When you read the British government’s intelligence assessments, they predict, plus or minus a few details, exactly what happened after the war. The UK had ample warning that Iraq would collapse after the invasion and make the problem of terrorism worse — but it went to war anyway.
.. It predicted that sectarian tensions, as well as the legacy of authoritarian rule, would pose a serious threat to post-invasion stability.
“Sunni hegemony, the position of the Kurds and Shia, enmity with Kuwait, infighting among the elite, autocratic rule and anti-Israeli sentiment will not disappear with Saddam,” the DIS report explains. “We should also expect considerable anti-Western sentiment among a populace that has experienced ten years of sanctions.”Fixing these problems, the DIS argued, would require an extraordinary and lengthy commitment of American resources.
.. The United States, too, knew of the war’s risks. According to Chilcot’s findings, “the State Department judged that rebuilding Iraq would require ‘a US commitment of enormous scope’ over several years.”
Yet the United States failed to plan for postwar sectarian infighting and had no serious plan for rebuilding Iraqi institutions after the invasion.
.. This, Chilcot judges, owed principally to Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. “Many in the DoD anticipated US forces being greeted as liberators who would be able leave Iraq within months, with no need for the US to administer the functions of Iraq’s government after major combat operations,” Chilcot concludes.
.. “The UK wanted [the UN] and the IAEA to have time to complete their work, and wanted the support of the Security Council, and of the international community more widely, before any further steps were taken. This option was foreclosed by the US decision.”
.. The UK leadership thought that standing up to America would threaten their partnership. This probably wasn’t true — the US and France get along fine nowadays. But the UK leadership thought it was, and that made all the difference.
Researchers have found that war has a remarkable and miraculous effect
Their conclusion is that the experience of wartime violence somehow changes people for the better, making them more cooperative and more trusting. And they have some theories explaining why.
.. In Sierra Leone, researchers found that people who had been exposed to more wartime violence were more generous — they shared more money in the dictator game than neighbors who hadn’t seen much violence.
.. Certain lab games found that exposure to war violence made people nicer toward members in their own village but not necessarily toward people outside their own community.
.. In recent years, evolutionary psychologists have argued that war may have played an important role in making us more cooperative. We know that humanity has a bloody past; constant conflict between different tribes would have extinguished any groups where people couldn’t work together or sacrifice themselves for the common good. At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to be indiscriminately kind toward others. If war made us nicer to our neighbors, it did not make us any more trusting of outsiders.
In 2002, Donald Trump Said He Supported Invading Iraq
For months, Donald Trump has claimed that he opposed the Iraq War before the invasion began — as an example of his great judgment on foreign policy issues.
But in a 2002 interview with Howard Stern, Donald Trump said he supported an Iraq invasion.
In the interview, which took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump directly if he was for invading Iraq.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
..
At the Feb. 6 debate in New Hampshire, Trump said, “I’m the only one up here, when the war of Iraq — in Iraq, I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’”
The Sacred Sacrifice We Honor Today
Remembering the thousands of Americans who gave their lives in defense of freedom.
And all of those who died in all America’s wars ultimately died for the sake of preserving freedom. This was not the fate they wanted. Most if not all of those who died at Midway or in the Argonne Forest or at Gettysburg or in the streets of Hue and Fallujah never intended to give their lives away, certainly not without a fight. But volunteer or draftee, officer or buck private, the moment they took their oath of service they presented their lives willingly for that sacrifice — which is where far too many ended. The sacral nature of this willing sacrifice needs to be understood and appreciated — even revered.
.. General Douglas MacArthur did. It was why he liked to compare the military life to a priesthood: that the sacrifice unto death entailed in America’s military services was one that ranked with the sacrifice of the Son of God Himself.
“It is my humble belief that the relation which He came to establish was based on sacrifice,” MacArthur once said, “and that men and women who follow in His train are called by it to the defense of certain priceless principles, even at the cost of their own lives.”