[quote=felix]I guess this would be an issue if we actually did start costly new wars.
I can only assume you are referring to Iraq which was actually a war started in 1990 by Saddam’s incursion into Kuwait. That war was never ended.
It was in a cease fire and the conditions of that cease fire were repeatedly violated by Saddam. Saddam had longer range missiles than allowed, he violated no-fly zones, he interfered with and tossed out inspectors. And most importantly he never demonstrated to the UN that he destroyed WMD. That was his responsibility.
I also hope you are aware that it costs three times as much to supply a soldier in Afghanistan than Iraq due to it being land locked. And I hope you don’t think it cost nothing to patrol and hem in Saddam forever.
Our priorities of keeping our citizens and allies safe wasn’t screwed up. That should be our first priority imo.[/quote]
Saddam was a good friend to the US and an asset. We sold him many WMDs to keep Iran at bay after Reagan’s election and most of his butchery was done with US consent. He became the enemy because of his dollar and oil policy. Basically, he became defiant. It is publicly known that Saddam received an tacit Ok from a US to invade Kuwait.
On July 25, 1990, the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq, April Glaspie, asked the Iraqi high command to explain the military preparations in progress, including the massing of Iraqi troops near the border. The American ambassador declared to her Iraqi interlocutor that Washington, “inspired by the friendship and not by confrontation, does not have an opinion” on the disagreement between Kuwait and Iraq,
Basically, they duped him into thinking it was ok to invade. He sure as hell did have a valid beef with kuwait if you look at the issues. My thinking is we probably worked kuwait to provoke him on the other side. Otherwise, they would have resolved the issue another way.
We thought destroying his military would make him more subservient but only worked in reverse. We tried reason and probably assassinate him during the 90s with no luck. The next move was military. This was decided by the late 90s that he would have to be taken out.
WMDs were never the real reason for the invasion, because lots of “enemy” countries have them. It was a side issue, the US intelligence community was split on and were definitely not sure of it, but uniformly agreed that he was not a threat to the US as far as violence, bombs or terrorism is concerned, only in an economic sense was he a threat. Which is a little complicated to explain to the public. Actually, Colin Powell in early 2000 described him as a mean junk yard dog with no teeth, living paranoid in underground bunkers. Which is a pretty damn good analogy.
Today, Iraq has become the center of the oil exploration world today. It’s widely known in oil circles that Iraq “could” be another Saudi Arabia and the only major oil producing region left in the world that could significantly and easily raise their production levels. This was not a surprise and is central to economic health of a growth based system.
