
I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies

Although it should be noted Scott Ritter is a fucking scumbag piece of shit kid touching Putin apparatchik. But other than that, it holds up.

Reader Interactions

138Comments

  3. 3.

    Elizabelle

    Curious if the same rah-rah types for Iraq (journalists and other Very Serious People) are the same people who were shrieking about the absolute “debacle!!!” of Biden’s exit from Afghanistan.

    That is a good blogpost about the snipe hunt.

  4. 4.

    Elizabelle

    DougJ’s comment on John’s 2008 blogpost (#5):

    Your willingness to prove that you were wrong about everything just proves that you’re not a Serious Person.

    He was the Pitchbot even then.

  5. 5.

    NotMax

    Everyone mentions Cheney, Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld. Leave us not forget the equally odious Condi Rice.

  6. 6.

    twbrandt

    Your list of what you got wrong about the Iraq war is my list too, John. There are events that cause you to shift everything you thought you knew. For me, the Iraq war was one of those things, when I realized that people I thought were trustworthy would lie repeatedly and shamelessly. The 2016 election was another, when I realized the country I thought I lived in isn’t the country I actually live in.

  7. 7.

    Elizabelle

    @NotMax: And Paul Wolfowitz.  And L. Paul Bremer.  John Bolton.  The PNAC crowd.

    I see that PNAC ceased to exist in 2006, and its successor (the Foreign Policy Initiative) folded in 2017.

    Wiki:  PNAC.  Project for the New American Century.   Neocon think tank and war cheerleader.  Those are some awful people.  I do not see a single name that has redeemed itself.

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    I got one big thing wrong about the Iraq war: I still thought Bush was dealing in good faith.  I knew there was no need to go to war, and I opposed the war because I thought it was unnecessary, but I spent way too much time listening to the Bushies’ BS.  I haven’t made the same mistake since.  Now I start from the assumption the Republicans are operating in bad faith, and I only correct my opinion in the vanishingly rare case that they demonstrate some good faith.

  9. 9.

    schrodingers_cat

    From this morning’s thread.

    I was a lowly international student at that time and even I figured it out and so did the South African guy who worked in the same lab as me. The American student however was gung ho. So was my yoga teacher and my lesbian neighbor. The fervor to go to war was quite high and not just among the punditry and RWNJs and Bush II officials.

    I even penned a couple anti-Iraq screeds in the college newspaper.

    BTW has MoU apologized? I know a couple of R voters like JGC IRL who left the party after the Iraq fiasco and never looked back.

  10. 10.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Elizabelle:

    Relatedly, I’ve always wondered whatever happened to the right wing commenters that were on BJ before Cole’s epiphany and how they reacted to his change of heart

  12. 12.

    sab

    @schrodingers_cat: My mother left the party then. Couldn’t bring herself to register as a Democrat but she voted for Obama in 2008 and was planning to vote for him in 2012 except that she died in March that year. I checked with the board of elections to make sure she wasn’t on the rolls to be falsely voted by Republican hacks.

  14. 14.

    JustRuss

    Long time ago, but I think it was common knowledge, for anyone paying attention, that Cheney and Shrub set up their own intel service to generate “evidence” of Iraq’s WMDs. Maybe that didn’t come out until after the invasion, but I’m pretty certain I was aware of it before that.

  15. 15.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @NotMax:

    Everyone mentions Cheney, Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld. Leave us not forget the equally odious Condi Rice.

    Chaps my ass that she found it so easy to rehabilitate her reputation and image, to the extent that rehabilitation was even necessary.

    As to Powell, I’ve always felt his presence around Bush, a sort of de facto third spot on the ticket, was enough to tip two close elections, and they couldn’t get rid of him fast enough once the second one was in the bag.

    And, as ever, the cowardly silence of the Bush bros in the face of trump and trumpism is as a great a stain on their name as anything, or should be.

  16. 16.

    Citizen Alan

    @schrodingers_cat: Is it really lying if you’re such a fucking idiot you don’t even know truth from falsehood? There’s a reason “truthiness” was the Word of the Year at one point back then.

  18. 18.

    Feathers

    I was completely opposed to the Iraq War. What moved me from anger to abject horror was learning that Baghdad is roughly the size, population, and density of Los Angeles. This meant that it wasn’t warhawks lying to get themselves easy glory. It was going to be a catastrophe with an unclear global future on the other side.

  19. 19.

    Ohio Mom

    I remember early in the morning padding down the driveway in my bathrobe and slippers, looking for the newspaper and it wasn’t there. I knew then the war had started, that’s why the paper would be late.

  20. 20.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Citizen Alan: Oh they knew they were lying I remember Karl Rove being quoted in Garbage Times saying that they create their own reality.

    Three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians died, but our MSM is still fluffing Rs and a majority of white people still vote for the R party no matter how off the rocker their candidates get

    I found out thanks to Balloon Juice that before there were Freedom Fries there was Liberty Cabbage.

  22. 22.

    Anyway

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Chaps my ass that she found it so easy to rehabilitate her reputation and image, to the extent that rehabilitation was even necessary.

    She always had that sweet sweet Exxon $$$ gigs and a cushy sinecure with the Hoover Institute.

    No limit to RW reactionary sugar daddies and the hundreds of millions they spend propping up that corrupt media eco-system

  23. 23.

    TaMara

    I suppose it’s a good thing I did not know you then…because the moment my brother was shipped to Iraq, I was angry at anyone who supported that garbage, including my own mother (I mean how the fuck??).  And I’m not over it.

    If the secret service could read minds, I’d be under investigation until the day cheney joins rumsfield and powell. And I don’t care how many mints Michelle and shrub share, fuck him, too.

  26. 26.

    PJ

    @Elizabelle: And Richard Perle and Bill Kristol.  Kristol has come around a little bit to see the awfulness of some Republican policies, but I’ve never heard him apologize for his role in advocating for and selling the Iraq invasion.

  28. 28.

    sab

    @PJ: Condi Rice only believed whatever her boss of the moment believed. She never had actual opinions of her own.

  29. 29.

    Devore

    And I’m still waiting for an explanation why we did invade.  Was it really just hubris or greed?

  31. 31.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Anyway: She was doing winking cameos on 30 Rock with super-lefty Alec Baldwin, and I can’t exactly remember when the NFL boosterism started, but I guess it’s less surprising that a bunch of (mostly) RW white billionaires wanted her to be their public face. I think she’s a part owner of the Broncos now?

  32. 32.

    sab

    @TaMara: That’s how we felt when my stepsons’ best friends deployed. 18 years old and off to war because they had already signed up in high school. Hoping for veterans benefits toward college. Instead a war. One came back an angry mess. The other is career Army.

    American media pundits say ” No one knows actual soldiers.”  What fucking elitist world do they live in.

    ETA Also too, the families of soldiers I know deployed repeatedly to Afghanistan were thrilled when Biden pulled them out.

  34. 34.

    Roger Moore

    @Devore:

    Was it really just hubris or greed?

    The Iraq War happened because there was something in it for every Republican constituency.  The military industrial complex got to sell lots of bombs.  The neocons got to use Iraq as an example for anyone who defied the US.  The Christianists got to invade a Muslim country.  The people angry about 9/11 got to beat someone up.  The oil companies got their chance at Iraqi oil.  The grifters got their chance to swipe endless piles of reconstruction money.  If it had only appealed to one part of the party but another had hated it, it probably wouldn’t have happened.  Because there was something for everyone, it was inevitable.

  35. 35.

    Elizabelle

    @PJ:  Does not seem Bill Kristol ever apologized or acknowledged his role.  Tweets from 2019.

    May 25, 2019.  Bernie Sanders: Have you apologized to the nation for your foolish advocacy of the Iraq war?

    Kristol response:

    Nope. I dislike quasi-Stalinist demands for apologies. I’ve defended and will defend my views on Iraq, and Syria, and Milosevic, and the Soviet Union, and more, as you defend yours. How about a real debate on U.S. foreign policy–I’ll ask for no apologies!–on a campus this fall?

    Jen Rubin scolded Bernie for his tone.

    This is perfect example of why ungracious, inflexible Bernie would be disastrous candidate. Just on a human level he is unlikeable

    All found at this tweet:

    https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1132626633637154816

  37. 37.

    sab

    @Devore: Dick Cheney thought it was the first step towardsi the necessary war of confronting China. We need to careful about how much we like Liz Cheney. Her father is nuts. She probably is too…

    300 million people take on well over a billion for no particular reason other than dueling hegemonies.

  38. 38.

    PJ

    @Devore: ​
      The original plan was to establish the Pax Americana, and, after 9/11, it had the added benefit of making the Arabs “suck on this.”

  39. 39.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Devore: erstwhile Washington Post liberal columnist Richard Cohen

    On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

    less well-known than Friedman’s “Suck. On. This!”, but from the same mental-emotional space as a reaction to 9/11.

  41. 41.

    PJ

    @Elizabelle: Fuck him.  For Kristol, and all these lying, stupid fucks, though a non-believer, I hope there is a hell, and we are all judged according to our actions.

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    It was a strange time, just so much through-the-looking glass stuff in the news.

    We bought our house in ’98 and our mortgage banker was always sending us her newsletter trying to drum up more business. She was, or claimed to be, quite plugged into the rumblings at the Pentagon from her discussions with people buying and selling houses in NoVA.

    Fall 2002 – (roughly) “Consider refinancing soon, noises out of the Pentagon indicate that the invasion will start in a few weeks which will probably drive up interest rates…”

    Normal people were on edge because of the October 2022 DC Sniper Attacks, after the Anthrax attacks that messed up the DC mail (and killed a bunch of people) the year before.

    Etc.

    I’m sure just about everyone in DC understood that W was going to drive things to the brink with Saddam. Many good people in Congress didn’t like it, but reasoned that: W’s the CiC and undercutting him by not passing the AUMF would mean that the chance that Saddam would finally back down without a war would be lost. Others seemed to think that since GW1 was “quick and easy”, then GW2 would be as well because reasons. Others were trying to figure out how to recover from the tech bubble bursting and figure out how to get their assets back up and really didn’t have time for W’s daddy issues.

    Fear makes peoples do stupid things. We, as a public, need to be smarter, and that means finding ways to fight disinformation…

    Thanks for this place, John (and everyone).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  50. 50.

    Alison Rose

    I remember going to an anti-war march in the City and seeing this massive crowd against the invasion, and thinking, how can they ignore this many people.

    I was young(-ish) and had not yet realized that it is painfully easy for the GOP to ignore people when those people do not agree with them.

    I like David Corn’s article today. He notes some of the past statements of error and regret from various war cheerleaders, but says:

    Let’s give one or two hurrahs for those who can declare they got it wrong. Yes, this conclusion is now obvious, given that no significant WMDs were found in Iraq after American bombs and troops were unleashed on the country and that the invasion, contrary to the assurances of the Bush-Cheney administration and its cocksure neoconservative allies, did not trigger a flowering of democracy in the Middle East.

    Yet it’s one thing to acknowledge a misstep in policy judgment; it’s quite another to admit to abetting a fraud. Many of the Iraq War regretters insist they pursued the war in good faith predicated on solid assumptions and propelled by genuine concern for US security. What they don’t confess to is being part of an effort to purposefully bamboozle the American public and whip up support for the war with scare-’em tactics and disinformation. Frum, who has become a pal of mine during the Trump era, provides a good example. In his essay, he challenges the Bush-lied-and-people-died view, noting, “I don’t believe any leaders of the time intended to be dishonest. They were shocked and dazed by 9/11. They deluded themselves.”

    This self-delusion argument—we believed what we said—is often packaged with the contention that the Bush-Cheney crowd rendered their decisions on the basis of flawed intelligence that stated Iraq had WMDs,  and, thus, these leaders did not intentionally misrepresent the threat.

    But this is a phony narrative. The intelligence assessments that suggested Iraq possessed significant amounts of WMDs and was close to developing a nuclear weapon—produced under tremendous pressure from the Bush White House—were often disputed by experts within the intelligence community. (And later, but before the invasion, these findings were challenged by UN WMD inspectors who were scrutinizing Iraq.) Yet Bush, Cheney, and their top aides (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and others) embraced these problematic evaluations, as well as assorted and unproven (or disproven) reports, in order to justify the case for war and—here’s the key point—oversold these findings to the public. Meanwhile, they issued overwrought statements about the supposed threat from Iraq that either were unsupported by the faulty intelligence or utterly baseless. In short, Bush and Cheney did lie, and those that marched with them toward war were part of a campaign deliberately fueled with falsehoods.

  51. 51.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: This is a stupid argument, but “don’t let a crisis go to waste” is a very useful and productive philosophy. If we’d turned that energy towards actually productive things (rooting out AQ in intelligent ways, helping with education, care and the economy for a lot of these developing nations) it would have been great. Bush could have called for and gotten a complete overhaul of Americorps and similar projects.

    Instead, he wanted to go kill a bunch of brown people.

  52. 52.

    sab

    I was a big Baghdad Burning fan back in the day. I had known Iraqis visiting and also immigrating to America. It just sickens me what we did to them. Being Iraqis, they seem to be building a country back after a generation and a half of total chaos.

  53. 53.

    topclimber

    I suspected WMD was a bad faith argument and that the motive behind the war was to advance the GOP agenda across the board, but I KNEW Iraq would not become a democratic model because the neocons wanted to do it on the cheap. No war taxes, no acknowledgement that we would have to occupy Iraq like we did Germany after WWII with hundreds of thousands of troops AFTER pacification.

    Overnight we went from good guys chasing terrorists to the usual suspects prospecting for oil. I wonder if that switch created a few tankies. Ya think?

  57. 57.

    Elizabelle

    Richard Perle is still alive.  As is James Baker.  Funny, I thought both had gone on to their rewards.

    I remember James Baker writing a big op ed along the lines of “It’s the Oil” in the runup to the Iraq War.  Cannot find it so far, but it’s got to be somewhere.  Assuming it was in the WaPost; maybe the FTF Judith Miller NY Times.  Will check both those sites.

  58. 58.

    MomSense

    @NotMax:

    Can we add the a$$hole “war czar” Doug Lute and Paul the war will pay for itself Wolfowitz?

    Fuck those guys

  59. 59.

    Elizabelle

    @Alison Rose:  Thank you for the David Corn link.  Will read it.

    And yeah.  It was stunning that so many antiwar protestors were ignored.

    And then, years later: all the women in pink hats, protesting TFG and for abortion rights.  But:  Alito decision!

    GOP gonna do what GOP gonna do, unless there is some way to stop them.  And there is not always, unfortunately ….

  60. 60.

    Roger Moore

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    Makes you wish Bush v Gore had been decided differently

    It makes me wish elections in Florida were run by people who cared about getting the election done right.  There’s every reason to think Gore would have won if Florida elections were run properly.

  61. 61.

    suzanne

    Mr. Suzanne and I met in 2008. We both agreed, years later, that neither of us would have dated the other if either of us had supported it.

    Twenty years later, we have the term “toxic masculinity”. It seems to me that the push to go to war after 9/11 was, in many ways, toxic masculinity writ global.

  62. 62.

    PJ

    @Elizabelle: Baghdad was never a threat to the US.  Even if Iraq had had WMDs (and there was no credible evidence they did), they had no way whatsoever to deliver them to the US.

  63. 63.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Alison Rose: Yep, they lied. A lot. And they were so damned smug about it all. I recall that those of us opposed to the run up to the war were just shit on by everyone – the Republicans, the press, etc. And even after the war had gone on long enough that everyone, EVERYONE, knew that it was all bullshit, somehow it was STILL our fault.

    And not one of them was ever or will ever be held accountable.

  64. 64.

    karen marie

    @JustRuss: Anybody with half a brain should have seen it was a setup.  While it’s nice to see people admit they were wrong, the people who are in fact responsible have never admitted they were wrong or have done so with qualifiers so ridiculous that it’s clear they’re not actually admitting they were wrong.

  66. 66.

    Alison Rose

    @suzanne: I mean…Bush and the “Mission Accomplished” banner were very much a form of that. Not only did they launch this bullshit war, but then almost immediately were like WOOHOO LOOK WHAT WE DID WITH OUR BIG SWINGING DICKS. One of the zillion reasons I hate Trump is that because of him, Dubya is no longer the worst president we’ve had.

  67. 67.

    Tim in SF

    Scott Ritter is a fucking scumbag piece of shit kid touching Putin apparatchik

    I thought it was suspicious the awful kid stuff was found on his computer right about the time he was blowing the whistle on the Bush Administration. People I listened to at the time suggested it was a smear job. Working in IT at the time, I knew how easy it was to put material on an unsecured computer, and how most computers were laughably unsecured. Since I figured the rest of the justifications were bullshit, and since I didn’t trust Bush at all, and since this was the wrong fucking country, it seemed entirely plausible.

    I don’t know about the Putin stuff, though. So maybe he really is a piece of shit. I never heard is name much after his computer troubles, so I figured it was either real or a very successful smear job.

  71. 71.

    Roger Moore

    @suzanne:

    It seems to me that the push to go to war after 9/11 was, in many ways, toxic masculinity writ global.

    That was certainly a factor.  There were people who wanted a war because they were mad and wanted to lash out, but there were also a lot of people who had more calculated reasons for wanting a war.

  72. 72.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @NotMax: i didn’t even notice that and the weird part is that the person I think off right after Bush/Cheney and Iraq is Condi. Ugh. I cannot believe this garbage woman was considered to become the head of the NFL even though she would have done less damage there. The 20th anniversary just makes me sad. Especially on top of TFG and Ukraine. We need to improve as human beings. We really are a sucky species. So many lives lost for no reason and so many resources wasted.

  74. 74.

    Roger Moore

    @Tim in SF:

    I thought it was suspicious the awful kid stuff was found on his computer right about the time he was blowing the whistle on the Bush Administration. People I listened to at the time suggested it was a smear job.

    It’s hard to know with that kind of thing.  Maybe it was a fabricated smear job because he was blowing the whistle.  Maybe it was something true they were holding over his head and released when he turned against them.  It’s easy to believe either one.

  75. 75.

    Dan B

    I knew a woman from Baghdad.  She was an anesthetist who’d put many guys under to have their ears cut off because they’d crossed Sadaam.  She was horrified when the Iraqi army was shut down.  Having hundreds of thousands of young men suddenly with no job or income would result in resistance.  She was correct.

  76. 76.

    ColoradoGuy

    The background story is there was a real fear of Peak Oil at the time, and the oilmen were pretty freaked out about it, fearing an imminent collapse of civilization. Since the data (at the time) showed a USA that was tapped out and permanently heading downward, the country had to secure overseas sources that firmly in US hands.

    Bush and Cheney were oilmen, and the Peak Oil fears in the industry were quite real. What everyone missed was the rapid onset of the Fracking Revolution, and the worldwide decoupling of economic growth from fossil-fuel consumption (which happened for the first time in human history around 2005, breaking a two-century trend line). The decoupling was due to a worldwide increase in energy efficiency, the natural gas revolution, and the slow arrival of clean alternatives … just in time.

    The other reasons for invading Iraq, and controlling its oil output, were transparently bogus, and only a thin smokescreen for the far more serious and consequential real reason. If Peak Oil had played out like the scenarios of the day, we would all be in a hell of a lot of trouble right now, facing a worldwide industrial collapse. Instead, we’re facing a much more drawn-out damage to the Earth itself, and it’s carrying capacity for humanity.

  77. 77.

    different-church-lady

    NYT: “Why did the U.S. invade Iraq 20 years ago?“

    Hey, I got an idea, why don’t you go ask JUDITH FUCKING MILLER, EH?

  80. 80.

    Dan B

    I recall W was angry at Sadaam because he’d threatened his father.  If he’d wanted to go after AL Quaida he would have attacked Saudi and Pakistan plus Afghanistan.  The Saudis were family friends so unpossible.

  81. 81.

    Geminid

    @MomSense: Doug Lute? I wonder if you meant Paul Bremer, who was put in charge of US operations in Iraq several days after Baghdad fell. Bremer did a lot to ruin an already bad situation.

    Bremer’s arbitrary decision to dissolve the Iraqi Army was an especially egregious mistake. The US had dropped a huge amount of leaflets before and during the war, urging Iraqi soldiers and officers to surrender, and assuring them they would not be punished for Saddam Husseinen’s misdeeds. When Bremer dismissed them all, he not only attacked their livelihoods, he insulted their honor. The insurgent movement could not have asked for a more potent recruiting tool.

  82. 82.

    geg6

    @Chief Oshkosh:

    Exactly.  I had friends with whom I argued with in the run up to the invasion who didn’t speak to me for several years because I was such an un-American commie and didn’t give a shit about 9/11 and so many other horrible things.  I tried everything to try to convince them it was all lies.  Hell, I was in tears, I was so passionate about how this was wrong, wrong, wrong and that Iraq would not be just a disaster for Iraq, but for the US, too.  Wasted lives on both sides, billions down the drain, loss of any prestige or moral authority on the world stage we had left after Vietnam…just nothing good could come from it.  And I was ostracized, not just by my government, but so many I knew in my personal life.  For me, the only good thing that came from it was that I didn’t have go through cutting any ties with those people in 2016.

  83. 83.

    sab

    @suzanne: Yikes. I was already, as an old person when we went to war. We( spouse and me)  were both of the Vietnam war generation. My husband’s oldest brother went there and came back  adamant that his two younger brothers wouldn’t experience what he had experienced.

    My own brother was so young that he missed the draft by months. So he having missed Hell, is a RWNJ. God somehow smiled on him because he has spent his life striving to be rich. He cannot understand why my husband, whom he likes, can barely bring himself to be civil to my brother.  Husband had lots of friends and a brother in Vietnam. My brother knew nobody. Too young mostly, but also because he could have known older and chose not to.

    Iraq war. My husband had his brother and many friends. We were adamantly against it and protested but nobody gave a shit.

  84. 84.

    Elizabelle

    @Geminid:   But Bremer has a Harvard MBA.  And Phillips Andover!  And Yale undergrad.  How could he get it wrong?  LOL.

    Yeah.  Dreadful decision.  And it was apparently his, because no one else ever tried to claim credit.  Much as everyone pointed to GHW Bush for the Dan Quayle selection.  (And who knew that DQ would eventually look like a good guy in the January 6th aftermath?)

  85. 85.

    Jay

    Argued here for a couple of years against both the Afghan War and Dubya Dubya Me Too.

    The pro war people would always start with Argument A, I would blow that up, they they would go to B, boom, C, boom, D,E,F,G, then go back to A. It got to the point that I had a Word document that I could cut and paste from. It became very clear that most of the posters here at the time had been Faux News propagandized to the n’th degree, and then of course, there were all the other hate and abusive posts that would pile on.

    So I left here and a bunch of other sites, this is the only one I came back to, a decade later, because it had changed.

  87. 87.

    AlaskaReader

    @Baud:Perhaps you’d prefer a book instead:

    Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq Hardcover – July 3, 2012

    By Greg Muttitt

  92. 92.

    Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride

    @schrodingers_cat: This isn’t meant to be a criticism of you in particular — I’ve just been waiting for anyone to say Karl Rove made that speech about “creating our own reality,” because it’s always seemed extremely unlikely to me that he was the one who said it.

    First, the reporter identified the speaker only as something like “a Bush insider with close ties to the administration,” which could have fit dozens of people as well as Rove.

    Second, the reporter never confirmed that the speaker was Rove.

    Third, Rove always denied it (meaningless, I know).

    Fourth, and most important to me, it just doesn’t sound like anything we ever heard Rove say in public, starting with the word “empire.”  As far as I can recall, Rove’s only interest in foreign policy was whether it could generate an issue that would help Bush get elected or reelected.  All that talk about “empire” and “creating our own reality” sounds to me a lot more like the kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage generated by the neocon deep thinkers the Bushies brought in with them.  As it happens, one of those people was Bush’s chief of staff when the story came out:  Scooter Libby.  What’s more, the statement strikes exactly the pompous, portentous, pseudo-poetic note of statements that we later learned Libby had made under his own name.  (Remember “When the aspens turn, they all turn together”?)  So, unless there’s hard evidence to the contrary, Scooter is my candidate for author of the “creating our own reality” BS.

  93. 93.

    Jay

    @Baud:

    the short summary, It was all about the Oil.

    Not just the never ending pre-war war, but the invasion, the botched occupation, and Iraq’s post occupation political instability.

  94. 94.

    Baud

    @Jay:

    Repeating that it was all about oil is not an explanation of how it was all about oil.  That’s fine. I give up.

  95. 95.

    AlaskaReader

    @Baud: It’s not complicated, nor does it need much of an explanation, stabilizing oil markets drove not only US decisions, it drove Tony Blair’s involvement too.

    Just because their efforts didn’t pan out as efficiently or just exactly as the perpetrators had wished, that doesn’t mean gaining control of the oil wasn’t what drove them to make the attempt.

    After all this time the documentation has become available, and because of some people’s reticence, or apathy, either one, people still want to believe it wasn’t about gaining control of commercial markets.

    The myth that it wasn’t about oil should be ended, that myth serves no good purpose.

  96. 96.

    sab

    @schrodingers_cat: Come on! India is huge complicated  nation that speaks a bunch of languages and is religiously complex. And Baloonjuice is supposed to have words of wisdom?

    My niece just killed herself two days ago, hoping to maximise the trauma to two her kids. This is who she is and was. My husband is devasted. She was his sister’s daughter. I cannot help to think good riddance.. She was a horrible toxic person.

    Wonderful kids. Girl fled to Canada. Boy stayed behind to help, so that she could blow up his life. I rarely get angry at suicides, but this one was a toxic bitch her whole life.

  97. 97.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I think Roger Moore nailed it.

    The Iraq War happened because there was something in it for every Republican constituency.

    The military industrial complex got to sell lots of bombs.

    The neocons got to use Iraq as an example for anyone who defied the US.

    The Christianists got to invade a Muslim country.

    The people angry about 9/11 got to beat someone up.

    The oil companies got their chance at Iraqi oil.

    The grifters got their chance to swipe endless piles of reconstruction money.

    If it had only appealed to one part of the party but another had hated it, it probably wouldn’t have happened.  Because there was something for everyone, it was inevitable.

  98. 98.

    Gemina13

    @TaMara: ​
     

    A good friend was married to a medic who was stop-lossed twice, serving in the Green Zone. They lost two friends in Fallouja. In 2004, on finding out her parents voted for Shrub, she informed them that if anything happened to her husband, she would consider them parties to his death. That pretty much ended her relationship with them.

    We lost touch after 2007, but I’ve always hoped that he came home safely and they made a good life for themselves afterward.

  99. 99.

    Baud

    @AlaskaReader:

    Thanks for the attempt.  I guess the real explanation is complicated, because I’m unclear as to how, if everything had gone as they had hoped, the oil men would have been better off with the invasion than they would have been otherwise.

  100. 100.

    Jay

    @Baud:

    read the book. The whole thing starts with the Oil War in the 70’s, the Iranian Revolution and just keeps going on and on, involving dozens of major Corporations, Think Tanks, hundreds of politicians, Brits, Americans, Iraqi’s, Saudi’s, etc.

    The basic, Iraq contains enough untapped oil reserves to dwarf the ROW. For some, the goal was to keep them off the market, for others, it was to get them on the market, under their control. Either way, it would have reshaped geopolitics and reshaped alliances at a key point in time.

  101. 101.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: Tankie left’s answer to everything is oil. Even Vietnam. I asked this person to explain how because AFAIK Vietnam doesn’t even have oil. They just gave me some gibberish about the CIA.

  104. 104.

    Jay

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Oil Reserves in Vietnam
    See also: List of countries by Oil Reserves

    Vietnam holds 4,400,000,000 barrels of proven oil reserves as of 2016, ranking 25th in the world and accounting for about 0.3% of the world’s total oil reserves of 1,650,585,140,000 barrels.

    Vietnam has proven reserves equivalent to 25.2 times its annual consumption. This means that, without Net Exports, there would be about 25 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).

  106. 106.

    sukabi

    Thank you John Cole for being able to admit your mistakes and embrace your change without equivocation. That’s a very rare trait. You’re a good man.

  108. 108.

    grumbles

    I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies

    And look here 20 years later, you’re running a virtual commune.

    I dunno about the youth, but we successfully corrupted a middle-aged white guy.

  109. 109.

    Jay

    @schrodingers_cat:

    deriding anybody who says “Oil” as a tankie, by claiming Vietnam has no oil, when it has oil and gas, and claims on a bunch of unproven reserves in disputed waters, is an ignorant knee jerk response.

    No, the Vietnam War was not about oil, but Vietnam has oil.

  110. 110.

    Elizabelle

    @sab:  Oh sab, I am so sorry.  What trauma to have to get through and past.  Poor kids, and horrible for the family.

  111. 111.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: As I remember the times, there were W people who talked about “our way of life” being dependent on oil.  And someone today (maybe in this thread) mentioned the concerns about Peak Oil and all that would mean.

    I have a distinct recollection that someone, maybe Rumsfeld, but probably not, maybe Perle or Cheney, talking about how Iraq had the 2nd largest oil reserves so: 1) they’d be able to pay for their own reconstruction, and (unstated) 2-n) Iran wouldn’t be able to threaten the US with high oil prices anymore because Iraq would out-produce them; Presidential popularity is proportional to gas prices, so cheap gas means perpetual Republican majority; if we didn’t “secure the oil” then it would be irresponsible and America would be on perpetual decline; etc.

    So, it was a lot about the oil.  A lot.

    But, not all, IMHO.  W wanted to get rid of Saddam since the day he took over (because Saddam tried to kill HW in Kuwait in April 1993 with a car bomb). His PNAC buddies and handlers wanted to get rid of Saddam to start a new American Empire.

    Yes, oil prices went up at the start of the war. But not a lot.

    Oil prices went nuts in 2008, as the graph and Wikipedia article discussed, for reasons that had almost nothing to do directly with Iraq.

    You’re right to think that it’s complicated.

    My $0.02. HTH!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  113. 113.

    Geminid

    @Elizabelle: Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon wrote an excellent book* about the invasion of Iraq. Trainor was a retired Marine Corps Lt. General, and Gordon was chief military correspondent for the New York Times. They had a lot of very good sources, and they provided extensive behind-the-scenes accounts of the war planning and the war itself

    Trainor and Gordon could not, however, find answers to the questions: how and why was Bremer chosen, and who chose him? They even reported a scene months after Bremer took over where George Bush asked Bremer who he was responsible to and to Bush’s surprise, Bremer told him, “You.”

    My guess is that Bremer was inserted into the situation by Dick Cheney, who knew how to handle matters without leaving fingerprints. Rumsfeld would have been all for this too  because he thought that the Army commanders were outdated in their thinking, and they were hard to micromanage from the Pentagon. Bremer was put on the spot, and given the authority.

    The Army already had a decent choice to lead Phase Four (post-combat) operations in retired general Jay Garner. He had spent much of the previous decade working with the Kurds in their autonomous zone up north. The Phase Four effort was poorly planned and under-resourced, but that was Rumsfeld’s doing, not Garner’s. After Bremer took over, Garner hung on for a week or so, but he saw that Bremer would not listen to or allow him any real authority so he flew home.

     

    * Cobra II (2006), Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon. This is easily the best history of Second Gulf War I’ve read.

  114. 114.

    Devore

    Hmmm.   Peak oil and lots of hubris.   Yeah.  I forgot how everyone was convinced that peak oil was coming soon around the time of the Iraq war.  The film Syriana did a good job capturing the moment thanks    I guess the hubris was the Bush administration thinking that ruling Iraq would be easy   Idiots

  115. 115.

    Another Scott

    @sab: I’m very sorry, sab.  Broken people can do so much damage to the innocent.  I hope her kids find a way to heal.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  116. 116.

    Suzanne

    @WaterGirl: Agreed. One thing the Times pieces does do well, IMO, is underscore that there was no one cause. Lots of people wanted to do it and they were surrounded by others who wanted to do it and they all fed on one another.

  117. 117.

    Roger Moore

    @Another Scott:

    Yes, oil prices went up at the start of the war. But not a lot.

    The thing about oil is that oil prices are not an easy political issue.  On the one hand, low oil prices are good for a president’s popularity, since they have such a big effect on the overall economy.  On the other hand, there are distinct constituencies in each party that would be happy with higher oil prices.  In the Republican party, it’s the oil companies, who get windfall profits any time oil prices spike.  In the Democratic party, it’s environmental and climate activists, who want permanent high oil prices to drive people away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.  That said, I think any president would like to be the one calling the shots with oil production rather than at the mercy of the big oil producers.

  119. 119.

    AlaskaReader

    @Baud: You say that as if you would perpetuate the myth that BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies and Partex aren’t better off now they have the control they planned for long before the invasion.

    Not to mention the foreign policy ‘Serious People’ who are ever so thrilled that now we have taken the control they had planned and hoped for.

  120. 120.

    AlaskaReader

    @schrodingers_cat: Yeah, nope, that right there’s some rhetorical misdirection if I ever saw it.

    Look over there, you say.

    And you tried to assign it all to what exactly?  Tankie Leftists?

    Good luck with the myth that US imperialism wasn’t driven by the inseparable wish to control natural resources and trade wherever we stuck our nose in.

  121. 121.

    AlaskaReader

    @Roger Moore: …bit of a correction if I may,

    …the oil corporations aren’t all that concerned about the constant fluctuation in crude prices, too much of their contractual language and tax structures are built around that volatility, in short, much of the time it’s heads they win and tails they win again.

    When assessing the moves the oil corporation make it’s the long game and not the short game that drives them.

     

    And they’re doing fine, and as is usual, …while most others are not.

  122. 122.

    Manyakitty

    @sab: I’m so sorry. Sounds like a tragedy on every level. Hoping for a smooth resolution to the fallout. Peace.

  123. 123.

    AlaskaReader

    Some may have missed this back in 59, our policy advisors and intelligence folks did not:

    “After we gain independence from our Vietnam war, we hope that Soviet Union in general and Azerbaijan in particular will help us to build up our oil and gas industry as Baku’s”

     

    Ho Chi Minh – July 23th, 1959

     

    Dominos are an abstract concept,

    …capitalism and it’s need to control resources is not an abstract.

    Some just don’t wish to associate with the downside…

    Having made the bed, it’s amazing the lengths some will go to in order to not sleep in it.

  124. 124.

    Suzanne

    @sab: Oh God. I’m so sorry for you and the family. I hope you all can be good support for one another in this situation.

  125. 125.

    Aussie Sheila

    @schrodingers_cat: Hey there. I wonder in the FPs agree, if you would be willing to write a post of contemporary India? I travelled there for work and pleasure 20 odd years ago and loved it.
    Modi and his movement has been a shock to me personally, but of course, a very real danger to Muslims and anti Modi forces there.

    I still find it difficult to comprehend how such a diverse, vibrant and talented country could fall for such charlatanry and cruelty.

    Anyway, hope I can read something here soon. Cheers

  126. 126.

    Roberto el oso

    @Geminid: Bremer also took a stab at writing a brand new constitution for Iraq, all on his own, no input from anyone, as though he was cosplaying MacArthur in Tokyo. The arrogance of the 3rd-raters in the Bush administration continues to shock.

  128. 128.

    Geminid

    @Roberto el oso: Yes, as Trainor and Gordon reported in Cobra II, Paul Bremer was working for Kissinger’s consulting outfit when he was tapped as head of the US operation in Iraq.

  129. 129.

    Tehanu

    John — I remember that post, and I just wish everyone was as honest as you are. We seem to be inundated with liars and people who will do anything to avoid admitting errors in this country. Thanks for being a person of honor.

  131. 131.

    Paul in KY

    @Devore: It was to help out Israel. To remove a large Arab regime that Israel couldn’t do by herself without starting a large Mideast war.

  133. 133.

    evodevo

    @Sure Lurkalot: ​
      Why not both! Cheney wanted the oil , and the Repubs thought this was their chance to develop a conservative/libertarian paradise in the ME to pose as a staunch ally against Iran…too bad about those Shiites lol… the first thing they did in the Green Zone was send in a bunch of Young Repub types to …set up a stock exchange…

  134. 134.

    Paul in KY

    @evodevo: That was all bullshit. They wanted to destroy Iraq as a functioning state, so it could not militarily threaten Israel in any way.

  135. 135.

    evodevo

    @Devore:  They were assuming they could just insert tame Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi into the presidency or whatever, and rule through him without having to actually, you know, establish a working democracy.  Somehow they forgot all about the Shiites, or the actual desires of the Iraqis…didn’t end up well…

  137. 137.

    Kosh III

    I remember W boasting on Polish TV  in May 2003 “We found the weapons of mass destruction.”  LIAR

    Mitch Daniels the head of OMB said the war would cost 50 maybe 60 billion at most.  IDIOT.

    One of my closest friends and his family moved here from Baghdad in 2018.  The horror stories he told were appalling.

  138. 138.

    Barney

    A salute to Robin Cook (who was a former Foreign Secretary), who resigned from the British Cabinet a few days before the invasion, and told the House of Commons the government’s evidence just didn’t show any practical WMD. He sadly died of a heart attack a few years later. Here’s an article from the man who helped him write his resignation speech:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/17/robin-cook-stop-iraq-war-speech

    ”
    Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term -namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?”
    https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/statement/2003/0318Cook.htm

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