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With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?
On behalf of those of us that have served in that conflict, I prefer it not be stated in such terms that might be construed as lessening the lives lost and blood spilled.
I understand what you're getting at though, and I feel that it's a valid question to ask. I just would have phrased it differently though.
NO, another example of why the U.S. shouldn't be in the business of nation building.
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?
My respects to the fallen. Meaning do you think it was worth the cause.
It wasn't worth it, then it might have been worth it, then not worth it again, then probably worth it, then we left, now it's not worth it again.
NO, another example of why the U.S. shouldn't be in the business of nation building.
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?
On behalf of those of us that have served in that conflict, I prefer it not be stated in such terms that might be construed as lessening the lives lost and blood spilled.
I understand what you're getting at though, and I feel that it's a valid question to ask. I just would have phrased it differently though.
I agree with Beaudreaux. I know what you mean, but I think there's a different way to say it. Better might be, "Do you think our strategy in Iraq ended in a cluster****?" Yeah, I like that.
In Obama's hurry to close it down, he left this country in a mess. We have troops stationed all over the damned world on a permanent basis. Why not here? This country's stability is most certainly of great importance to the United States.
Obama was dead wrong.
My respects to the fallen. Meaning do you think it was worth the cause.
I have mixed feelings over how blunt people should be. You could sugar coat it and say that brave soldiers sacrificed themselves for a cause they believed in. They fought the good fight and died heroically, and just leave it at that.
My opinion is that soldiers don't ask for much, just that their government doesn't put them in harms way unless its necessary...
And of course, it should be mentioned that "hindsight is 20-20". A better question would be is based on what we knew at the time, was it worth it to go into Iraq.
I would agree if it were Obama's decision.
I didn't know he'd been impeached and convicted. Color me surprised.
Obama isn't the president of Iraq, much less Iran (who effectively controls Maliki). Maliki refused to sign the status-of-forces agreement. Maybe Obama wanted to withdraw the troops, but it was never in his control.
[1] Any residual U.S. force we might have left in Iraq would have been minimal and in a non-combat role, somewhere on the order of 2–3,000 [troops]. . . . [2] We could not have stayed unless the Iraqi government let us stay — Iraq is a sovereign nation and the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave. . . . [3] The status-of-forces agreement, the basic framework upon which American withdrawal was based, came from the administration of George W. Bush.
These claims don’t jibe with what we know about how the negotiations with Iraq went. It’s the White House itself that decided just 2–3,000 troops made sense, when the Defense Department and others were proposing more. Maliki was willing to accept a deal with U.S. forces if it was worth it to him — the problem was that the Obama administration wanted a small force so that it could say it had ended the war. Having a very small American force wasn’t worth the domestic political price Maliki would have to pay for supporting their presence. In other words, it’s not correct that “the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave.” That contradicts the reporting that’s been done on the issue by well-known neocon propaganda factories The New Yorker and the New York Times. Prime Minister Maliki did say in public, at times, that he personally couldn’t offer the guarantees necessary to keep U.S. troops in the country, but it’s well-established that behind closed doors, he was interested in a substantial U.S. presence. The Obama administration, in fact, doesn’t even really deny it: For Dexter Filkins’s New Yorker story, deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes didn’t dispute this issue, he just argued that a U.S. troop presence wouldn’t have been a panacea.
And Hayes’s third point, that the Bush administration signed the status-of-forces agreement that included U.S. troops’ leaving at the end of 2011, is utterly meaningless: The agreement was supposed to be renegotiated eventually, to provide a long-term presence with U.S. troops in a different role. That’s why the Obama administration, however half-heartedly and with little regard for the fate of Iraq, did try to renegotiate it. And it’s why the Maliki government was open to these negotiations — the situation on the ground was very different in 2011 than it had been when Bush signed the agreement in 2008.