WI: US Invades Iraq in 2003 With Force of 500,000?

You know jmc, I had a response to your whole post, but then I came to this part:

So you believe that Obama wanted Iraq to fall apart and for genocide to happen just so he could make Bush look bad. I'm not even sure how to respond to that. I mean, this is borderline conspiracy theory thinking here and I honestly don't think I can even have an intelligent debate with you if this is what you really believe.

I mean, I am as big a critic of the Bush administration as anybody, but even I wouldn't make an accusation like that against him. It's one thing to accuse someone of being incompetent and thus causing horrible things to happen, but to accuse someone of wanting genocide to happen for petty reasons.

Wow.

I'm done.

He wanted to be proved right that the Iraq War was evil and believed as he said it would break into genocidal war when we left and that we had to leave ASAP.

It's going too far to say he wanted to see genocide happen, but he believed it would happen once we pulled out and I believe he saw the possibility of it occuring as a vindication of his original opposition to the war.

This was early Obama mind you. I think by 2013 he was just hoping to keep the Syrian civil war from spilling over while doing as little as possible.

So no he didn't want genocide to happen, he believed it would in 2007 when we left, he believed we should do nothing to help head it off and I believe he thought it would vindicate his original opposition to the war. The most positive thing I will ever say about Obama is I think he has grown somewhat from those years.
 
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a good apolitical look at what is going on in Iraq right now

James Dunnigan hosts Strategypage. Wargamers know him as a game designer that invented, along with Avalon Hill (who preceded him) the entire board war game publishing business. Dunnigan has been around in other words since the 1960s studying military affairs. Back during the surge during the War in Iraq, he was the first to write that the Surge and the change of heart by the Iraqi Sunni militias, was turning things around. So is as unbiased as it gets regarding military affairs (and any bias typically is toward the conservative side of politics)

Basically he reports several thousand US troops, or in effect a special operations brigade with logistical support currently in Iraq. He also gets into how the rules of engagement have changed since the US was asked to come back in

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iraq/articles/20160214.aspx
 
He wanted to be proved right that the Iraq War was evil and believed as he said it would break into genocidal war when we left and that we had to leave ASAP.

It's going too far to say he wanted to see genocide happen, but he believed it would happen once we pulled out and I believe he saw the possibility of it occuring as a vindication of his original opposition to the war.

This was early Obama mind you. I think by 2013 he was just hoping to keep the Syrian civil war from spilling over while doing as little as possible.

So no he didn't want genocide to happen, he believed it would in 2007 when we left, he believed we should do nothing to help head it off and I believe he thought it would vindicate his original opposition to the war. The most positive thing I will ever say about Obama is I think he has grown somewhat from those years.

curious how you know all these things...

As to the belief that it would turn into a genocidal war. A lot of people thought that it might happen, particularly as by 2007 a huge number of the Sunni middle and upper classes had already fled. Most people just assumed there would be ethnic cleansing, and there was even by 2005.

The point some of us in this thread have made is that if protection of life and property had existed early on in the occupation, the killing and ethnic cleansing would have been sharply reduced from the start. The only way to reduce that would have been better policy, which would have included sending in more troops (what the Army Chief of Staff asked for and got fired for asking for), and that ultimately Rumsfeld made the decisions, and Bush as President is responsible for the ship of state, so thus is responsible for what happened as a result of invading Iraq.

The Right in the US has been accusing Obama for the last 4 years for all that went wrong in Iraq after we 'won'. Even though he wasn't even in the Senate yet when we invaded to begin with. Even though there was no public support in the US to justify our continued presence in Iraq in 2008 not to mention that officially and in public, the Iraqi government was ok with the US leaving

and even though ultimately poor policy decisions by the Iraqi and Syrian government made the establishment and expansion of ISIS possible.

yes, that indeed seems completely non partisan and objective to me
 

gaijin

Banned
If it weas Obama that "lost" Iraq by removing US troops, why is it that it was actually Bush that agreed to the complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_U.S._troops_from_Iraq

2008 U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement

In 2008 the American and Iraqi governments signed the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, after being sought by the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government. It included a specific date, 30 June 2009, by which American forces should withdraw from Iraqi cities, and a complete withdrawal date from Iraqi territory by 31 December 2011.[13] On 14 December 2008 then-President George W. Bush signed the security agreement with Iraq. In his fourth and final trip to Iraq, President Bush appeared in a televised news conference with Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to celebrate the agreement and applauded security gains in Iraq saying that just two years ago "such an agreement seemed impossible"

Sounds like a Dolchstoss legend in the making (just like the US didn't lose the war in Vietnam, it was those damm hippies).

Maybe Dolchstoss is not the correct word, partisan bullshit would be more correct.
 
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