Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I'm fairly sure that if the Iraqi military was working with the US government, that wouldn't be the case.
I have the feel it was always overextending US resources by far and was for fake reasons bur for the majority, they were Punch-Clock Villains and plenty of (suppressed but now available) material says they were all prepared to show up for work. They just needed someone to sign the surrender agreement and be placed as the puppet ruler.
Iraq wasn't one mistake but a compounded rolling snowball of them.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 15th 2019 at 8:05:51 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Other than the fact that the Iraqi military somehow ending up on the US side may as well be a fantasy novel, even with their help it never would have worked. It would have worked a little better, but still nowhere near good.
Iraq was too dysfunctional and the power vacuum after Saddam too total for anything good to happen. Invading them destroyed any chance we had for a good resolution. Even if we had used their military as a stopgap to hold back the immediate chaos it wouldn’t have been able to do anything for the underlying issues and may have just exacerabated them in the long term or ended up just where we ended up.
The pooch was screwed in Iraq the second our tanks crossed the border.
Edited by archonspeaks on May 15th 2019 at 8:17:38 AM
They should have sent a poet.Ally?
No, but the whole thing became an example of Order Versus Chaos from the beginning. If you don't have leadership then no one can surrender their forces. If you don't have a structure for dealing with people, they will go wild.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters." The US basically completely forgot what did and didn't work during de-Nazification."
More like deliberately deleted it from the collective military memory. Vietnam scared the brass from anything that smelled remotely of nation-building, so all strategies basically stopped at when the tanks stopped rolling and fobbed anything afterwards to the State Department.
And all the previous posts here showed what happened then.
That and in general germany is a little bit to different fron iraq and other cases, the monstrosities of hitler and is crony were to damn much to tolerate for germany itself and is not like germany was hyper awfull so there is a sense of "there is other ways".
with many dictators often the mantain a semblance of order, selfish orde rand clearly depent of said leader but order none at the end, this make dictatorship look appeling, specially if you leave afterwar.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Germany is very different from Iraq. And it would be more accurate to say we tried to apply the lessons we learned in Vietnam to Iraq, but even those two were far too different.
Like I said, the hand was dealt the second we crossed the border in 2003. There was no way to escape the consequences of that action and of the structural dysfunction within Iraq.
They should have sent a poet.Awesome. That's another 4 EVs to the Interstate Compact.
I think that puts us at 193? Somewhere around that. The Compact doesn't go into effect until 270 to avoid handcuffing its member states without having enough votes to actually win.
Once we hit that number, though, that's it. 270 votes tied to the Compact, Compact goes into effect, and the electoral college functionally does not exist anymore.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
![]()
Enough with the sealioning, please. It’s common knowledge that the counterinsurgency tactics we used in Iraq and Afghanistan were informed by our experiences in Vietnam and Africa.
Sure, the basic principles are similar, but that doesn’t exactly say much. The basic principle of war is kill the enemy but you wouldn’t say that WW 1 and the Gulf War are very similar.
Iraq has a whole host of structural and religious issues that Germany didn’t. Germany had a very different ideology that needed to be removed, a much different position vs. its enemy, the list goes on.
Not firing party members is a good idea, but the structural issues in Iraq ran so deep it probably wouldn’t have even mattered.
Edited by archonspeaks on May 15th 2019 at 9:31:03 AM
They should have sent a poet.The comparison for Iraq isn’t Germany, it’s Bosnia and the rest of former Yugoslavia.
Firing the entire Iraq military (without taking their guns away) did a ton of damage. Iraq was always going to be bad because of Saddam and the nature of the state, but we made it worse with a lot of blindingly stupid mistakes and a total lack of long-term planning.
The occupation was originally envisioned to last months, when we know from the past that one needs to measure nation building in decades.
Edited by Silasw on May 15th 2019 at 4:35:51 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
They successfully became more integrated with the European markets through capitalist reforms.
![]()
![]()
![]()
I used Germany as a comparison because like in Germany, a lot of people were technically members of Iraq's ruling political party.
Turns out blanket-firing everyone without checking why they're even in the party is not a smart idea.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 15th 2019 at 7:10:17 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyNo Sympathy for them, though if they vote Democrat/third party/stay home it does some good.
But I am past feeling pity for Trump voters and/or Republicans at this point.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

When Germany was occupied, they didn't just fire everyone who might be linked to the Nazi party - mostly because a lot of jobs had required you to join the party - but instead introduced a tiered system, with the people at the top going to the gallows at Nuremberg.
In Iraq they simply threw nuance out of the window.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 15th 2019 at 4:56:42 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from history