We have been there 19 years and as of yet no one has been able to explain that. Can you?
They are also not better off now than they were under Saddam.
Absolutely they are better off. Iraq is now a functioning democracy, the Kurds are no longer being gassed and killed or locked up in concentration camps as they were under Saddam and the Shi'ites are not being publicly executed for protesting government actions and Shi'ite villages are not having their water supply destroy. The Sunni were better off under Saddam but the rest of the country were not.
We have killed more Iraqi's than Saddam ever did. Iraq was a fairly modern country. Now it's third world. Saddam was bad. We have been no better.
If you were a Sunni, about 30% of the population, life was better under Saddam, but if you were in the the other 70% if Iraqis life was much worse. If not for Obama's premature withdrawal, there would have been no ISIS to contend with and Iraq would be in much better shape today than it is. With Saddam gone and with democratic institutions in place,there is hope for tomorrow, but if Saddam and his sons had remained in power there would be no hope for tomorrow.
I am glad you think the American lives and money was well spent and are happy with new middle east 19 year quagmire.
I do not! I lost friends over there. We did not owe the Iraqis, rescuing them from their dictator, and we are the worst nation builders on earth, (it ain't taught in the books. Believe me, I read them.) and look at the entire middle east now. We should have never gone in there. It was sold to the American public on patriotism and false need. It was not worth it. The entire middle east is worse off for it. The idiots we have in charge now will never be able to fix it. We're there because even that dumb ass Rummy said "if we break it, we bought it". So, we did. We
never, ever had a plan for what to do with it. God, I wish we could unload it!
Was it a mistake to go in? I'm not sure. At the time it did not seem like a sustainable situation to me, and I tend to think we would have to eventually go in and reform the country. Saddam was already bribing people working in Kofi Anan's office with oil contracts, quite illegal but ignored by the UN, and Syria was put in charge of enforcing Iraq sanctions at the same time it was illegally helping Saddam sell illegal oil. And Saddam's brutality to the Kurds and Shi'ites seemed to continue to grow.
The war, as predicted, was over quickly, and while the nation building did seem to take forever, we went in in March 2003 and by 2007, there was relative peace, Iraqis held their first honest elections -remember all the smiling faces and purple thumbs - US forces were no longer fighting and were merely supply logistical services and training for Iraqi forces. So in four years with no blueprint to work from the US had transformed Iraq from the horror show it had been under Saddam to a functioning, relatively peaceful country now focusing on developing its resources to raise its standard of living. Quit an impressive accomplishment, something no one had thought possible. Should the US have gone in? I'm not sure, but having gone it and after making some initial errors, in four years we completely transformed the country from a brutal dictatorship into a functioning democracy which even had its own bill of rights.
Even Obama said so, when he was telling the American people why he wanted to withdraw. He told the American people that Iraq had made such spectacular progress that it no longer needed American help and so he was withdrawing our troops. He was right about the progress the Iraqis had made, but of course he was lying about Iraq no longer needing us. The Pentagon had been telling him all year that disaster would follow a withdrawal - and it did, ISIS was created in the vacuum the US had left and it proceeded to capture half of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and making millions of them homeless refugees - but Obama believed he might lose the 2012 election if he did not keep his 2008 promise to withdraw, so he decided the devastation he was creating was a small price to pay for his electoral success, so we withdrew. Had we stayed - not fighting but with the thirty thousand soldiers the Pentagon had asked for to function in support and training positions, much as we have been doing in Korea for the last 70 years -the progress that had been made through Obama's first term would have continued, Iran would have been contained, the civil war in Syria would have been much smaller, Iran's support to Hezbollah would have been more limited so Lebanon might have been able to reestablish itself as a sovereign nation and generally the ME would have been a more peaceful place. In addition, of course, the EU would not have been flooded by ME refugees leading to Brexit, but that's another issue.
Should we have gone in? Maybe things in the ME would have resolved themselves in another way if we hadn't, although I doubt it, but having gone in we should have seen the whole project through and not have pulled out against all advice simply because an anxious ambitious politician was worried about his next election.
