Current Events > 20 years later, was the invasion of Iraq worth it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Stars And Stripes ponders the question today.

It's a Quagsire

Made a lot of warmongering rich people more rich AND helped erode our rights as citizens.

And by that I mean the first pokemon card to uncontroversially knock out Charizard

The war that was based on lies and destabilized the area for 20+ years? Sure, it got rid of Hussein, but at what cost? An evil asshole as he was, at least he kept Iraq stabilized.

That war was all Tony Starks fault

275,000 Iraqi civilians murdered in a low estimate

It was one of the most evil military actions of the 21st century.

It was the second biggest crime of the 21st century.

The first is oil companies and billionaires blocking knowledge and measures related to climate change.

Hundreds of thousands dead, a region ruined for generations, the western world thrown off balance by the resultant refugee crisis

But we got the movie War Dogs out of it so it's a wash

Absolutely not.

Hell no.

Iraq isn't really in the news much, so maybe.

As it happened?

Completely not worth it.

That said, was there a way to have gone in and create a stable country? Yes. And I knew how we should have handled it as the time, but no one would listen.

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We created a unitary parliamentary democracy in a country which had three different, mutually antagonistic, ethnic groups. Meaning whichever group had the biggest population could use the government to harm the other groups. Groups who would not cooperate with each other to stop it, because of their past hatred.

Whereas a federal democracy, with each group in their own, self-governed state, coupled with a limited central government... would have allowed each group to rule themselves as they wished (and would have had no mechanic to force the other groups to submit to another's dictates).

In such a scenario, things would have been a lot more peaceful.

Maybe they might have split into three independent countries, but even that would have been preferable to the violence, death, destruction, and the rise of ISIS.

It was always baby Bush's butthurt war to avenge his daddy.

The only wars worth anything were the two world wars. All the rest were a total waste of American soldiers lives. For absolutely nothing. We didn't need to get into the Korean war, we didn't need to get into Vietnam, we didn't need to go to desert storm, we didn't need to do the Afghanistan war that bush started

As any teenager could have told you at the time: no.

Rikishi posted...

The only wars worth anything were the two world wars. All the rest were a total waste of American soldiers lives. For absolutely nothing. We didn't need to get into the Korean war, we didn't need to get into Vietnam, we didn't need to go to desert storm, we didn't need to do the Afghanistan war that bush started

You realize that we only got involved in WW1 because we had loaned the Brits and French substantial amounts of money and then realized the only way to guarantee it got paid back was to make sure they won?

ScazarMeltex posted...

You realize that we only got involved in WW1 because we had loaned the Brits and French substantial amounts of money and then realized the only way to guarantee it got paid back was to make sure they won?

That's ridiculous to say. The USA joined because they had to beat Hitler and his.nazi army. I believe if the USA never joined the other allies to fight that hitler would have had a very high chance of succeeding In taking over the world.

Rikishi posted...

That's ridiculous to say. The USA joined because they had to beat Hitler and his.nazi army. I believe if the USA never joined the other allies to fight that hitler would have had a very high chance of succeeding In taking over the world.

While I don't agree with the view on the war. You are thinking about the wrong one.