Quote Originally Posted by Sargent View Post
If you want to hear my most cynical side, I would say that they were blindsided by Iraq because they could not possibly imagine the US would lob them such a gimme.
That too is possible but I'm not at all sure they now look at it as a gimme. I have little doubt they'd say they do but I suspect the reality is they're still nonplussed by the Iraq incursion. They ran it out and they aren't gone but their prognosis isn't good.
I've never prayed so much in my life as I did between October 2002 and March 2003 that we would not go into Iraq.
Not being a praying type, I was merely incensed that it was being done so clumsily. I agreed with a need to do something in the ME; Iraq made strategic sense but the fumbling in the doing was apparent. He should have said nothing about Iraq, waited until his second term and gotten a better handle on things. My guess is that he feared if he did not get a second term, he was afraid his successor might not do something he thought needed doing. In any event, I wouldn't have done it the way it was done but I do believe it or something very near it was both necessary and overdue.
I firmly believed that it would not work out so well as we hoped it would.
Me too, at least as it was being touted -- I gave it a 60:40 shot at success, decided Bush was a risk taker (he's also a an inveterate smart ass and since I'm both those things, I'm a little more receptive to him than many -- even though I disagree with much he's done) and figured it'd take three or four years. After Bremer fired the Iraqi Army and Police, I upped that to five years. 2008. I also think we're up to a 70:30 shot or thereabouts. We'll see...
I just knew that once broken, Iraq would pose nearly insurmountable problems in its reconstruction. And these would be especially difficult problems unlike those posed by Germany and Japan, because we would not have the mandate to do as we wished as the victorious can over the bad guy aggressors. But if you really look closely at the post-war history of those two countries, at the end of the day we gave them most of what they needed and had clumsily sought in war.
I'm not sure one can compare the post war WW II / Iraq situations in any meaningful way for many reasons; not least that Iraq does not feel beaten; that gives a different mind set as you noted. That and the religion angle plus the interplay of other States in the Region mean a very different environment. Add in todays mass and instant communication capabilities and parallels are difficult to discern. Of course, you did not compare them, noting the difference but to even use them as a corollary or a starting point is, I think, perhaps a bit misleading to one's own thought processes.

I also think our (well, some -- not you or I, obviously and among others) initial idea of 'victory' and a democratic highly secular Iraq have run into the wall of reality. No 'victory' in insurgencies, an acceptable outcome is all that's possible (and I hope we relearned that). Still, we could leave today and most of our strategic aims will have been achieved; it'd give the opponents a propaganda scream but the myth of "America won't fight, they'll leave when it gets tough" has been sort of put to bed -- that is totally unimportant to western thought; it is extremely important in the minds of those in the ME. Very different thought processes.
I wish I had been wrong. But unfortunately I don't think I was.
Too soon to tell but I see the half full side...
And I do not fear to say that the Iraq intervention was the worst mistake of American foreign policy.
On that, I disagree; there were many blunders in the process but the strategic issue, a response to and continuing presence in the ME, was going to be necessary at one time or another. It would have been easier in 1991; not easy, just easier. It was easier in 2003 than it will be later -- and if we leave too soon and too completely or on the wrong terms; we'll be back within ten years or so and it will be harder...
There, I've bared the depths of my historian's soul.
And made sense doing it. Thank you for the good response. I understand where you're coming from, we may disagree on some issues and I'm very much aware there are probably more people who agree with thee than with me but we're all products of where we've been and age makes a difference.

My defining moment was Pearl Harbor; my wife's was the Kennedy assassination, my second son's Desert Storm (or maybe OEF/OIF, he just says the ME?), my daughter's was 9/11. "My war" was Korea, after it Laos, Viet Nam and the other places were easy. Point being that age skews your historical perception. My pick for the greatest foreign policy fiasco of my life would be Viet Nam. It cost the US more in every respect (including respect...) than have the last seven years and it still reverberates 46 years later. My belief is that Iraq will be looked much differently and more favorably in all respects in another 40 years. Again, we'll see. In any event, being a historian, I expect you to write the definitive book on it!

Thanks again for the response.