The War in Iraq

American troops approach the hideout of Saddam Hussein's sons

Why are we rehashing the war in Iraq? It is all in the past. And, in that several people running for President have all jumped in and disqualified themselves as potential leaders, that should count for something.Instead, it's re-opening a debate that we never had prior to the war in Iraq.

We were supposed to have had that debate BEFORE committing troops, not this many years on.

Fact is, what the Bush administration did was wrong, pure and simple. I knew it at the time, I know now. We all know now. And, a bunch of Republican candidates have all tried to re-argue everything. Thus disqualifying themselves. In fact, this should disqualify them from holding any elected office.

The war in Iraq is not the CIA's fault. The CIA had very few assets in Iraq because we didn't have any kind of a diplomatic relationship with them. Just like the CIA has no assets in North Korea. So, in every report to the President, they always offered the "we believe with very limited assurance that…" This means, "we are speculating." Just like, today, we are speculating that North Korea does not yet have the capability of launching a submarine-based missile. We don't have a "mole" in North Korea who knows for certain because the CIA has zero to very few assets in that country.

Saddam Hussein pulled out of his spider hole

The war in Iraq was a personal vendetta between the Bush family and the al-Tikriti family (Saddam Hussein's family). Saddam Hussein chose to try to send a hit squad after Poppy Bush and it was not successful. GW Bush thought he'd use the entire United States military to kill Saddam Hussein and he was successful. Then, after doing that, he didn't know what to do with the country. He also didn't know how to help New Orleans or Mobile Bay recover from Katrina, either. He was incompetent.

Iraqi soldiers graduate from basic training
after being trained by United States military advisers

We trained the Iraqi army. This was back during the war. The first thing is that we got rid of the all-ready trained army that Saddam Hussein had put together (because they were disloyal to the United States). Then, we accepted applications from people who were kept out of Saddam Hussein's army because they might have been disloyal to Saddam Hussein. Then, we "trained them." And, we had them all trained up before we left Iraq. And we left Iraq after GW Bush had signed an agreement with Nuri al-Maliki's government to GET out. So, the exit from Iraq was something that President Obama faithfully executed due to prior agreements with a generally hostile government in Iraq that wanted us out.

Today, Iraq is in a crisis. But President Obama did not create this crisis. It was created when Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot drew boundary lines and created countries in the wake of WW I after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They created an Iraq with several different ethnic groups that Saddam Hussein held together using fear, brutality and a kind of strange nationalism based on hating the outsider (Iran, the US, Israel…)

Iraqi insurgents

When we marched into Iraq, I had previously educated myself about that country—we were there under Poppy Bush. I knew that they had several different ethnic groups and those groups didn't get along. Saddam Hussein's Baathists were running the show and they were the Sunni minority, based in the north and west of the country. Since they were the army and the government, they had control.

It was always a given that Iraq would descend into a civil war. The three main ethnic groups don't get along and won't unless they have a dictatorship. And al-Maliki made sure that the government in Iraq was all Shi'ia. The Bush appointee to run Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, had previously "cleaned out" the Sunnis, preventing them from holding any jobs in the military or the government and setting up a system that would create Sunni-Shi'ia conflict that would result in civil war. For members of the Bush administration to claim that they didn't know this would happen is a confession of complete incompetence. But we all ready knew they were incompetent. The primary focus of the Bush administration was to please those big corporations that made the most money from the war in Iraq, Halliburton, GE, Boeing, GM, General Dynamics and so on. This would also please the American oil companies for whom the Bush administration hoped would get extremely lucrative contracts to drill, produce oil and refine oil in the oil-rich nation of Iraq. The al-Maliki government didn't play along, though and awarded those contracts to companies from outside of the United States. The only ones who did play along were the Kurds.

Saddam Hussein statue toppled in Firdos Square
at the same time, an effigy of GW Bush is being
burned by Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers
but we didn't have a video camera on that.

We tried to re-fight the Vietnam war when John McCain ran for President. I thought that was really foolish. We made mistakes in Vietnam but McCain tried to re-fight it and declare failure a success. Unhappily, Vietnam's mistakes were the result of the failures of two administrations, one Democrat and the other Republican. The Iraq fiasco was not the result of the failure of the Obama administration. He, largely, followed what the Bush administration left him with—an agreement to get out.

So, now we're "training the Iraqi army" again. Remember, we did this before. We spent untold millions of dollars training them (instead of rebuilding New Orleans, instead of paying for a prescription plan for seniors, instead of rebuilding our infrastructure, instead of funding schools). If we are training them again, we are picking the Shi'ia side in a civil war. And we are doing this because the only way the Sunnis could possibly challenge the Shi'ia is to create a terrorist organization: ISIL (DASH, ISIS).

I am not an isolationist. But I would ask that we clearly define why we are so interested in the Iraqi civil war. Granted, our invasion certainly did create it, but after Bush and al-Maliki did everything in their power to plant the seeds of this civil war, we ought to simply recognize Kurdistan (our only friends there) and encourage the Sunnis to form their own political entity that we will recognize as a separate country—if they will agree to eschew terrorism.

The result will be three countries. Which is the way it ought to have been after WW I. Now, the Sunnis don't particularly like us because of Bremer, but if we promised them a country and recognition, they might stop the terrorist gambit.