Well, what do you know?

[kallend 1,632]

"US-led invasion of Iraq played role in rise of ISIS, ex-British leader Tony Blair says"

www.foxnews.com/world/2015/10/25/former-british-leader-tony-blair-says-iraq-war-played-role-in-rise-islamic/

I expect Turtle to say he's just disgruntled.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[christelsabine 1]

kallend

"US-led invasion of Iraq played role in rise of ISIS, ex-British leader Tony Blair says"

www.foxnews.com/world/2015/10/25/former-british-leader-tony-blair-says-iraq-war-played-role-in-rise-islamic/

I expect Turtle to say he's just disgruntled.

Some of our politicians share that opinion, me too.

dudeist skydiver # 3105

[RopeaDope 0]

kallend

"US-led invasion of Iraq played role in rise of ISIS, ex-British leader Tony Blair says"

www.foxnews.com/world/2015/10/25/former-british-leader-tony-blair-says-iraq-war-played-role-in-rise-islamic/

I expect Turtle to say he's just disgruntled.

I don't know that this is even debated. As a veteran myself, I would say that Tony Blair is spot on. Although the invasion hinged on the false pretense of WMD, oust the Saddam regime was absolutely the right thing to do.

I was in the invasion, and then spent the following 14 months in Baghdad. In May 2003, it was pretty much over. There were people we were looking for, but the streets were fairly quiet. We focused on re-opening schools, hospitals, banks, police and fire stations, power stations, ect.

By late June, the insurgency had started up. Al Qaeda started an Iraq faction known as AQI to fight the coalition in Iraq. By 2010, AQI had been decimated and Iraq was mostly as safe as any major U.S. city. The Iraqi government was in complete control.

My personal opinion, and wide spread criticism of the Obama Administration, is that in order to capitalize on the political move of "ending OIF" he withdrew U.S. forces too soon creating a power vacuum.

This allowed AQI to reorganize and regroup in Syria, and then they initiated the "Caliphate" and became known as ISIS. With successful and unimpeeded conquests in Syria, they spread into Iraq, taking advantage of a government that was still sorting itself out.

- To further exacerbate the problem, I believe that by simply refusing to admit to making a mistake, the Administration let the situation perpetuate into something that we alone are not going to be able to quell.

To quote Alexander the Great, "I do not fear an army of lions led by a lamb. I fear the army of sheep that is led by a lion."

That being said, I would compare the American and Russian military both to armies of lions, but as for their leaders, one is clearly a lion, while the other very much resembles a lamb. Does anyone know how to say, "I have no beef with you" in Russian?

[billvon 2,402]

>oust the Saddam regime was absolutely the right thing to do.

4000 dead American soldiers, 100,000+ dead Iraqis, complete failure in completing the objectives of the war, no WMD's to control and creating ISIS seems like the very definition of "the wrong thing to do."

[jclalor 12]

"The Iraqi government was in complete control"

How do you figure that?

The Iraqi government, after OIF, has always been dominated by the Shia and this has never sat very well with the Sunni... To say the very least.

While we may have thought that in order to archive sectarian harmony, it was important to reopen schools and KFC's as quickly as possible. The fact is, we have never had a firm grasp on just how complicated that situation really is.

If the Shia backed Al-Maliki Government was in "complete control" it sounds to me like it was a good time to leave.

[RopeaDope 0]

jclalor

"The Iraqi government was in complete control"

How do you figure that?

The Iraqi government, after OIF, has always been dominated by the Shia and this has never sat very well with the Sunni... To say the very least.

While we may have thought that in order to archive sectarian harmony, it was important to reopen schools and KFC's as quickly as possible. The fact is, we have never had a firm grasp on just how complicated that situation really is.

If the Shia backed Al-Maliki Government was in "complete control" it sounds to me like it was a good time to leave.

Saddam's Ba'athist regime was Suni, although Sunis are the minority in Iraq. When their newly established government went into effect, the Sunis were less than thrilled to see the majority of power which they had enjoyed for the past 40 years be transferred to the majority population of Shiites.

After the invasion, American and British forces governed the provinces in their areas of responsibility. By about the end of 2008, all provincial control had been transitioned to Iraqs government.

The situation was still fragile, which is why I would have liked to have seen it through a little more before we gave up on it.

Billvon - 4000 dead American soldiers, 100,000+ dead Iraqis, complete failure in completing the objectives of the war, no WMD's to control and creating ISIS seems like the very definition of "the wrong thing to do."

We completed several objectives successfully. The WMD intel was false, but if you had seen the effects of Saddam and his sons....I guess you just had to be there.

Those 4000 dead Americans, I knew several of them. Some died in their beds during mortar attacks, some stepped on IEDs, and some sacrificed themselves to save the lives of their brothers.

Governments fight over politics, oil, or whatever. The soldiers get hauled over their and simply fight for each other. With the loss of life having happened, I wish we could have stayed and finished the job. Being pulled out prematurely and seeing all the progress go to shit and even become worse than when we started means those 4000 men and women basically died for nothing. They died fighting for their country, doing their duty, saving heir friends, making life better for Iraqis, but in the end, there was no gain at all.

Going back to Tony Blair's remarks, I agree that ousting Saddam was the right thing to do. Beyond that, we made significant strides in progress. Iraq made progress. Then we screwed up. We created the conditions for ISIS to evolve and then allowed it to grow into the monster that it is today.

[billvon 2,402]

>We completed several objectives successfully.

Which objectives were those? It seems like the two primary ones - getting control of Saddam's WMD arsenal and fighting terrorism - have failed miserably.

>but if you had seen the effects of Saddam and his sons....I guess you just had
>to be there.

Do you think replacing Saddam with ISIS is a good trade? Is ISIS better than Saddam?
=======================
74 children executed by ISIS for 'crimes' that include refusal to fast, report says

Published July 02, 2015
FoxNews.com

The blood-soaked executioners of ISIS have spared neither women nor children since the jihadist army established its caliphate a year ago, putting an estimated 74 kids and even more women to death for such offenses as practicing “magic” and refusing to fast during Ramadan.

A total of 3,027 people have been executed by ISIS since it declared itself a state under strict Islamic law in Syria and Iraq last June, according to a new report by the UK-based group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Many of the charges against those executed are recorded as blasphemy and spying, but others include sorcery, sodomy, practicing as a Shia Muslim," the report states.

Just this week, two children whose ages were not known were crucified in the Mayadin, Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria after ISIS accused them of not properly fasting during Ramadan. The children’s bodies, put on public display on crossbars, each bore a sign explaining their violation during the holy month for Muslims that runs June 17 to July 17. . . .

“The violent Islamist group appears to demonstrate a particular interest in children, releasing videos of children fighting in cages and undertaking military training,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group said. “The report also details moves undertaken by the group to entice children to join, which include setting up offices called "cubs of the caliphate" that recruit children to fight for ISIS.”
=========================
That's better than Saddam?

>Those 4000 dead Americans, I knew several of them. Some died in their
>beds during mortar attacks, some stepped on IEDs, and some sacrificed
>themselves to save the lives of their brothers.

Yep. And if not for the mistakes of our government, they would be alive today.

>With the loss of life having happened, I wish we could have stayed and
>finished the job.

And I wish we had not killed 100,000 Iraqis and sent 4000 US soldiers to their deaths. Also, given the choice, I'd rather be dealing with a blustering, angry, criminal (but ultimately submissive) Saddam than a group that is crucifying children.

I guess we have different priorities.

[kallend 1,632]

RopeaDope

***"US-led invasion of Iraq played role in rise of ISIS, ex-British leader Tony Blair says"

www.foxnews.com/world/2015/10/25/former-british-leader-tony-blair-says-iraq-war-played-role-in-rise-islamic/

I expect Turtle to say he's just disgruntled.

I don't know that this is even debated. As a veteran myself, I would say that Tony Blair is spot on. Although the invasion hinged on the false pretense of WMD, oust the Saddam regime was absolutely the right thing to do.



What a load of rubbish.

The Bush/Blair actions not only failed to achieve the primary objective (see Bush's 2003 SOTU address), the war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, cost $Trillions, left over 4,000 US soldiers dead and many more than that maimed, and totally destabilized the entire region which was fragile to begin with. Bush's handpicked administrator (Paul Bremer) fucked up the immediate aftermath, and Bush's handpicked PM (al Maliki) was even worse than that. It was a major policy clusterfuck not exceeded by any other that I can recall in my lifetime.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[RopeaDope 0]

Objective to topple Saddam's regime was a success.

Standing up a new government was a success until we abandoned them just like we did in Vietnam.

We trained and equipped their Army, Air Force, and Police forces.

There wasn't WMDs, but there were a hell of a lot of long range SCUDs with chemical and biological warheads that a group called Task Force Rocketeer went through and dismantled.

There were chemical and biological weapons in massive storage depots, as well as factories for new ones.

Inlue of WMDs, we found plenty of other weapons capable of a good amount of destruction, we found torture chambers in the personal houses palaces of Saddam's sons a log with home movies of them having their fun.

Replacing it with ISIS is not an accurate statement. AQI was defeated. AQI were effectively crushed and ran out of the country. By leaving too early, as I said before, we left Iraq vulnerable while our President ignored the fact that AQI leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a world wide caliphate which became known as ISIS.

If you have the stomach for it, watch some of their execution videos and see how brutal they are. I see some of their stuff on the news in Mosoul, Talafar, Baji, northern Baghdad and I recognize the places as I have been there, work with the local population their, fought AQI there, and lost friends there.

I'm done with the military, and done with war, but if I had the chance, I'd volunteer to go fight ISIS. If there really is a heaven and hell and all that, there must be renovations going on right now because those guys deserve a whole new level of hell. I would dip all my bullets in pigs blood and make sure they know they aren't going to see any virgins when they die.

[RopeaDope 0]

Honestly kallend, I don't know. I've tried so many times to make sense of it all. The President along with his large civilian staff and four military Generals decide invading Iraq will be a smart thing to do.

As the delegation of command gets sliced off into smaller pieces, and then the commanders of those pieces slice them up and so on, the guy with the big picture of the battle is pretty far removed, often not even in the same country.

At my level, all I knew was today we have to make it to this town. Little bit of fighting, little bit of waiting around, then get ready, we have a part in a big battle in the next town. Get there and the town is a ghost town. They say well why don't you go to this town, and we run into an ambush and end up in a 4 day battle with the Republican Guard.

After enough of that, we were driving around in down town B-dad. It starts to look like we've got the war in the bag and think we are going home, but end up being there 15 months. An insurgency pops up. IEDs become the new hip thing. April 2004, the Sadr's Jashe al-Maudi militia springs up and we see worse fighting than we did during the invasion.

The subsequent deployments, new militias, new terror groups, JAM, JAI, AQI, SOI and so on. We did the troop surge with a victory by attrition strategy, and when we had them pretty well beat down, Gen Petraeus flipped the strategy and it worked. On my last deployment, I felt that I could have left my JCOP with nothing more than a pistol and one magazine, and went a few hundred meters down the road to the local market with no trouble whatsoever.

[billvon 2,402]

>Standing up a new government was a success until we abandoned them just
>like we did in Vietnam.

Ah, so the Vietnam war was a good idea too; the only problem is that we didn't stay there long enough?

>There were chemical and biological weapons in massive storage depots, as
>well as factories for new ones.

No, there weren't.

>I'm done with the military, and done with war, but if I had the chance, I'd
>volunteer to go fight ISIS.

And we could wipe them out and install a strong secular leader. Let's call him Saddim. Then the next generation of US servicemen can fight HIM. At least until we learn that we are not the world's policeman - and that when we try, we usually just make things worse.

>we left Iraq vulnerable while our President ignored . . . .

Well, at least you got around to blaming Obama.

[RopeaDope 0]

No Billvon, either I'm not speaking clearly, or you are have fun playing with my wording. I don't think Vietnam or Iraq was a "good idea".

I'm saying that if you get stuck with a war, whether you agreed with it or not, you want to win. You want to win your battles so you and your men come back home to your families. After all the loss of life, you want some solace in knowing that it at least made a difference and was not all in vain.

Chemical and biological weapons, YES, there were, for I saw with my little eyes a little place called the Muthana chemical weapons depot.

We also, at a separate location, came across a weapons depot with something in it that was radio active. I don't know what it was, it was really hush hush and most of use were told to guard the perimeter.

The NBC NCO who went in to take readings and get pictures suffered some of the effects of radiation exposure and later received a Bronze Star with V for it. I'm not trying to say it was something it wasn't. I was never privy to what it was. Maybe waste, maybe something for a "dirty bomb", I don't know what all is radio active.

There were not WMDs. There was a lot of shady shit though. I'd be more than happy to email you some pictures of large SCUD missiles, chemical warheads, chemical artillery rounds, and pictures of the biological storage depot.

[RopeaDope 0]

Here is actually one of the articles of chemical weapons. I didn't even know they were trying to keep some of this stuff secret. I have several pictures that maybe I shouldn't have.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

Typically, what we would see is, mustard gas, tabun, and sarin for chem, and anthrax or botulinum toxin for bio.

Then, attached are some images of task force rocketeer dismantling missiles.

[ibx 2]

Quote

Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.

Well then - every American and Iraqi life was worth it then.

Do you even read the articles you post?

I would probably delude myself as well, it must be tough realizing that you where lied to, lost friends, saw and caused terrible shit all so that some white old men could get richer...

[Amazon 7]

Did you ever hear about any of the generals who got sacked for telling the administration to not go for it.... not an appropriate level of YES MANitis..... so Rummy replaced the people that were not telling them what they wanted to hear.
Some people knew it was going to be a clusterfuck long before any boots were transferred over there.
I believe I said something to that effect way back in the run-up to the war. Anyone who knew anything about the region knew it was going to end up being ShiaStan.....SunniStan and Kurdistan. Iraq has always been nothing more than a horrible joke on the world stage.

Iraq and the surrounding countries were created by a bunch of idiots thousands of miles away when they carved up the old Ottoman Empire by drawing fantasy lines on a map.100 years ago. They did not know of or take into account the more than thousand years of internecine infighting between all of those groups. They had no clue of the tribal nature of the people and their allegiances based on the religious sect a given tribe belonged to. It took a maniac like Sadamm and his Bathist Party to keep a lid on all the stupidity by being more ruthless than anyone else.
It is really too bad that the Project for a New American Century were just as idiotic when they thought their excellent little adventure up in the mid-nineties.. they ended up getting a lot of their fellow countrymen killed and maimed for profit. They got just what they wanted... and they did quite well off the war.

[RopeaDope 0]

I've gone deeper into this particular discussion than I should have. I agree with what Blair said. That's all.

I did spy with my little eye really big missiles on big trucks and semi trailers, and many chemical and biological warheads and artillery rounds. The Muthana chemical weapon depot was a pain in our ass, because hadj wanted really badly to get those sarin artillery rounds to use for their IEDs. Many a gun fight took place keeping them away from there.

On the totem pole of the American war machine, with Bush perched on top, I was on the other end. The part with worms stuck to the bottom, mold growing on it, and just the right height for a dog to piss on.

I wasn't "lied to". I was serving in the military and in early March 2003, I went where I was told, got off a plane in Kuwait, drove into Iraq, and did what I had to do to come back home.

[rhaig 0]

We have a history of arming, training, and pissing off our future enemies.

I don't know why it shocks anyone that we did it again. (if it even does)

--
Rob

[billvon 2,402]

>Here is actually one of the articles of chemical weapons.

You posted a picture of a crushed bomb being guarded by two men without exposure suits, who in fact are walking on it and poking it. In other words, they are guarding a destroyed (and empty) bomb. There were plenty of them in Iraq.

[Driver1 0]

christelsabine

***"US-led invasion of Iraq played role in rise of ISIS, ex-British leader Tony Blair says"

www.foxnews.com/world/2015/10/25/former-british-leader-tony-blair-says-iraq-war-played-role-in-rise-islamic/

I expect Turtle to say he's just disgruntled.

Some of our politicians share that opinion, me too.

Being that ISIS is populated among its upper ranks by former Saddamn regime honchos, I'd agree too.

There will be no addressing the customers as "Bitches", "Morons" or "Retards"!

[RopeaDope 0]

billvon

>Here is actually one of the articles of chemical weapons.

You posted a picture of a crushed bomb being guarded by two men without exposure suits, who in fact are walking on it and poking it. In other words, they are guarding a destroyed (and empty) bomb. There were plenty of them in Iraq.

In that particular picture, Mr. Hadj poj McDoge was poking around at it after the fuel, payload, and guidance system were removed. After a while, we just worried about the important parts and let them dispose of the scrap metal.

But hey, don't take my word for it. I'm just some dude, who spent a little time over there, then used my GI bill on a trade school, and now I make my living swimming around in municipal water towers.

[billvon 2,402]

>In that particular picture, Mr. Hadj poj McDoge was poking around at it after the
>fuel, payload, and guidance system were removed.

OK. So the picture does not show chemical weapons. Which makes sense, since none were found. There have, however, been several false alarms:

Jan 2004. 120mm mortar rounds that contained a suspected blister agent. Lab tests indicated no chemical agents were present

May 2004. A shell that formerly contained mustard gas was found in the middle of the street. The gas had degraded; the Iraq Survey Group called it "ineffective" and not a viable chemical weapon.

July 2004 - Warheads thought to contain Sarin was found in Iraq. Testing indicated there were no chemical weapons inside.

2004 - Several crates of buried shells with degraded (and inactive) blister agent were found. They were buried near the Iranian border; Iraqis were using them in their war with the Iranians in 1988.

2006 - Senate intelligence committee releases report showing ~500 munitions containing degraded chemical weapons dating from before the first Gulf War. None were usable.

[normiss 622]

I was amazed with the amount of propaganda that is spewed at service members.
It was just silly to be honest.

Yet I was expected to think my plywood desk would protect me from a nuclear onslaught.
Yeah....

[cvfd1399 0]

Wasn't some of iraq's mustard gas recently used in Syria?

Edit found it. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/08/german-intelligence-confirms-isis-used-mustard-gas-in-iraq-says-news-report

[turtlespeed 212]

cvfd1399

Wasn't some of iraq's mustard gas recently used in Syria?

Edit found it. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/08/german-intelligence-confirms-isis-used-mustard-gas-in-iraq-says-news-report

You know you can't trust those Germans!

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[billvon 2,402]

>Wasn't some of iraq's mustard gas recently used in Syria?

Ah. So we invaded to control their weapons of mass destruction - and found none. And now, after the invasion, they have restarted chemical weapons production.

Yep, the war really accomplished its objective. Great job.