Iraq Today.

Raising this from the Egyptian/Middle East Protest thread, how is Iraq doing these days? Its been radio silence for as long as I can remember in the news.

Last I checked there's been a solution to the leaderless Parliament, violence is still at all time lows and the protest situations that have toppled two governments and brought a third to a civil war have been relatively few and very nonviolent on both sides protestors and government.

I also forgot to mention that all remaining US presence is due to leave I think this summer as the last stages of the Bush-Maliki Security Deal of 2008 take effect.

There are protests going on there just as with the rest of the middle east. They aren't taking too lightly to the fact that Maliki is gaming the system to effectively be a dictator. The Sunni remain estranged, the Kurds are biding their time before they are strong enough to declare independence, and the Shia are being influenced by Iran.

But yes, there is less violence than before. Before being a virtual civil war.

Worried about Maliki progressing towards dictatorship. I hope someone checks him. Peacefully.

edited 1st Apr '11 3:22:16 PM by GameChainsaw

Well as for the middle east protests sweeping through the region, the Iraqi government responded with the military and live ammunition if that interests you.

Violence at "all time lows" is kinda a silly word for it in my opinion. People are dying less often in violence! Which means little if we consider that the place should not be a degenerated hell hole. I might as well tell you I only stab you three times instead of six. Is that actually any better? (Or I should rephrase, is there a non-negligible improvement?)

edited 1st Apr '11 3:50:17 PM by breadloaf

This is what I've heard on my end as well, from a friend in Iraq.

As far as violence against Americans, that's only intensified ever since we said we would be leaving. We're just getting less casualties gradually because of better technology and tactics from being there for almost a god damn decade now.

So in other words, a complete strategic failure. No WM Ds, no terrorists to attack America in the first place, increased violence against Americans in the region, failing democracy, and thousands of dead coalition forces and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis to no ultimate gain.

...well, not no ultimate gain. The invasion of Iraq showed one thing. You may make the people who take you out rue the day they decided it, but ultimately, if you push the world too far, it will destroy your bloody regime and throw it from the palace roof. They got Saddam. That is something.

EDIT: Plus, maybe the Kurds will get independence from this madness.

edited 1st Apr '11 4:10:14 PM by GameChainsaw

I certainly hope so, I like the Kurds.

BUT THEY CAN VOTE NOW!

Oh wait their democracy is corrupt is hell.

Oops?

^ Half the world's democracies (some of them in the developed world) are corrupt as hell. Poor point.

Don't give me the violence either. Turkey suffers more terrorist attacks on average than Iraq lately and Israel has had more or less daily attacks in the form of suicide bombers, car bombs, bus bombers, rocket attacks and gunbattles for decades. (Then there's The Troubles, the recently ended Sri Lankan Civil War, the Kashmir dispute, and more.)

Kurds getting independance would be a very bad thing. If they want self-rule, they have that and they should (and this does sound harsh) live with it. They don't need to try to redraw the map. Because if they do, it'll be a war that would make the Balkans look like a picnic, and it would be to their detriment, ultimately.

Iraq under Saddam was a harsh and authoritarian police state, but at least it was stable. Now, it's more likely than ever that Iraq (which is an artificial entity based around three former Ottoman provinces) will be partitioned either de jure or de facto. An independant Kurdistan alone would disrupt the balance of power, but all of Iraq? Forget about it.

The Iraq War is fumbled from the beginning...it shouldn't have even been a war. If they wanted to rid themselves of Saddam, they should have assassinated him and then manipulated the situation to get some gutless hairdo to run the show and Iraq remains stable, orderly, less death with the added benefit of not being a threat. Because what the current Iraq makes up for in freedom, it gives up in law and order.

I truely fear what Maliki is going to do once the news stops covering the protests, which you know they'll do before Iraq's day to shine occurs.

^^Thats less a credit to Iraq and more a comment on how bad the world situation really is. And comparing a near-dictatorship to the issues in certain developed democracies is laughable.

The point I was making, Major Tom, is that as an alliance, the coalition has failed in every single goal bar the removal of Saddam, and the consequences of removing him that they wanted haven't come to pass (the democracy and ultimately the freedom hasn't happened) while disorder has reigned. Admittedly Maliki isn't as bad as Saddam, not nearly, but the fact is he still potentially isn't removable by the people barring violent revolution. Though hopefully he doesn't have the authority to command the lives and deaths of his people like Saddam... and that is a worthy achievement.

But is that one achievement, the lifting of the sword of damocles from above the Iraqi peoples heads, a Pyrrhic Victory? As I said, thousands of coalition soldiers are dead. Manpower has been diverted away from Afghanistan. And the Iraqis who we wanted to incidentally help and bring the protection offered by democracy to? A million of them are dead, internally displaced, or have left the country. It is a disaster. I point to this document along with this wikipedia article, backed up by this article, among others listed at the base of the wiki page.

It cannot be denied that any victory has been costly, I would argue Pyrrhic potentially. Unless Saddam could have caused a war with another country, or slaughtered his own people to a great extent like he did with the Kurds, in which case, it most definitely was worth it.

edited 1st Apr '11 6:01:58 PM by GameChainsaw

Tom, for fucks sake man, just throw in the towel already.

Iraqi Freedom is not some glowing success. "Mission Accomplished" is a lie. All we have right now is a shaky jenga tower that we're very carefully holding in one spot. The second we take our hands off it, then it won't take long to fall to the ground.

We took a mass murdering dictator who held the region together, and now it's a region where mass murder will continue, but not under the united flag of one man. I honestly think it Iraq was better off with a maniac so ruthless that he discouraged other maniacs from popping up. Something that we haven't had, nor will we have, the balls to do.

Not sure who you're source is on how nice Iraq is these days, but I have pretty good reasons to trust mine. What you keep saying about Iraq keeps coming off as some sort of right wing propaganda, which is the last thing people need to hear.

edited 1st Apr '11 6:22:07 PM by Barkey

"Mission Accomplished" was too soon declared, but in case you didn't pay attention the last combat troops many of whom had been "in country" to borrow a term from the Vietnam-era for upwards of a year or more were the ones saying we were successful when they left last summer.

Those were US Army and US Marines saying "We brought democracy to Iraq!" in a victorious, confident tone. It wasn't Bill O Reilly or Glenn Beck or Geraldo Rivera or John Mc Cain. It was enlisted and officer personnel who had seen the place first hand.

Nobody is saying it was perfect and that we made actual hard won victories like Iwo Jima and World War Two look pathetic. But the people who made it out to be an abject failure, a repeat of Vietnam were wrong in every possible way.

It wasn't an abject failure. But it was a failure, overall. Or at best a Pyrrhic Victory.

Wasn't worth it.

And really, what the fuck did you expect us to say to the cameras? "Nah Fox, this whole thing sucked ass and we're leaving with a sense of disappointment and wasted effort."

We're not running away with our tails between our legs, but we're definitely giving it a tired sigh and a "Fuck this. We could keep going, but we wouldn't accomplish enough and we've had enough."

^Well that would have been more honest. The worst thing a person can do is lie to himself, the same applies to a nation.

The Battle of Peleliu was a Pyrrhic Victory, Operation Iraqi Freedom was not.

People keep flinging the term "Pyrrhic" around like it means any victory that wasn't flawlessly executed. A true Pyrrhic victory is it cost more than you gained. What we gained vastly outnumbers the losses. Al Qaeda is discredited in the heart of Mesopotamia, genocides of Kurds and Shia Muslims halted in their tracks never to return (we hope), a democracy in a region filled with autocratic dictatorships and theocracies, and a great many lessons in how to fight Afghanistan and future conflicts more properly. The days of the no-fly-zones over Iraq are over, the days of starvation under Oil For Food are over, the days of Saddam Hussein's brutal oppression are over.

If that wasn't worth the operation, no military operation in the Middle East will ever be worth it. Not Iraq II, not Afghanistan, not Libya, not even past issues like Desert Storm.

Thats actually a pretty convincing argument. Iraq is no longer under embargo, and the massacres have been stopped in their tracks. But there was a tremendous cost.

A close victory then? I would still contest the claim of democracy, seeing as Maliki opened fire on his own people when they protested. At least there wasn't an outright massacre, but on the other hand, there hasn't been open revolt. Has anything really been gained? Is there any more protection for individual Iraqis?

These are the questions I don't believe have been answered yet.

edited 1st Apr '11 6:50:00 PM by GameChainsaw

I don't consider it a Pyrrhic victory, but financially, Iraq was a clusterfuck thanks to Halliburton.

A fuckton of money was wasted that shouldn't have been. Financially, no, I don't believe it was worth it. We'd be in a way better place right now if we had focused on only Afghanistan and just left Iraq alone. Hell, we'd probably have Afghanistan under something resembling control if we had kept our entire focus there.

Seriously, so many of our problems are from Iraq.

No doubt the massive cost is why our economy is still in the ditch.

^^^^

Al Qaeda never had much currency in Iraq until we actually went there. They then lost said currency and are back to what they were seen as when Iraq was under Saddam. The genocide going on has had a reprieve, but the way the government there is going, it's not likely to last.

We lost a lot of money, the Iraqis lost alot more lives in this adventure than they would have under Baath rule, and the entire region has now become a tinderbox. We also put too much stock in those lessons outside simple field tactics, and because Afghanistan is not Iraq, its not working quite as well as is often said. That's pretty pyhrric to me.

And what is the point of not having a no-fly zone if there is no Iraqi Air Force (outside of helicopters) and airspace protection is still the responsibility of the United States?

edited 1st Apr '11 7:03:43 PM by FFShinra

The entire region was a tinderbox to begin with what with Iran and Syria and whatnot. (Don't act like the region was sunshine and lollipops in 2002, it wasn't) The Baath Party killed no less than some quarter million people (actual killed, not killed and displaced) and had they never done the Gulf War in the first place would have kept right at it for the next 20 years.

I never said it was sunshine and lollipops. But Iraq was the buffer state. Now that buffer is SEVERELY weakened and so It Got Worse puts it mildly.

It's worse now. And we killed more people than the Baath would have. At least under Saddam things were stable, now there's going to be upstarts vying for power, at least before this, Saddam was the baddest motherfucker on the block and that was that.

Fuck, we should have just airlifted him into Afghanistan and told him to do what he did to Iraq. That's the only way to unite and pacify Afghanistan, someone who is absolutely terrible and ruthless. Our soft touch will never accomplish that, and any government we create who has that same soft touch will fail as well.

I've got a pretty good depth of experience with Afghanis. This isn't about resistance, it's about culture. Most Afghani's don't understand or want Democracy. If you tell an Afghani that in a society, everybody has a voice and votes, they'll tell you that it doesn't make sense, and that the leader of the tribe makes the decision and he may disregard input from others at will. They'll tell you it's a silly concept, because over there loyalty to the tribe is what matters.

That type of society needs to be broken for Democracy to ever take hold. Afghanistan needs to have some degree of national identity, national pride, and national infrastructure. And the only way to make that happen is with someone like Caesar or Saddam. Someone has to beat their faces into the ground so badly for enough generations that they can kill the dissenters and brainwash the youth into supporting said regime, before the idea that Democracy Rocks(TM) could ever pop into their little hadji heads.

And that Regime isn't us, and it isn't any regime that we put into place. It's not pretty, and some people might say I sound like I'm supporting that course of action, but I'm not. I say we just let them go back to killing eachother over stupid shit until that man comes along to start that regime. When that happens, we'll be there, until then this is a losing battle unless we decide to stay another 20 years.

TLDR: We need at least another 5 or 6 years before we can make positive assumptions about Afghanistan in a post-pull out environment. I don't think American voters will hold on that long, not happily anyway.

edited 1st Apr '11 7:14:55 PM by Barkey