Ten year anniversary invasion of Iraq. What lessons should we have learned?

[HomerJS]

Its been 10 years and what lessons do we as a country take from this? We know pretty much what happened so I don't want to litigate that here

My biggest take away was everyone failed in their job to ask the hard questions. The right refused to question. The left were afraid to question. The press fell down on the job and basically went along with the Bush administration as cheerleaders.

Rather then having an honest debate if anyone disagreed they were labeled as a trator.

Some of that is being corrected today. Obama is taking heat and being questioned from his own constituency on the drone program. Hopefully the right is cabable of that kind of self reflection.

We can't refuse because of fear or partisanship to question what these people in Washington are getting us into.

 

[kage69]

No more puppet presidents who delegate thinking to career douchebags.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Lessons:

(1.) Don't elect any president with the last name of Bush.

(2.) The Republican Party's presidential darling can lie to the American people, get thousands of Americans killed and injured, and tack on trillions of dollars of debt, but they'll blame it on the next winning Democrat. Also, the "Joe-the-Retarded-Plumber" types will still love the Republican Party.

(3.) The Republicans can do an amazing job of pretending that a president like Bush never existed and was never affiliated with their party.

 

[nextJin]

Absolutely nothing, we have not learned a damn thing.

 

[TallBill]

Lessons:

(1.) Don't elect any president with the last name of Bush.

(2.) The Republican Party's presidential darling can lie to the American people, get thousands of Americans killed and injured, and tack on trillions of dollars of debt, but they'll blame it on the next winning Democrat. Also, the "Joe-the-Retarded-Plumber" types will still love the Republican Party.

(3.) The Republicans can do an amazing job of pretending that a president like Bush never existed and was never affiliated with their party.

Way to follow your leaders advice and work with the other party. Oh wait, he doesn't do that either.

Both parties need to stop wasting time attacking each other. Its old and boring and unproductive.

 

[Jhhnn]

Way to follow your leaders advice and work with the other party. Oh wait, he doesn't do that either.

Both parties need to stop wasting time attacking each other. Its old and boring and unproductive.

Heh. That's stunningly lame. Modern Repubs' version of compromise is "My way or the Highway" & "Give us what we want or we'll shoot the hostage".

That got a big headstart in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, when anybody opposed was characterized as a Terrarist Sympathizer or worse, when fearmongering & bloodlust were running rampant courtesy of "Compassionate Conservatives".

What have we learned? Depends on who answers the question. Given the deafening silence from our usual right wing ravers, It's obvious that the only thing they've learned is more comprehensive methods of denial & obfuscation.

The right wing neocon agenda hasn't changed one little bit, despite having lost the presidential election & actually receiving fewer votes than the opposition in HOR races. They maintain a HOR majority strictly on the basis of Gerrymandering, but they want to dictate the same old right wing social agenda, the rich get it all agenda, onto the majority-

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/12/paul-ryans-budget-isnt-about-the-deficit/

 

[sandorski]

If a Proponents reason for doing something changes from week to week, be very wary.

 

[IronWing]

We have learned that tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people taking to the streets to protest a war before it starts not only has no effect but the war mongers will later pretend it never happened and make up shit about how we were united going in.

We have learned that Americans will support even the most retarded of wars as long as they aren't asked to pay for it.

 

[Paratus]

 

[Moonbeam]

Ten year anniversary invasion of Iraq. What lessons should we have learned?

I think this is the wrong question. I think that before asking what we should learn we have to ask if we can learn. What I saw was some very hideous people who used the terror on 9/11 to manipulate us into a war in which we should have had no part. The same manipulators and the same terror still exists, ready for the next psychotic outbreak. How can we learn if we do not change? Do we still worship the manipulators? Yes. Are we still easily terrified. Yes. So we have learned nothing and won't until we do something about our own stupidity. To learn is to unlearn, to shed fear and idolatry.

 

[Jhhnn]

Heh. It's not like we've invaded anybody since the Bush era, is it?

I suspect that the Obama Admin will declare victory & leave Afghanistan on schedule, with the Bushistas puppet, Karzai, on the first plane out right afterwards.

We'd already lost in Afghanistan before Obama was inaugurated, thanks to Bush admin arrogance, stupidity & neglect.

 

[Jhhnn]

Ten year anniversary invasion of Iraq. What lessons should we have learned?

I think this is the wrong question. I think that before asking what we should learn we have to ask if we can learn. What I saw was some very hideous people who used the terror on 9/11 to manipulate us into a war in which we should have had no part. The same manipulators and the same terror still exists, ready for the next psychotic outbreak. How can we learn if we do not change? Do we still worship the manipulators? Yes. Are we still easily terrified. Yes. So we have learned nothing and won't until we do something about our own stupidity. To learn is to unlearn, to shed fear and idolatry.

Thank You, Moonbeam.

 

[trenchfoot]

We gotta look carefully at the folks the president surrounds himself/herself with. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al, talk about having a top tier team of dyed-in-the-wool chickenhawks looking for profit taking wars. They were all there exploiting a compliant president that would only on rare occasion get fed up with being led around by the ring in his nose and lash out to say he was his own man with his own mind ala "I'm the decider".

The only guys close to Bush that I felt some sympathy for was Bush's press secretaries because they had to lie and lie and lie to no end. Most of the time they had to lie so blatantly and belch out an endless string of obviously false, lame excuses for the Bush team that I'm sure each must have had some kind of soul searching identity crisis every time they went home for the night.

 

[Zorkorist]

Government in general needs absolute scrutiny, and absolute transparency, in real time.

No more, they are better than us because they are Government!

They can't spend more than they earn. They can't invade nations on false pretence, etc.

They can't have drones.

They can't...

-John

 

[glenn1]

Takeaway is that when you feel a President is about to make a grave policy error, engage him to limit the worst excesses of the plan rather resorting to an unyielding, unthinking, and fanatical opposition to him trying to scrap the entire plan. The President *will* get his way, and you'll just steel his resolve to be even less wiling to listen to good advice since he'll just see your opposition as personal. And in the end, the people will get stuck with a fucked up quagmire like Iraq or Obamacare.

 

[TallBill]

Takeaway is that when you feel a President is about to make a grave policy error, engage him to limit the worst excesses of the plan rather resorting to an unyielding, unthinking, and fanatical opposition to him trying to scrap the entire plan. The President *will* get his way, and you'll just steel his resolve to be even less wiling to listen to good advice since he'll just see your opposition as personal. And in the end, the people will get stuck with a fucked up quagmire like Iraq or Obamacare.

General population vote isn't used to declare war for a reason Not justifying any war, just always thought that it was a silly argument.

 

[Matt1970]

Lessons:

(1.) Don't elect any president with the last name of Bush.

(2.) The Republican Party's presidential darling can lie to the American people, get thousands of Americans killed and injured, and tack on trillions of dollars of debt, but they'll blame it on the next winning Democrat. Also, the "Joe-the-Retarded-Plumber" types will still love the Republican Party.

(3.) The Republicans can do an amazing job of pretending that a president like Bush never existed and was never affiliated with their party.

It's kinda hard to pretend he doesn't exist when he is the man subject of blame for everything that goes on today.

 

[TallBill]

I blame FDR for some things. Clinton for others, Bush for others, Obama for others, congress for others.

 

[Zorkorist]

It's kinda hard to pretend he doesn't exist when he is the man subject of blame for everything that goes on today.

LOL at attributing it to a man, when it is the system that is broken.

-John

 

[DucatiMonster696]

As nextJin put it "Absolutely nothing, we have not learned a damn thing."

What was learned is that as long as it is one group's guy doing the bombing and foreign intervention it's okay but when it's that other group's guy doing the bombing its a bad thing.

 

[Matt1970]

As nextJin put it "Absolutely nothing, we have not learned a damn thing."

What was learned is that as long as it is one group's guy doing the bombing and foreign intervention it's okay but when it's that other group's guy doing the bombing its a bad thing.

The fact that we are still in Afghanistan proves we haven’t learned much. Some day we will learn that we cannot occupy a nation that has so many people in and near it sworn to kill as many Americans as possible and die trying. Our military forces can make short work of disabling any countries defensive capabilities, policing that nation is another story.

The next time a President has intelligence that another nation is up to no good, that intelligence needs a lot closer scrutiny. But even if Bush didn’t lie, would it have been worth all those lives?

 

[TallBill]

Or just go in, wipe em out, and pull out. But actually wipe em out unlike the first gulf war. American public would never have it though. So we get stuck for a decade trying to improve it.

 

[nextJin]

Looking back we were seen as liberators at first, two days after the war started I was in some random town (damn if I remember which one) during the sprint to Baghdad where our convoy had to stop for some reason. Everyone got out to take up security positions and we had kids running up to us holding American flags asking for candy. Most all of the adults had smiles and waved. In my opinion things did not really start going down hill until Bush and company decided it was a good idea to disban the standing Iraqi Army. Within a week we were starting to take small arms and rocket fire on our small COB.

We never should have went, but that one thing set us up for failure and put us on the road to nation building. Had we left them in place and allowed them to maintain stability for future elections we might have been able to come home long before we actually did.

I look back at it from a fathers perspective now, when I was little my grandpa used to have me on his knee showing me old photos of him in World War II. He used to tell me the good side of things, about how he helped saved thousands of jews from hardship and rid the world of a tyrant.

My father never got to experience that, his time in Vietnam was an excercise in perserverance getting through the meatgrinder alive, and unfortunately I feel almost the exact same way about this war. Things could have been so much different had we simply focused all of our efforts on Afgahnistan and those who plotted to kill Americans.

Truth be told, I was a huge Neo-Conservative before and during the invasion. Overtime I became older and wiser, leading me to become a libertarian and to look at principle over everything else.

If I have learned anything personally it's that the world is not a fair place. It is up to you as an individual to forge your own outcomes in life with the hand dealt.

 

[xanis]

Like someone else said, we haven't learned a damned thing. Ten years and $1.3 trillion later we're still in the Middle East and we're still living in fear of terrorism. I think more and more people are catching on to the government's shenanigans, but I think a lot of people still love a good fight and don't mind seeing their tax dollars vanish into the desert as long as we bag a few terrorists now and then.

 

[brandonb]

I learned that Israel was in control of the US Government back then. They still are today. (See top story on CNN right now)...

Arabs are a threat to Jews. We will continue to fight a war against Arabs (be it Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan) until our "best buddies" have been removed from our government think tank. The government will use whatever execuse that needs to be, be it WMD, Revolts, Buddies with NK, Cyberwarfare, whatever...

The people are still too stupid to figure it out. Because the news (agents) tells them so.