Iraq war will haunt west - Emma Sky

[TheCurmudgeon]

Come on, just because the people don't have a say in their governance, it does not mean it is not "their country." That is a dangerous bit of rationalization.

You are misreading what I wrote. I was responding to Dayuhun's assertion that engaging the people becomes extraordinarily difficult when the engagement begins with you invading and conquering their country. I would argue that how difficult engaging the people is situation dependent. We had no problems working with the French after Normandy. Each case has to be looked at as a unique situation.

"We had to destroy the country to safe the country" Right? This is an easy trap to fall into, and we are better served by admitting that we did than we are by rationalizing away our most important lessons that we should be learning from this.

No, not saying that.

There is a WIDE range of options between "sit on the sidelines and do nothing" and "Invade and occupy."

This is EXACTLY what I am saying (although, apparently very ineptly). There is a continuum between the two extremes and each situation has to be examined to determine what, if anything can be done. Then once those options are fleshed out determine what, if anything should be done, based on our interests.

All the lessons learned I am seeing being captured are about how to do the wrong thing better. It is time we start putting a bit more wattage into thinking about how we could have done better things.

Agree, but we will never go there if our answer is "We should never do this again". That is the kind of cookie cutter solution I take issue with. That was the point of my comment.

I am not saying that "invade and occupy" was the right solution. But I will not concede that "invade and occupy" is the primary reason we are where we are in Iraq today. We did not need to apologize to every Iraqi for invading. We did need to have had a better plan for how we were going to occupy and how the transition was going to occur. It needed to take into account the various religious, ethnic, and economic variations and historical animosities. We could have split the country up into three separate nations rather than try to compound a mistake made when the lines were drawn by the British. We could have not engaged in DeBathification. Who knows if any of these would have worked better. But I do believe that we can learn from mistakes made after the invasion rather than see the invasion as the primary error and therefore dismiss everything that occured after as the natural cascade of events that occur as the result of that mistake.