(Jeff Danziger’s website)
“We” should never have gone there in the first place, “we” had no business doing what we did or hanging around as long as we did, but President Obama deserves credit for checking off another item on his campaign-promises list. From Andre Tartar at NYMag‘s Daily Intel:
The last U.S. military convoy of about 25 military trucks and 100 armored vehicles, carrying the remaining 500 active duty troops (most based in Fort Hood, Texas), crossed out of Iraq at daybreak Sunday. The final pullout was even kept secret from the soldiers’ Iraqi counterparts to avoid any final attacks, says the AP. But at the Kuwait border, it turned into a jubilant scene as the column of horn-honking and whooping soldiers were greeted by their fellow servicemembers. Although a final contingent of 150 or so will stay behind for training purposes, this effectively closes out one of the longest wars in U.S. history, having cost nearly 4,500 American lives and $1 trillion, with more than 20 times more Iraqi lives lost.
I personally agree with Doghouse Riley:
Point Of Order: If We’re Going To Declare The War In Iraq Over, Shouldn’t We Declare War On Iraq First?
__
Or, If We Were Going To Have The Last Person To Leave Iraq Turn Out The Lights, Shouldn’t We Have Turned On The Electricity At Some Point?
__
My favorite bit, so far: WaPo entitling a slide show “From swaggering hope to quiet departure”. Which is like seeing a review entitled “Dance incompetently staged” and discovering it was written by the choreographer.
Herewith, a thread for everyone to reminesce about your favorite Ten Years of FUBAR, Mesopotamia Model memories/grievances.
Raven
Grievance? I bought what Colin Powell was selling. I couldn’t believe a Vietnam combat soldier would lead us down that path.
eta I guess that’s not really a grievance. I just should have known better.
MikeJ
@Raven: My Lai wasn’t a tip off?
Bago
Hey, you know isn’t getting shot at anymore? Those guys.
Villago Delenda Est
How about “swaggering incompetently” which pretty much captures the gestalt around that vile shitstain, the deserting coward?
Raven
@MikeJ: yes
Silver
@Raven:
It might have helped if the LIBERAL MEDIA had bothered to inform you before, and not after, the fact that Powell was quite adept at those sorts of things…look to his bang up investigation of My Lai.
Raven
@Bago: Really?
Crisis hot line saves suicidal war veterans
Canandaigua, New York (CNN) — Suicide continues to plague the American military, with an estimated 18 war veterans in the United States ending their lives each day.
Raven
@Silver: No, I should have know better with or without any kind of media.
amk
Heh, dancing with the stars, any one ? How about american idol? Some ‘reality’ shows ?
FFrank
When I was in Baghdad, we had a manditory fun day with inter-brigade competition.
Well that’s all fine, in the USA when there is peace, it brings interunit cohesiveness. But… our unit and a couple of others that belonged to this brigade had to drive a half an hour to an hour in full battle rattle there (which wasn’t bad, it was a comfortable 90 degrees).
Then the competitions started. They had the swimming event in a nice pool that was part of the compound. But afterwards people were allowed to swim afterwards. A soldier got up on the diving board and dove in. well, he had a piece of hard candy in his throat and it went into his wind pipe and he suffocated. It wasn’t really preventable. But then the fun started where there was rioting in another part of Baghdad and the whole event got canceled. And we went back to our base with our morale at a low and a high point. Another damn death, and finally a day off.
Remember you can’t spell wimp without “MP”
magurakurin
@Raven: Definintely. If you believed Powell at his presentation at the UN you probably should only buy new cars…not used.But all dickishness aside on my part, you weren’t alone and I understand why it happened. Powell has a big bill to pay when he get’s to see St. Peter. If he had gone with his heart and just publicly said it was bullshit(he knew it was, he said so in a meeting to Rumsfeld) the war wouldn’t have happened. Because a lot of folks like yourself would have listened. You trusted Powell, he betrayed you.
Personally, I didn’t think Powell’s heart was in it when he said what he said and I assumed he was just being the good soldier and doing what the Commander in Chief was ordering. I don’t think he was ever able to fully wrap his mind around the fact that he was a civilian and his job as SOS was not to follow orders but to question them and offer his opinion.
Villago Delenda Est
@Raven:
I never bought what Powell was selling, because I knew who he was selling it for.
On September 11th, 2001, I was shocked, but not really surprised, at what happened, and knew exactly what was going on. Payback for 50 years of meddling in other people’s business is a motherfucker. Furthermore, I was not surprised at the reaction of people like the Coulter skank. Being typical asshole Americans, without the slightest inclination for self evaluation and reflection, it was all about those rotten brown Mooslim types committing a totally unprovoked attack on God’s Chosen Country.
Yeah, right. Totally unprovoked. We NEVER provoke attacks.
Pearl Harbor, btw, was provoked. It was a surprise, in part because we didn’t think the Japanese were ballsy enough. Ha, guess they showed us, eh?
“No one could have anticipated”. Yup, that’s right, Condi, you overpriced tart.
carpeduum
Nothing but crickets from John All War is Bad Cole about the end of Bush’s Iraq mess. Things that make me go hmmmm……yet again.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I think Obama deserves some big applause since a third of the country thought he would never do it and another third will call him a coward for doing it.
Raven
@FFrank: That’s strange, we lost a guy in Vietnam that dove into a pool and broke his neck.
Schlemizel
my oldest was in Afghanistan when the run up to this fiasco was in the works. The thing I remember most is his letters talking about how hard it was to get the stuff they needed because it was all going to Iraq. Even basic things like weapons and ammo where in short supply for a time.
We fucked up Iraq and Afghanistan simply to satisfy the ego of a little boy who wanted to out do his old man.
Raven
@Villago Delenda Est: Well, it would be easy for me to SAY what you are saying but I can’t.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Villago Delenda Est:
Really, we provoked a country who had been fighting in Asia for 3 years? Heck, the only provoking was that the Japanese didn’t believe we’d do anything about some islands in the middle of nowhere.
Omnes Omnibus
The ostensible reason for invading was that Saddam wouldn’t let the inspectors in which meant that he had WMD, yet Hans Blix and his UN inspectors were performing inspections and finding nothing. It did not compute at all for me. I said so at the time and got insulted by assholes for the effort. It is not the grievance that the Iraqi people, the dead and injured troops, or the families of those affected by the war have, but, yeah, I have a grievance from back then. So to any of the assholes who haven’t tried to make amends, fuck you.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Make amends how? And more to the point, to what end?
smintheus
Well, we did achieve one thing…we’ve left behind a stable democracy in Iraq.
Villago Delenda Est
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yup. We cut off their oil and scrap metal.
I’m not saying that doing so was a bad thing…the Japanese were the aggressors in China, and the embargo was a result of that aggression.
They felt surrounded. They felt they had no way out, so the brain trust of the Army General Staff decided they needed to strike at America.
Yamamoto, who had spent time as a Naval Attache and universities in the US, warned them that they did not want to do that. They insisted.
So Yamamoto planned what he thought was their only chance to defeat the US…wiping out the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, with emphasis on taking out the three carriers based there, and hope the US would sue for peace. He of course was not very sure about the sue for peace part…he was more convinced that a sleeping dragon was going to be disturbed and that its vengeance would be horrific for Japan.
As things turned out, the carriers were out at sea on December 7th. The gamble that might have paid off did not.
lamh35
BREAKING: AP reporting that Kim Jon Il is dead????
South Korean tv station says that North Korean tv reporting that Kim Jon Il has died???
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: Not to me. Think of the difference between Cole on one side and Sully with his fifth column shit on the other. That is really what I have in mind.
Schlemizel
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Well, we did cut off their supply of raw materials. Plus we really were their only serious competition for control of the Pacific. I don’t think it was exactly a provoked attack but it wasn’t without some justification. I think we even expected them do to something.
ETA: @Villago Delenda Est:
2 Points to you – 1 for typing faster & 1 for a more detailed explanation :)
Raven
@lamh35: Xin Loi motherfucker (that’s Vietnamese for sorry bout that)!
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh35: If we get a Kim thread before a Havel one I will be …. Well, I will be something.
Snowball
@Omnes Omnibus:
If the real reason to attack was WMD’s, then it never made any sense to me. The UN inspectors kept looking and never found any. When they started to be ridiculed by Dick Cheney/Rumsfeld etc, they asked bush to share his intelligence as to were the WMD’s were located. Funny, bush never did. That’s when I knew the whole thing was bogus.
And don’t get me started on the cost for the war. It has reached 800 billion, but will easily eventually reach a couple of trillion. Where the hell were those hypocrites who now are holier than thou when it comes to the deficit?
Thank you President Obama for ending it!
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: I had many friends who protested. I was very supportive of them doing it but I just couldn’t. Wish I had,
Yutsano
@Villago Delenda Est:
You’re underestimating a bit Yamamoto’s resistance. He even threatened to resign his commission over the invasion at Pearl Harbor because of what Tojo was commanding him to do. Tojo more or less blackmailed his honor and Yamamoto did about the best he could under the circumstances. He was more afraid of success than failure.
@lamh35: Can I just say shit? Shit.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: There certainly would be more of an impact on the world today if KJI was dead. Specially if it was an inside job.
Raven
From the Korea Times
[Urgent] N. Korean leader Kim Jong-il dies
North Korea announced Monday that its leader Kim Jong-il died of physical fatigue during train ride last Saturday at 8:30 a.m.. He was 69.
Schlemizel
@Yutsano:
Its been a while since I have read about it but I believe the Japanese felt they would get a six month head start out of Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto didn’t think that was enough & knew the US would not cave as many sin Japan did.
Interestingly, it was six months from Pearl to Midway. So they were right about that part.
Omnes Omnibus
@Snowball: Well, you and I know it wasn’t the reason; it was what they claimed as the reason. The whole fucking thing pissed me off for years. The fucking waste. Wars can be necessary; Iraq wasn’t. I think the Afghanistan mission was a justifiable action. Any chance of it succeeding was torpedoed by the Iraq invasion as well.
lamh35
@Raven: @Omnes Omnibus:
I know next to nothing about North Koreaan “politics” so I would be interested in hearing what this might mean for North Korea and surrounding areas, oh and America’s “Asian alliances.
jeffreyw
dolphin browser on kindle fire test…
smintheus
@magurakurin: The US news media also betrayed us. They gave virtually no indication that much of what Powell was repeating at the UN had already been discredited. If you read foreign press, you knew that. If you relied on domestic coverage – with a few honorable exceptions such as KR/McClatchy – you saw almost no criticism of Powell.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: Yeah, but Havel allows one to bring in the political significance of the Velvet Underground and Milan Kundera. Infinitely cooler.
patrick the pedantic literalist
Looks like the army guys are not as unhappy about not being allowed to “finish the job” as we were led to believe they would be.
Johannes
I didn’t believe Powell, but that’s largely because I knew someone involved in the weapons inspection team, and thus paid attention to Blix’s public statements. Also, I thought poorly of Powell for his insubordination to Bill Clinton, and his sabotaging Clinton’s efforts to allow gays to serve openly. I felt at the time (and still feel) that Powell behaved dishonorably in that mess, and that made me skeptical of anything he said, especially in view of Blix’s contrary statements.
Trurl
Why the long faces, chums?
Obama feels that this “moment of success” represents “an extraordinary achievement”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/14/barack-obama-iraq-war-success
Don’t you want to share in his happiness at the wonderful thing we’ve done for Iraq?
amk
@lamh35: Yup. He is a goner. Good riddance.
Raven
@lamh35: Depends. It’s a totally closed society ruled by the military and held together by the Chinese. A son, Kim Jong-un, is thought to be next in line and “just like” the old man. I was there 43 years ago and I try to keep track of what’s going on.
Snowball
@Omnes Omnibus:
I agree totally. I even thought the first Iraq war was worth fighting. It was a war where we, just like Libya/Afghanistan had the support of the world. I believed in bush’s new world order where the world would no longer allow another country to attack another country. Who the hell would have thought that just 12 years later US would violate its own new world order?
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: agreed
Spaghetti Lee
“From swaggering hope to quiet departure”
Awww, poor WaPoop. Ten years and a few hundred thousand corpses wasn’t enough for them, huh? They need to see more things go BOOM! Mean ol’ Obama, spoiling their Christmas like that.
Raven
@patrick the pedantic literalist: Shit, the dogfaces wanted to unass that motherfucker a long time ago.
Schlemizel
@smintheus:
This is what made me such a fan of European news sites. They did a wonderful job of looking into the stories and reporting facts. Any US reporter that claims they didn’t know we were being sold a lie is either a liar or too stupid to study the subjects they are reporting on.
Did you know that the UN weapons inspectors said they were getting “unprecedented levels of cooperation”? Or that the International Atomic Energy commission and the US Dept of Energy said the aluminum tubes were not suitable for uranium enrichment? Or that ‘Curveball” was a friend to Iran and met with their intelligence agents regularly? I did but you wouldn’t have learned that if you did not read outside the US news sources.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s the headline right above Havel.
Villago Delenda Est
@smintheus:
All the vile Ferengi assholes of the US news media could think about was the money they’d make by covering the war that was going to happen. It’s good for their business.
Besides, very, very few of them had any relatives who would be in harms way. Only the little people actually fight wars in this country, since Nixon shut down the draft because it was inconvenient for people to question the MIC when their sons came back from the other side of the globe missing a limb.
CaseyL
At the risk of hijacking this thread, CNN is reporting on the North Korean sitch. Kim Jung Il did have a named successor, but I don’t know if anyone has a sense of how strong his support in the military is (and right now someone on CNN is saying the kid’s uncle will be the real power).
On topic: I don’t like talking about the Iraq War because it was obvious to me from the start that the whole thing was a crock. I remember my utter shock when the war started; it seemed insane to me that the combined opposition from all around the world had no effect whatsoever.
I spent the next few years trying not to think about the war in Iraq, because thinking about it reduced me to shaking, weeping rage. The lives lost, the wealth lost and stolen and wasted, the utter loss of America’s soul… the country will never recover from that fiasco, and its architects will never suffer any loss of prestige and, for that matter, not lose one moment’s sleep.
OK: blood pressure spiking now Gotta stop.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: I guess another one of my thoughts is that it would be nice to be able to honor one of the more or less good ones without having it be stepped on by the consequences of the death of one of the world’s true copper bottomed, first class shits.
Samara Morgan
and not even a drop of lemonade for you, Old JAFI.
tant pis.
Raven
CNN reporting that China is very nervous that NK’s are gonna run north like Chattanooga Houndogs!
Snowball
@lamh35:
I have no clue. But the South Korean stock market is currently down over 4%, while the Nikkei is only down 1%.
Omnes Omnibus
@CaseyL:
Yes, it will. Well, it can. It will take a while, but it can be done.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Yea, kinda like when Reagan died and ruined the WWII Memorial Dedication.
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: The thread is up.
jayboat
I’ve heard 3500-5000 contractors will still be on the clock at our embassy. Because they aren’t enlisted troops, does this somehow qualify as ‘not’ a war? 3500 seems like a fair number of military types.
Also, too… Who gets the throne in North Korea?
This must be good news for someone. John McCain? Bueller?
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: Yep. Never liked that fucker either.
Zifnab25
@Villago Delenda Est:
If we are going to have to choose between allowing a little more cognitive dissonance among war supporters and legalizing military enslavement, I’m thinking we go with the lesser of two evils and keep that draft abolished. Ending the draft was one of the very few things Nixon did right.
10 years in, I’m just glad to see the clusterfuck of a war finally at an end. Hail to the Chief on this one.
Raven
@jayboat: 15,000
lamh35
@Raven: I hear the son is in his late 20’s. Kinda young to inherit a dictatorship right??? So does the military have behind the scenes controls then?
smintheus
@Schlemizel: Yes, I knew those things because I read foreign news. The aluminum tubes garbage was the most absurd of the zombie lies; you could watch the Bushies walking it back ever so slightly every time they trotted it out and it got some pushback.
I remember trying to convince Tim Noah at Slate that Powell’s allegations had already been discredited internationally, but he just treated it with incredulity. So I pointed him toward some pieces on line that backed up what I’d told him, and instead of looking into them seriously he just dug in and made a mockery of them and all those who refused to bow down before Powell…a man who had a long record of behaving like a POS whenever it suited his career.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Villago Delenda Est: Thanks for the update. I had forgotten some of that stuff. I’m not sure, though, that cutting off supplies to a country invading another country should count as provoking, but yes, it was a response.
Omnes Omnibus
@smintheus: TableTalk at Salon was an ineresting place at the time. I am so old that I remember Tbogg being the only person there who could actually make funny jokes about the horror.
smintheus
@Villago Delenda Est: Yup. Remember that quickly forgotten scandal uncovered about 4 years ago, about the former generals with skin in the game whom the Pentagon secretly groomed to parrot pro-war talking points on teevee in the run up to war? Funny how nobody in the US media cared to discuss that scandal once it was exposed.
Roger Moore
@Schlemizel:
Not so much that they’d get that kind of a head start as what they’d do with it. The general staff though the head start would give them a chance to put together a practically impregnable defense against American naval attack, and that seeing the defensive perimeter the Americans would accept their position in the Pacific as a fait accompli. Yamamoto said they didn’t understand American character, and that the sneak attack would infuriate the Americans to the point that they’d never be willing to negotiate or accept anything less than a total victory. I think history bears out Yamamoto’s version.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore:
Really?
Villago Delenda Est
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I concede your point…the US action I feel was proper. However, the notion that the Japanese just attacked because they felt like it (much as the September 11th 2001 attacks are viewed in this country) is utterly fallacious. These things don’t just happen.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
If you look at it in more detail, there’s some room for disagreement. Yes, the Japanese lost, but in a history that happened somewhere between the two expectations. In the actual event, the Japanese were able to use their 6 months to put together a very formidable defense that, IIRC, held out for longer than Yamamoto expected. Part of that is that the USA generally treated the Pacific as a secondary theater that never got the resources Europe did, which is not what he thought would happen. And the US was willing to accept some terms to avoid the cost of invading the Japanese home islands, which suggests their defensive position was successful in scaring the Americans.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: I was being facetious, but, seriously, thank you for the substantive response.
honus
@carpeduum: don’t go hmmm, just go away.
OzoneR
@Trurl:
As a matter of fact, I do, you feckless twit, for us, the people of Iraq for what they’ve been subjected to, and for my high school classmate Rich who was blown to bits there in 2004.
Chuck Butcher
funny thing is I beat hell out of the drum of no half measures in Afghanistan and the horseshit one about Iraq and all I got was lumped into coward/traitor ranks along with those few writers who didn’t buy in either (and the DFHs on the same page). Their careers thanks to being right went in the toilet, then there are totally wrong ones… we still suffer with today.
funny how those things work out.
somebody please punch a hippie for me…
Chuck Butcher
cripes, the Japanese went on a rampage in Asia to get their hands on resources and we cut them off for some and we asked for it…
OK, what they asked for was a couple nukes and some firestorms and they got that.
So, WWII in Pacific Theater in two sentences…
It is not smart for a toddler to punch a lion in the nose.
DanielX
“Favorite” implies something viewed most favorably, and I can’t think of a damn thing that I ever viewed favorably about W’s exercise in showing he had a bigger dick than his daddy. A couple of moments that come to mind…when I told a Republican friend of mine in 2003 that the whole thing was a catastrophe and was going to get worse. I said a war of aggression was criminal and bad enough, but failure to plan for the aftermath was worse and was going to cost a lot more lives. This was shortly after the “Mission Accomplished” mockery, and he sort of scoffed…five years later he admitted that the whole thing was a colossal waste and tragedy.
Second episode I recall…running into a woman that I went to high school with and talking about one of her sons, who was over there at the time. I asked how he was doing, and she said that aside from it being his third tour and his being wounded, sent to Germany and then sent back, he was doing okay. I asked what his specialty was, and she got this look on her face when she said ‘cavalry scout’. Go out and wait til they shoot at you and go yup, there they are…he ended up doing four tours and is pretty fucked up. A horrible shame and tragedy for which we’re going to pay for a long time and a lot of ways, and that is just about all there is to say about it.
DanielX
Also, too,I got really really tired of hearing that W was a warlord supreme and THA GREATEST PRESIDENT EVAR. And that anyone who wasn’t willing to fellate George the Great in Yankee Stadium…on the pitcher’s mound…during a game with the Red Sox…at the top of the third…was a terrorist supporter, no better than a Frenchman, and probably a faggot.
I used to get that kind of shit a lot when I suggested that Republicans in general and Bush/Cheney in particular didn’t seem to have any real principles aside from cutting taxes and bombing brown people. There are a lot of 27% folks where I live, and during that ten year period was when I learned, once and for all, that you can’t reason with or convince them of anything they don’t want to believe. The whole concept of cognitive dissonance doesn’t register with them. Just like with Tinkerbell, they figure if you just believe hard enough (clap louder!) it will change reality. It drove the ones who’d been to school up the wall when I said they sounded like a fuckin’ sophomore sociology major, or worse yet like Tom Friedman, who writes for that commie propaganda sheet the New York Times. (That last one made them truly crazy, for reasons I’m at a complete loss to explain.)
srv
Fun times.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, saying that Yamamoto was right and the Japanese Army was wrong about WWII is fatuous without some qualification. Yamamoto clearly got the big picture right- just look at who wound up occupying whom- but it wasn’t quite as simple as him getting it right and them getting it wrong. The Army clearly knew quite a bit about the material situation; they just didn’t realize what they were getting into in the political/moral situation.
@Chuck Butcher:
That’s more than a bit of an exaggeration. Japan was formidable and had geography on its side. It took the US almost four years to win the war, and that was with some exceptionally good luck and nukes to cut things short at the end. It was certainly a fair bit closer than a toddler taking on a lion.
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s reassuring to know that some people have never made a single error in judgment in their entire fucking lives, and are therefore eminently qualified to cast the first stone.
Supercilious, self-important windbag, in love with the sound of his own voice.
JoeShabadoo
@Villago Delenda Est:
The problem is you compare cutting off resources to a country that was literally raping and murdering entire cities to the way the U.S. screws up the middle east to get more oil.
They are incomparable. One is done to gain oil and power in a region while the other is a reaction to to some of the most horrible shit that happened in WWII.
The U.S. cutting off scrap and oil was provoked. That may have led to the attack but it all originated with Japan. When you use provoke in context of a war or a conflict you are talking about who started it or you will have a neverending series of provacations and the word loses meaning.
You deny it here but when you compare these two you are talking about the provocations being equal because you say they form a history of provocation.
An example:
A bartender gets in a fight with a customer because he cuts him off after he starts to get violent with other customers.
He then steals his neighbor’s mail every morning and they get in a fight.
You don’t say he has a history of provocation by equating these two together.
Joey Maloney
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, man, do you remember the Bad Thoughts thread? Started within hours of the towers coming down and kept going for the remainder of the site’s life.
There’s a full archive of Table Talk available as a torrent, if anyone cares about that.
Look, Powell had a role in whitewashing the My Lai massacre. That was forty-odd freaking years ago. I couldn’t believe in 2003 that anyone still believed he would put his personal honor ahead of the chain of command.
Chuck Butcher
@Roger Moore:
OK, sure – and Hitler was going to conquer Russia except…
WTF are you on about? Would you care to talk about what offensive they managed to put together after the Phillipines that went anywhere? It is always a real serious mess to dig people out of positions they’ve occupied. Would you really care to get into production capability and acess to resources much less manpower?
Pearl did two things, it brought us formally into the conflict and it pissed off the American public in a really serious way. There was not going to be any kiss and make up after that. Maybe you’re too young to have really known vets and civs from that period, but there sure the hell is enough info available.
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
Google “Rape of Nanking” and tell us again about how the US “provoked” the poor, innocent Japanese into attacking us.
Chuck Butcher
@Chuck Butcher:
Damn, I’m still fuming over the simplistic notion that it was a close thing. Minus Pearl you might have had some difficulty getting the American public real damn stirred up about the Pacific and spending men like water to just win. Post Pearl the only real question was just how much would be left of Japan itself. People had no question about the firestorms in Tokyo and other cities, they were gratified. The public didn’t just want a win, they wanted them destroyed. Hints from Japan that it might surrender never got out to the public because nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of that explosion.
Whether those hints were BS or not, it was not going to happen and minus nukes the bomber streams would only have intensified and turned the place into smoking bomb craters along with seriously “don’t give a fuck” troops invading.
Just maybe you don’t know that the military was already rotating men and material out of Europe for the Pacific? You talk about four years? Have you bothered to look at the scale of the fronts? Holy shit.
srv
@Joey Maloney:
Colin Powell in his Iran-Contra testimony. Boland, shmoland…
Chuck Butcher
@Mnemosyne:
Damn, my parents and their friends and families were vets or civs from WWII. Damn near every adult I knew growing up was involved in one way or another, most males were vets. We’ve made “friends” with the Japanese but playing around with history to get to something other than history is childish.
The Japanese didn’t play around with the nice rules we did in warfare and occupation – they were an iron fist wielding a sledgehammer and what they got up to in China, etc was not propaganda, or other assorted bullshit.
You can play at history, you can not like the nukes, but absent those – HE & Incindiaries proved pretty horrifying and would have continued. Luck my ass. The real luck was all on Japan’s side that the nukes were ready and put a goddam period to that horror show.
Agreeing with Mem…
Suffern ACE
@Mnemosyne: Agreed. Sure Yamamoto was right about the US not accepting Japanese control of the pacific and european colonies, but did he bother to speak up about that pesky Sino-Japanese war that started the whole thing? “You know, if we invade China, we might get mired in an endless conflict. I advise we not do that.”
Chuck Butcher
@srv:
Oh gahk, Colin Powell – the good GOPer.
AA+ Bonds
We have been at war constantly, troops on the ground, since before I was of voting age and we are still at war and so I probably see this a little different from a lot of people here.
Just realize that you have created a generation of young adults who fully expect war as a constant state of affairs, and if America pulls its armed forces out of Afghanistan, I and a lot of other people my age will face that era as strange and unusual, both those who have served and those who haven’t.
AA+ Bonds
@smintheus:
I will second that but note that certain U.S. sources were also very good at linking up stories; I think at the time Salon.com was doing a lot of redirects to translations of Der Spiegel and Le Monde, probably for reasons beyond Iraq.
To me U.S. sources were enough. I was a little stunned that anyone, at all, could believe that in order to stop NBC production in Iraq against its agreements, we had to invade and overthrow the government during NBC inspections, against the will of the body that forged the agreements, and over the protests of the inspectors themselves, who were still there. All of these facts were well reported in the United States, and used, bizarrely, to promote invasion.
AA+ Bonds
I think there was a certain level of “come on, you knew what was up” within the Bush administration when all this stuff (faked-up NBC accusations, al-Qaeda links, etc.) was “revealed” as bogus. The run-up to the war, with the whole deal pitting the U.S. against UN weapons inspectors who were there to enforce the very agreements that the U.S. used to justify invasion . . . I think that these claims were so ludicrous at the time that the administration had assumed that everyone knew they were bullshit and that invading Iraq was about other business entirely.
I think the Village felt the same way. They were invited to pick their own reasons for invading Iraq and did so with gusto to prove their usefulness in the new and bloodthirsty order of things. They didn’t expect anyone to be convinced, as much as to be proud of them for promoting the war.
Afterwards, when we tried to hold them to account, I think they themselves felt cheated, however ridiculous that may seem – didn’t we realize what was going on? Couldn’t we tell their patriotic propaganda from the dirty truth, just like they could at the time? I think to a certain extent, they were right.
I think the main motivator among pro-war Americans for invading Iraq was that it was an Arab Muslim nation. It was one with few friends who was already on our bad side, one we could attack with few consequences. And many Americans wanted revenge on a race and on a religion for 9/11. The sharks smelled blood and they raced toward it.
AA+ Bonds
Lastly, I want to offer a pitying chuckle and a shake of the head at those who still struggle, ridden with other men’s guilt, to justify the United States dropping the only atomic weapons ever used to vaporize and torment men, women, and children.
We did it because we felt it would kick the shit out of those savage Japs. And it was a terrible, shitty thing to do that we will never be able to “morally justify”.
AA+ Bonds
@Chuck Butcher:
“They” asked for it? This would no doubt be the Japanese who got burned alive in their homes with their families so you could crack jokes about it? The very same ones! Good thing they “asked” for it by voting in that military dictatorship.
Sure learned their lesson about the lion and all that, those piles of ash! Jolly good! Churchill did say we needed to wipe the Japanese from the planet, after all.
At Talaq
Horse Feathers.
Obama wanted the troops to stay. Yet another broken promise.
The Iraqi’s made them leave after they refused to accept America’s demands for legal immunity.
Funny that – even Iraqi stooges and puppets could no longer stick their heads in the sand when trigger-happy America storm-troopers were killing innocent children. American refusal for accountability and the rule of law – which Obama recoils from – was the final straw.
Do some goddamn research and deep-six the shameless propaganda. Your readership is NOT comprised of ignorant GOP assclowns.
NedPointsman
Awwww, diddums.
Your ability to turn yourselves into victims of your own aggression really is impressive.
Mjaum
If saudi arabia cut off oil to the US due to the US’ unprovoked aggression towards muslim countries (and various other good reasons), do we really believe the US would not see this as a provocation?
But of course the Japanese should understand and accept the US cutting off their supplies during a war.
The question of whether something is a provocation has nothing to do with morality.
Mack Lyons
@AA+ Bonds:
We call them “collateral damage” for a reason. I’m sure your heart bleeds for German families who were buried under rubble in Dresden.
Personally, I’m more sympathetic of the Chinese families who were beaten, raped and used for bayonet practice by the Japanese. Getting hit with a couple of nukes and some firebombs was rather tame karma. After all, we could have let the Soviets invade and disassemble Japan, one civilian at a time.
The Other Bob
At one time I was the biggest flag-waving mother-fucker I knew. I thought the lessons of Vietnam were to support the troops because if we didn’t, low morale might kill them.
Now I know better.
We cannot let politicians off the hook once our leaders send them into war. Lord knows Iraq wasn’t lost on the battlefield, it was Bush who killed the peace and dragged the war out for 9 years.
Now we see the tears over the 4,500 American troops lost. A tragedy for sure, but should we at least note the 100,000 to 900,000 Iraqis who are now dead, many of them children? We have a volunteer military, but kids never asked for this shit.
El Tiburon
Isn’t the fact of the matter Obama didn’t really end the Iraq war by his choice? Isnt the reason its over is because Iraq refused to grant soldiers immunity from prosecution?
And what about the five or so ‘enduring bases’ we built? And the largest embassy in the world with at leat 5,000 armed personnel of some sort?
Factor in the covert wars occurring in Pakistan and Iran and well…
smintheus
@AA+ Bonds: Agreed, it was obvious to anybody who cared to think about it that rushing to war while the inspectors were doing their job gave Bush’s game away. That’s why Powell’s job at the UN was to terrify the American public, so it wouldn’t think about what was going down.
Nix
“President Obama deserves credit for checking off another item on his campaign-promises list.”
He promised to end NAFTA, but signed 3 more free trade deals.
I give him credit where credit is due…
El Tiburon
http://www.nationaljournal.com/u-s-troop-withdrawal-motivated-by-iraqi-insistence-not-u-s-choice-20111021?print=true
I thought language mattered. So implying Obama ended this war isn’t really correct. I hope ABL is on topmof this to correct the historical record: Obama did not want to end the war, but was forced to.
terraformer
Powell fooled me. But then I suppose I always wanted to believe that there was a solid, rational justification.
I also suppose my fondest view of this whole thing is that I found several websites full of others who subsequently (or perhaps at the get-go) realized the lies, serving as an island of rationality of sorts with which to collectively grieve for all the dead and to support each other toward a future where we aren’t ruled by misanthropic oligarchs who control the money and the munitions. We’re not there yet, not by a long shot. So it was the internet, really, as a tool through which to find others of like mind. That’s what my fondest memory is.
Benjamin Franklin
@The Other Bob:
Not to mention the Iraqis hate us more than ever. And, whereTF is our
OIL?
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
They’ve all been turned over to the Iraqis per our agreement with them. But, then, I know you’re not really big on the whole “facts” thing, so I guess you didn’t bother to check that before you posted.
And it wasn’t as simple as “the Iraqis wanted us to leave.” Some factions wanted us to stay, others wanted us to leave, and there was a lot of talk from the Iraqi side about changing the SOFA agreement. I still think that the US deliberately put forth what they knew was an impossible condition (immunity from prosecution) to force the Iraqi government’s hand so they would make a decision.
Cermet
@Schlemizel: Becareful – dickless trolls will call you for expressing yourself about that coward bush and his bloody hands puppet master cheney.
Cermet
@Mjaum: Let us not forget that many millions of Chinese were murdered by Japan’s military (remember, that war started in the early 1930’s) – sorry but war is hell (for children especially) and Japan got fair play for the horrors it unleashed upon so many Asians (no one has, I feel, ever really gotten a handle on the massive number of deaths (mush less maimed) the Japanese caused throughout SE Asia and the numbers for Korea and China are still not certain but considering the length of time of that conflict, I feel that the claim of twenty million Chinese is believable.) Many have pointed out that far fewer Japanese died from the bombing then would have in the mass civilian suicide attacks the Japanese military planed to launch on the US invasion force (I do not believe our soldiers would have suffered anywhere the numbers some people at the time claimed for a full blown invasion but it would still have been ugly for them) – as for the A-bombings, maybe the deaths would have outnumbered the combined American/civilian Japanese deaths for an invasion, and maybe not but we (luckily) will never know since we can’t rerun that end of war.
El Cid
I didn’t think Obama would be able to bring the military forces home this soon, and although you simply logically can’t ignore the key role of the Iraqi government (such as it is) in refusing extended occupation, I thought there would have been much more of a right wing / establishment “cut & run” freakout than there has been.
I think that if there had been a continuation of agreement with the Iraqi government, troops would still be there.
But I thought the US could do what it usually does and cobble together some combination of incentives and threats to get the Iraqi governing coalition to approve continued military occupying forces.
So that’s something I was wrong about.
As I always suggest, though, these subtleties (i.e., reality) aside, for my loudmouth Republican friends and colleagues, YAY OBAMA DID WHAT HE SAID AND GOT US OUT OF IRAQ!
jonas
@jayboat: There will be a few hundred staff and Marine guards at the embassy, yes. The few *thousand* you mention are contractors and military personnel to “train” the Iraqi military, who apparently — eight years in — still cannot tie their own shoes.
Anyone know how many — if any — troops we’ll be keeping in Kuwait indefinitely?
El Cid
@Mnemosyne: I think that’s an act which has multiple motivations:
First, the US political establishment and military leadership would never have considered that Iraqis could charge and prosecute US troops.
It just wouldn’t happen. No, we’re not going to let those brown jihadi peasants attack Our Troops and then collaborate with Michael Moore to get them arrested blah blah blah.
But it’s not impossible — and maybe I haven’t seen quotes and good reporting to this effect — that this political / legal reality wasn’t also seen as an opportunity. I’d like to think you’re right about that.
I had thought years ago that the political strategy to extricate US forces from Iraq would be John Kerry’s line — blaming Iraqis for failing to do their part of the job. That was the only propaganda line I saw available which wouldn’t so easily be portrayed as blaming anything whatsoever on us.
In retrospect, I have to give some credit to the DO YOU DOUBT THAT THE SURGE IS WORKING!!! screaming propaganda crowd, because I guess the flip side of such triumphalism was that they convinced too many people that Iraq was sufficiently stabilized. Ha!
At Talaq
@Mnemosyne:
Pathetic excuse-making, aka more hero worshipping and denial.
Larv
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly. Anyone who thinks the Obama administration was surprised that the Iraqis rejected that condition is deluded. Anyone who thinks Obama “wanted to stay” is afflicted with ODS. What Obama wanted was a way to leave without being accused of abandoning the Iraqis or the troops or whatever bullshit the pro-war right would trot out. That’s exactly what he got. He gets to tell the left that he fulfilled his campaign promise and tell the many, many pro-military independents and righties that the Iraqis forced his hand. The fact remains that we are no longer on a war footing in Iraq. But there’s an element of the anti-war crowd that will only be satisfied if Obama personally apologizes to every Iraqis, removes every single American from Iraq, and promises never to use the military again.
El Cid
@Larv:
What you’re stating as a blunt contradiction isn’t.
El Tiburon
@Mnemosyne:
Oh really? So we spent how many billions on these 14 (not 5) bases and you think just like that we are giving them to Iraq? Does that sound like how we operate? And you believe this?
So what? Not what I was saying. The Iraqi government was not going to grant immunity for US troops. Now, all this bullshit that this is what exactly Obama was hoping for is really amazing.
Some of you really are delusional puppets.
Delia
Here he is: the last man to die for a mistake.
El Tiburon
@Larv:
It would be nice to have a politician with true convictions who would admit to the entire world what we all know: we committed the biggest fuck up and helped destroy a nation and slaughter countless lives for no fucking reason. But I know there are too many pro-war, pro-death, pro-torture people like you in this country to ever let that happen.
Most of our politicians are too corrupted to ever let this happen.
So, here we are again at the so-called end to yet another war and getting ready for a few more. But as long as it is Obama then it’s all good.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Villago Delenda Est:
So oil embargo on aggressor nations = invading some miserable 3rd World hell hole like Iraq? Talk about lame, false equivlancies. So what should we have done in the 40’s Smart Guy; gave Japan a loan to conquer all of China?
Go read about the Rape of Nanking Mr US the is Always Wrong before weeping about how the poor Japanese were just a bunch of helpless little brown victims of the mean old US.
Tony J
Late to the thread, but here we go.
The bit about the Iraq War that really grinds my gears is how it was actually triggered. Not the why, but the excuse thrown out there to justify walking away from the UN and sending in the invasion.
Remember that last week when the Inspectors were saying there were no WMD to be found and they needed just a few more weeks to go right through the list of ‘secret sites’ the US had provided? Then the US and UK tried to get a majority of the UN Security Council to sign off on a BS ‘moral vote’ saying that they believed that Iraq was deliberately hiding its NBC arsenal from the Inspectors, rendering their work moot, but they couldn’t even get a majority of the temporary members to do it?
Here’s what still makes me wild – because, I suppose, it was just so nakedly ridiculous that I couldn’t believe anyone could buy it, until they did, in massive numbers.
The French made an off the cuff statement that the US and UK should stop acting like dicks and just wait for the Inspectors to finish the job the UN Resolution they’d co-authored had given them. After all, even if enough small nations were bullied or bribed or both into voting for a change in the trigger mechanism for the use of force, France had veto power. So what was the point?
Next day, what’s the story? FRANCE ADMITS IT WILL VETO “ANY USE OF FORCE TO MAKE IRAQ COMPLY WITH ITS OBLIGATIONS!” – UN RENDERED HELPLESS BY FRENCH BETRAYAL! – BRITAIN AND AMERICA LEFT WITH NO CHOICE BUT TO GO IT ALONE!
How could anyone choose to believe that? A couple of clicks on Google would have been enough for them to realise it wasn’t just a barefaced lie, it was a lie told out in the open with the world watching. My faith in human nature took a bullet right there and then.
El Cid
@El Tiburon: The question of what happens to US bases in Iraq is the sort of thing dependent upon intense empirical investigation, no matter what public or legal pronouncement is made. What matters is what actually happens to them, because you can announce, declare, or for that matter intend whatever you want. So an easy prediction of these being ‘turned over’ to Iraqis is not one I’d make and is a statement which first needs a lot of definition.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@El Cid:
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, this purity idiot day?
How about, who in the fuck would dumb enough to agree to join the US military during a war if the US government ever agreed to terms like that? Maybe you all need to stop watching stupid Hollywood movies and crack open a history book or to and you find has NEVER been a war in human history that fucked up shit didn’t happen to even the most human of countries. You all think General Sherman was being a macho dick when he said “War is Hell”?
War is Hell is why wars should be avoided if it all possible. Once they start and people die all the rules we love about sanctity of human life goes into the trash can.
If anyone should be up for war crimes for Iraq its should be to the low lifes in the Bush admin. Dragging in some PFC is bullshit unless that happens.
Consumer Unit 5012
“somebody please punch a hippie for me…”
@Chuck Butcher: Displacing your anger, much? OTOH, hippies generally don’t have Secret Service guard details…
pattonbt
@magurakurin: The war was going forward with or without Powell’s UN dance. I don’t believe for one second that if Powel hadn’t done his dance or had resigned with great flourish denouncing the administration that the war would have been stopped.
The fix was in midday September 11th 2001. These guys wanted Iraq since the mid to late 90’s like nobody’s business, and they were not going to be denied.
Anyone who didn’t see that is an idiot (no offense as I am not claiming to be anything but the same myself – even though on Iraq I wasn’t).
El Cid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I don’t know what it is you think you’re responding to, but that wasn’t it.
I think it’s an entirely legitimate aspiration for a sovereign nation to demand that foreign forces operating in their territories be potentially subject to national law. And it’s simultaneously entirely understandable that the nation issuing the forces — and those forces themselves — would reject that outright.
And if you’ll, say, read more history than how awful war is, and things like key debates in sovereignty and rights during decades of French and British colonialism in West Africa, the question of the law enforcement powers of local authorities over the Western forces came up a lot.
People in areas of the world in which colonialism wasn’t that long ago remember such things. The Middle East is one of those areas.
Is this something odd? Has no one heard of such acrimonious debates between local governments and US forces and US government representatives in regards to Okinawa or, say, earlier bases in the Philippines?
I don’t understand what I’m being asked here — should I have a “side” on the Iraqi government not demanding that? Is that what I should have wanted, given my understanding of how things would and would not have worked?
Noting this is “purity”? Of course I was in favor of this demand, precisely because I hoped it would be unpalatable for continued US military forces. And not just formally undesirable, but shocking, insulting enough to provoke a reaction in the US political establishment.
And yes, I simultaneously understand why no US military member would want to be in that situation, either. I wouldn’t want to be. That’s the point.