Jackals or wild dogs is a better desciption for Al Qaeda. Not for the Baathists in Iraq. They were mosquitos - kept at bay with a nice fresh dose of DDT every so often.

Agree that Iraq was not strong, but was relatively stable, much more so than what we are seeing today. Unloved dictators are dime a dozen in the world, it does not mean we are invading their countries however. I suspect our political beliefs are different and that's good.

Where we part ways - Gathering bases is a do-nothing plan for me when we have bases scattered in the region from Turkey to Oman to Kuwait to Qatar to Bahrain to Kyrgystan...how many is enough? We could have done enough damage to non-state terror groups without invading Iraq for additional bases (do you really believe that?) We could have kept a close eye on Iraq, built up a Division size presence on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. Hell, we had a great deal of military surveillance on the place as is...after 13 years, we should have known everything about the damned country.

I don't believe the American public will allow us to stay in Iraq for 15 years, much less 30. We shall see.






Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Not really, but I'm incredibly easy. Not lions then. How about a pack of Jackals -- or even wild dogs? Still propose to do nothing? If so, we have a different approach to life.If you were under that illusion, as were many, not my problem. IMO, they were neither stable nor strong but they did have the misfortune to have an unloved dictator and be smack dab in the geographic center of the ME, they thus became an easy target.Stability in the region was not the issue -- export of nominally Islamic fundamentalist terrorism to the rest of the world was the issue and, in particular, attacks on the US (read: Afghanistan, here we come) and more importantly, US interests worldwide (as in Khobar towers, the embassies, Beirut and all that -- read Iraq and the greater ME, here we come...) were the triggers to do more than passively accept them -- which Desert Fox and such did absolutely nothing to deter. One could argue that such halfhearted foolishness merely encouraged the Jackals...

The object in attacking Iraq was not to produce a stable ME, it was to get bases in the area in order to facilitate the local development of greater stability and to deter local adventurers in the field of global terrorism by cutting the time to accomplish that from four or five generations to only two or so. May not have been the best plan in the world but it'll probably work and it is certainly vastly preferable to continuing to encourage the attacks by NOT responding significantly.Shouldn't need to be sustained indefinitely, just another 15-30 years or so. Hang in there, it'll get worse before it gets better.