I do not know if this topic has been discussed here before but since there is lot of debate in the world on why the US went to war against Iraq, i wonder if everyone here could give their own standpoint on this issue.
I mean clearly WMD was a weak justification, so if this war is valid what is then the jusification for putting so many Amercan live’s in danger.
Thanks in advance..
A quick and easy answer is that Iraq shot at our planes several times over the course of the ceasefire. (And that’s the ceasefire from the first gulf war, which technically never ended)
A somewhat more complex answer is that it was a dictatorship that violated the rights of its people and so had no right to exist… coupled with the fact that they constantly threatened America.
Of course, don’t take it from any of this that I think Bush’s self-sacrificial strategy was a good one.
Abdul Nidal was a terrorist that Saddam Hussein offered safe haven to.
Iraq also offered safe haven to several terrorist leaders who participated in attacks on the american embassy in Beirut.
In addition, Saddam Hussein contributed bounty money to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine.
While I take issue with his prioritizing Iraq, and also the manner in which he conducted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I do think that the Bush administration would have had to fight this war at some point.
I mean clearly WMD was a weak justification, so if this war is valid what is then the jusification for putting so many Amercan live’s in danger.
The WMD was a weak justification only because we haven’t found any. If we had marched into Iraq and found the weapons caches that the Bush adminstration claimed that Iraq had then the war would have been completely justified for that reason alone. The fact that we have not found WMD raises a few questions. Did the weapons exist in the first place? Did we have faulty intelligence about them or did the Bush administration make the whole thing up? Are the weapons actually in Iraq but still hidden? Were the weapons transported to another country? I do not think that Bush and especially Tony Blair would have made such an issue of the WMD unless they truly believed that Iraq had them.
Aside from the issue of WMD, the war with Iraq was justified based solely on Iraq’s numerous violations of the cease fire agreement from the first Gulf War.
I do not know if this topic has been discussed here before but since there is lot of debate in the world on why the US went to war against Iraq, i wonder if everyone here could give their own standpoint on this issue.
The mission was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. What do you think the primary justification for going to war with Iraq was?
The mission was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. What do you think the primary justification for going to war with Iraq was?
Ha! Good one MisterSwig. Do you beleive every slogan you read?
The objective of Desert Storm was then to…cause a storm in a desert?
The mission was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. What do you think the primary justification for going to war with Iraq was?
The mission was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. What do you think the primary justification for going to war with Iraq was?
People i’ll have to admit I expected better answers than that.
Saddam never actually (before the threat of war) stood so openly against America, he took the Plestinian side just for being anti-Bush. He woud allied with any country who is willing to weaken his neighbours.
I mean countries like Iran and Soudi Arabia pose a much bigger threat of Islamic funtamentalism.
That people supposidly who America gave “freedom” even have the cheek to declare that they were better under Saddam, what do they know of freedom, Islam is what matters to them. Under Sadam “that” was suppresed (which eventhough may sound tyranical for Iraqi people) was in favour of America.
If Mr. Bush really wanted to free supressed people, it was morally justifiable to invade Iran, where frequent uprising against the Ayotullah is a reality.
I supported Mr.Bush on going to war, but the way he’s handling it and the way he has compromised on his principles, the way he sacrificed American lives to secure the religious santity of that nation…has truly disappointed me.
I know that he began right but he lost his strength somewhere in between. It would have been right to choose Iraq first for 2 reasons:
-To complete the unfinished work of the previous Gulf war.
-To use Iraq in order to intimidate other Islamic countries (it certainly worked on Libya)
But it all went wrong and suddenly “Iraqi freedom” became a slogan to save our faces in front of United Nations and the American intereast became something to be ashamed of. 
Ha! Good one MisterSwig. Do you beleive every slogan you read?
The objective of Desert Storm was then to…cause a storm in a desert?
Um … the objective of Desert Storm was to … storm the desert.
Apparently, the slogans do have some connection to the motives.
Um … the objective of Desert Storm was to … storm the desert.
Apparently, the slogans do have some connection to the motives.
Um…the objective of Desert Storm was ostensibly to drive the invading Iraqi army out of Kuwait. At that time the allies had the “moral” right to whack Sadam…he was the aggressor.
And at that time driving him from power would have been moral and practical.
BTW…Desert Storm happened not too long after Mr. Rumsfeld had been having nice cosy chats with Sadam and greasing the wheels that sold a lot of US arms to him and his army. Now there’s long term self-interest for you…well if you are an arms dealer it is…perhaps not if your a marine. 
But I am sure you are right that Mr. Bush’s motives are to free innocent peoples from individual-rights abusers. I assume therefore that he has plans to invade N.Korea, all Muslim countries and of course China, perhaps even before the election?
Doesn’t anyone realise that the allies beat Sadam and that war is over?
And that war might have been justifiable even if waged way out of priority sequence.
Now the problem is that we are fighting a completely new (guerilla) war not against a secular Sadam, but against a fundamentalist militia (i.e. we have stirred up a hornets nest not eradicated it) and compared to these yahoos Sadam will appear like a rational nice-guy.
The fact that no intelligence service (as far as I am aware) predicted this turn of events, seems to big an even bigger blunder than the WMDs seems to be turning out to be.
I disagree with the title of the thread that this war is comparable to Vietnam…it looks more like it will pan out as the equivalent of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (I mean in terms of intractability and casualties not in terms of justification).
But, the administration has done one thing right in this “war”…they have put enough spin on it to hold on to nearly all of the GOP vote for November.
To argue that Iraq was not the biggest threat is to miss the point of the argument: whether the war itself is morally justified. I think most can agree that from a strategic standpoint, we should have gone after Iran, and shouldn’t have been so sensitive in the execution of this war. But this is beside the point.
A nation is always justified to replace a less free government with a more free one when it is in that nation’s national security interests. In Iraq, our interests, besides the typical bit about stopping any possible support of terrorism there, were to begin the inevitable process of changing mideast governments and globalizing the region. That ultimately is the only way to fight the ideological battle against terrorism, and it is what you’ll find Tom Barnett spoke about here.
Ha! Good one MisterSwig. Do you beleive every slogan you read?
The objective of Desert Storm was then to…cause a storm in a desert?
Actually, it was: a desert storm of Allied aircraft that rained down bomb after bomb upon the Iraqis.
Oh, and by the way, do you know who said the following?
“We are waging a war [Operation Iraqi Freedom] to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq and, in the process, liberate the Iraqi people, because this is a regime that oppressed its people and would not get rid of its weapons of mass destruction.”
…what is then the jusification for putting so many Amercan live’s in danger.
This fight cannot be fought by airport screeners. We have to take the fight to the governments that aid anti-US terrorists. The Iraq war has positioned huge number of US troops on the border of Iran and Syria.
The target we chose is debatable. Still, better to have fought Iraq and be where we are now than never to have fought at all. If this doesn’t fix things, we might just have to nuke them.
A nation is always justified to replace a less free government with a more free one when it is in that nation’s national security interests.
Okay, lets’s first consider who is going to benefit, and who is going to pay. If the nation doing the regime replacing is not a laissez-faire government, does it have the right to seize a portion of the wealth of the productive class to replace “less free” with “more free” governments?
Since our current government is explicitly anti-wealth, anti-production, why should we support foreign adventures that drain the wealth of the producers in order to benefit people in Iraq and Afganistan that have contributed nothing to us?
I do not know if this topic has been discussed here before but since there is lot of debate in the world on why the US went to war against Iraq, i wonder if everyone here could give their own standpoint on this issue.
My own, personal view is that the general reasons for the war are outlined here, as The Project for the New American Century .
I’m sure there were a host of factors involved in the selection of Iraq, but the two major ones are:
[*] Iraq is already highly Westernized so there’s a much higher probablity than with most other similarly geographically situated countries of successfully converting it to a Western-style democracy.
We just have to keep bombing 'em till they become more democratic.
A nation is always justified to replace a less free government with a more free one when it is in that nation’s national security interests. In Iraq, our interests, besides the typical bit about stopping any possible support of terrorism there, were to begin the inevitable process of changing mideast governments and globalizing the region. That ultimately is the only way to fight the ideological battle against terrorism, and it is what you’ll find Tom Barnett spoke about here.
Oakes,
Your point is well made…and I still disagree with it!
“less free” vs “more free”…a free country might have the moral right to overthrow a non-free country. But when we come to argue over degrees of freedom and to deduce from that a “league table” of who is morally justified in overthrowing who, then I think we are on a slippery slope.
“national security interests”…most people cannot cogently explain their own self interest I am still at a loss to understand how a nation describes and definesd its self-interest. Is the US safer today than it was before the Iraqi invasion?
I don’t think that the occupation of Iraq “stops any possible support for terrorism there”. Even if it does, it has made more likely the support for terrorism elsewhere.
What is “inevitable” about changing mid-east governments? If it is inevitable, then why is it inevitably by use of force? If it is inevitable then why has the US built up and supported some of the mid-east governments that it is now inevitably it overthrows?
If our system of “free” governments and “capitalist” economies is so much morally superior to theirs (which BTW I absolutely beleive that it is) then won’t they come to this realisation themselves sooner and stronger if we don’t bomb the bejesus out of them? (e.g.USSR/Poland etc. etc)…it seems to be starting to happen in Iran.
If it were morally justifiable for a more free country to overthrow a less free country then surely the battle cry before the war should have been “we are a more free country(/alliance) and it is in our national self-interst(s) to overthrow this country so we are going to war.”? That wasn’t said, and not because it wasn’t true, but because it is not a sufficient reason to go to war.
IF one is morally right, and if one is logical, then one can also be truthful. On this occassion the Bush administration was none of the above and it is not legitimate, in my opinion, to try to rationalise away another mistake, after the fact, by explaining why it would have been right to use “these reasons” rather than “those reasons” at the outset.
Afghanistan is another matter entirely, I haven’t heard one word of protest or concern about that invasion. That is because that war was completely moral and logical and people understand that.
Brent
My own, personal view is that the general reasons for the war are outlined here, as The Project for the New American Century .
I’m sure there were a host of factors involved in the selection of Iraq, but the two major ones are:
Iraq is geographically well situated as a place in which to station an effective military/intelligence presence from which to begin the long process of eliminating and/or converting our most deadly ideological enemies, the radical Islamic terrorists.
Iraq is already highly Westernized so there’s a much higher probablity than with most other similarly geographically situated countries of successfully converting it to a Western-style democracy.
But Possbly,
These are not reasons for bombing them. These are reasons for nurturing them!
Personally, I think the discontent among young secular Iranians is just as/more promising a place to start. But invading Iraq has just strengthened the Mullah’s grip on the small minority of idiots that they can turn into suicide bombers.
One big point about the WMD that I think Bush really screwed up is that it was not our responsibility to prove that Saddam had WMD. It was Saddam’s responsibility to prove that he didn’t have them (by allowing full inspections). Saddam’s failure to do so was sufficient to show that he had violated previous agreements.
The wider issue is whether invading Iraq was in the US’s interest. In the short run, I think not. Iraq was not a serious direct threat to the US; we could have just withdrawn our planes etc. and left Iraq alone. But perhaps in the long run the invasion will be the first step in westernizing the whole middle east, which would be in our interest. (Japan after WW2 is a good example of this idea.)
BTW…Desert Storm happened not too long after Mr. Rumsfeld had been having nice cosy chats with Sadam and greasing the wheels that sold a lot of US arms to him and his army. Now there’s long term self-interest for you…well if you are an arms dealer it is…perhaps not if your a marine.
The reason for the arms sales is that Iraq was fighting Iran at the time, and we wanted to help damage Iran. The point was not just to make money for US arms dealers as many people seem to think.
The reason for the arms sales is that Iraq was fighting Iran at the time, and we wanted to help damage Iran. The point was not just to make money for US arms dealers as many people seem to think.
Godless,
I understand this. I also understand that steering the ship of state is a dirty business sometimes…and sometimes it puts you in bed with some bad apples.
However, from the perspective of the rest of the world:
the arms dealers still made there profits.
the arms that produced those profits later killed American troops.
at the time the U.S. relationship with Sadam was justified as being in the US’s self interest in the region.
by the time of the Gulf War Sadam had become a dangerous madman and brutal killer of his own people.
after the Gulf War the Kurds (who had helped the allies) were left to fend for themselves against an enraged Sadam…(was this in the USs “self interest” in the long term?
This whole concept of national self interest is really beginning to bug me. It seems to me that “national self interest” is an extremely statist concept and it is therefore gaulling to see it used by Objectivists to defend a necessarily fluctuating set of (often short-term, always political) imperatives.
Brent
Brent