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Was the Iraq War "Worth it"

Was the Iraq War Worth it?

  • Yes

    Votes: 5 6.4%
  • No

    Votes: 65 83.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 8 10.3%

  • Total voters
    78

TheDemSocialist

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With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?
 
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?

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.
 
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.

My respects to the fallen. Meaning do you think it was worth the cause.
 
NO, another example of why the U.S. shouldn't be in the business of nation building.

There's nothing wrong with nation building, as long as it's done by USAID or other such agencies. The US military is trained to kill people and blow stuff up. They were never meant to be school teachers for other countries leaders, community organizers, or diplomats. Once we started trying to both, with the military, it was obvious that one of the two missions would suffer; either the winning of wars, or the building of nations.
 
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?

I believe hindsight serves little purpose, hence the "20/20" that goes along with it.

If one is to fantasize, it was foolish to think these people from the dark ages would want to be part of any form of civilized modern society in the first place.
 
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.
 
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.

That may be the best way to describe it. There's no one singular answer, and it depends on the date the question is asked.
 
NO, another example of why the U.S. shouldn't be in the business of nation building.

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.
 
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?

Hard to say.

Some good came out of it. Hussein is gone, and he was a bad man, and who knows what would have happened had he not been removed.

I'm not a fan of pre-emptively striking a country that didn't attack us first, and to my knowledge Iraq never attacked us, so in that regard, it was wrong.
 
Worth what? You could say it was worth removing Saddam from power and that's it from one perspective. You could say it was totally not worth it if you consider making Iraq a completely functional and democratic state forever from another.

Where would 'it' end to be considered worth it? Pykes and Sicot are still being blamed nearly a century later.
 
With the situation in Iraq unfolding do you believe that the Iraq War was worth it?

It is far too complicated to look at in simple black and white terms. Worth it to who? Some people have had their lives improved by it, so to them, probably yes. Would I have made the decision to go? Probably not.

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.
 
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 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...
 
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.

I would agree if it were Obama's decision.
 
My respects to the fallen. Meaning do you think it was worth the cause.

Yes. I was proud to serve, and I was proud to have brought (apparently temporary) peace and freedom to a people who had known only fear and tyranny. That was worth it.

Whether the whole war will end up producing net benefits that justify the costs?

Chou En-Lai was once asked if the French Revolution had been a good thing. His reply was "It is still too early to tell." I sort of feel that way about Iraq. We gave a jump-start to the evolution of the region, and now it is going through some serious upheaval (as evolution does tend to do), which is exacerbated by a lack of good players capable of projecting reasonable levels of security. Where they end up might determine the answer to that question.

I honestly don't know whether to be optimistic or not.
 
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...

Good point.
 
The Iraq War was not worth it from the beginning. It was based off of lies and was off from the original mission in Afghanistan. The Iraq War will mark GW's Presidency's as one of the worst political decisions in history.
 
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.

As someone who bought into the WMD "slam-dunk", I thought it was worth going into Iraq, at the time.
I think the 20-20 hindsight has made this country, as a whole, dubious about ME involvement.
That's a good thing.
 
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.
 
No way.

I was opposed to G.H.W. Bush's invasion of Iraq back in 1991.

Iraq was never a real threat to the USA and the USA has gained nothing there.

Take a look at what's going on there right now.

Those people will be fighting over religion way off into the future, with or without anyone's help.
 
Democracy in the heart of darkness.
 
The Status of Forces Agreement Explained.

 
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.

Here's your argument:

[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.

Here's why it fails:

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.
 
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