March 19, 2003: Mission Accomplished!

[krispos42]

And then we un-accomplished it.

Everything we needed as a nation for national security was accomplished in Iraq before we invaded. Essentially, we had already won the War on Terror in Iraq.

Consider:

• The government of Iraq was stable.
  
  
• There was no sectarian strife.
  
  
• With Iraq effectively out of power in Kurdistan, there was no ethnic strife.
  
  
• There was no Al-Qaeda in Saddam's Iraq (which does not include Iraqi Kurdistan).
  
  
• The government of Iraq actively detested Al-Qaeda and the fundamentalist Islam that compromised it.
  
  
• Iraq's role in international terrorism was limited to the ubiquitous regional support for the various Palestinian causes.
  
  
• The government of Iraq was secular and reasonably effective in doing the everyday business of government.
  
  
• The government of Iraq was free from Iranian influence.
  
  
• There was no chemical weapons program in Iraq, nor were there stockpiles of chemical weapons.
  
  
• There was no biological weapons program in Iraq, nor were there stockpiles of biological weapons.
  
  
• There was no nuclear weapons program in Iraq, nor were there stockpiles of nuclear weapons or material.
  
  
• The country's infrastructure was, if not great, at least functioning adequately.
  

The only difference between the way things were and the way things were desired to be in Iraq is that Saddam Hussein was in charge, and because of that fact UN sanctions were kept on Iraq, denying them oil revenues and a variety of technology and consumer goods.

Saddam Hussein alone and by himself was not worth the lives of over 3,000 American soldiers, 650,000 Iraqis, and the $2.25 trillion this war, occupation and rebuilding will ultimately cost the US economy. And since that is all that this war has gotten us, it wasn't worth it.

It might have been worth it, or at the least necessary, to do the things that we have done if one or more of the reasons we were given for invading Iraq was, in fact, true.

But none of them, were true. Not only that, it was known that they weren't true. And in fact, the political and governmental processes that would make this fact come out were deliberately circumvented, short-circuited, or done by cronies.

On March 19th, 2003, we had accomplished in Iraq all the goals needed for our national security. Even the vast reserves of Iraqi oil that were not being pumped were irrelevant, because other oil-producing states around the world have been compensating for Iraq's loss of oil production since the 1980 Iran-Iraq war. The fact that Saddam still breathed fresh air was not really a good thing, but wasn't a threat to national security.

So, in fact, Bush's legacy will be "Mission Unaccomplished!".

[lligrd]

1. LOL Bush Should Use This In His State Of The Union Speech

"I won Iraq once and I can do it again."

[babylonsister]

2. Now there's an e-mail that should get sent out to the delusional. nt

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. None of that was good enough. There were gulf war scores to settle.

Settling those scores became a priority in the late '90s with the PNAC & by god they settled them, the rest be damned.

[leveymg]

4. There were no McDonalds in Baghdad.

The Iraqi people hadn't realized the blessings of democracy.

Halliburton was $5 billion poorer.

Iraqi oil was steadily pumping at a rate of 2.5 mbbl/day, keeping world oil prices at half today's level.

[krispos42]

5. Shameless Monday afternoon kick!

Ah, I do this things late at night sometimes, so it drops down off the page before most people are awake. Oh, well.

[Marnieworld]

6. If they just changed the law that Heads of State can't be assassinated

this would have all been avoided. It's all just collateral damage from a hit job.