If this offends anyone I do appologize but, what would be the affects of Saddam Hussien remaining in control of Iraq
As for what effects us not invading Iraq would have had, I think it would have led to a lot less anti-Americanism, particularly in the mideast. Radical Islamism would be much less popular, and al-Qaida would have fewer donors.
It's pretty much accepted as fact that the 2003 Iraq war was a spectacular success for Iranian Intelligence & their disinformation campaign and an utter humiliation for the CIA & MI6.
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It is????????
It's pretty much accepted as fact that the 2003 Iraq war was a spectacular success for Iranian Intelligence & their disinformation campaign and an utter humiliation for the CIA & MI6.
Seconded; most of the really recent PoDs degenerate into political discussions (if they're blatant political flamebait to begin with) and those kinds of discussions belong in political chat.[proposes new rule: counts as AH only when POD is at least 15 years back]
The main change to the timeline would be how events in Iran unfold. It's pretty much accepted as fact that the 2003 Iraq war was a spectacular success for Iranian Intelligence & their disinformation campaign and an utter humiliation for the CIA & MI6.
SourceWatch said:In December 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the administration of George W. Bush actually preferred INC-supplied analyses of Iraq over analyses provided by long-standing analysts within the CIA. "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency.," he wrote. "The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war." Much of the pro-war faction's information came from the INC, even though "most Iraq hands with long experience in dealing with that country's tumultuous politics consider the INC's intelligence-gathering abilities to be nearly nil. ... The Pentagon's critics are appalled that intelligence provided by the INC might shape U.S. decisions about going to war against Baghdad. At the CIA and at the State Department, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, is viewed as the ineffectual head of a self-inflated and corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but not much else."[5]
"The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," said Vincent Cannistraro a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked informationthat goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."[6]"
"What he did was pander to the dreams of a group of powerful men, centered in the Pentagon, the Defence Policy Board the vice president's office, and various think tanks scattered around Washington,² according to Thomas Engelhardt, a New York writer who produces a daily web log on the war. The thing that needs to be grasped here is that since 1991 these men have been dreaming up a storm about reconfiguring the Middle East, while scaling the heavens (via various Star Wars programs for the militarization of space), and so nailing down an American earth for eternity. Their dreams were utopian and so, by definition, unrealizable. Theirs were lava dreams, and they were dreamt, like all such burning dreams, without much reference to the world out there. They were perfect pickings for a Chalabi. Of course, the fact that Chalabi is now scarcely mentioned as a possible political force in Iraq is barely acknowledged by the hawks who still insist, albeit with less conviction, that things are going their way and that there is no reason to panic. --Jim Lobe, 11 July 2003 [8]