What the Iraq war taught us is that lots of folks are simply never going to get this.

I am curious at what mental blocks exist that prevent people from understanding that criminals need to be brought to justice, and whether there is a combination of words that can persuade them of this. Or whether it really does require goons knocking on their door before they return to reality.

the Iraq war was most definitely a war crime will be that no one was charged...?

The Iraq was most definitely NOT a war crime. If you believe there is a law that protects Saddam's "right" to rape and mutilate, you have a duty to ignore that "law" and then do your best to CHANGE that "law".

It's equally simple to divide the world into pro-our-war-crimes or pro-his-war-crimes.

I'm not pro-US-war crimes. Nor is the American government or the American people. If an American commits a war crime, or any crime for that matter, they are charged and jailed (and I support that). Under Saddam's regime, it was a criminal in charge of the government. The US et al thankfully rectified that horror.

By analogy, you're now proposing that murdering someone and killing someone accidently are the same thing, because intent doesn't matter.

No, that is not my position.

Or, if I'm a serial killer and I happen to kill a family planning to commit a terrorist act, that I committed a laudable act.

If I knew a family was about to commit a terrorist act, and I saw a serial killer enter their house, indeed, I would not stand in the way. If there were no repercussions for killing the family, I would kill them myself. Especially if the terrorist act was something like 9/11 with people jumping from skyscrapers. When I saw video of people jumping from skyscrapers, I just hoped they knew that they would be avenged, and set about planning vengeance myself. Cleaning up the Middle East is part of that plan.

Thanks for creating a philosophical argument.

Oh, the attractiveness of being judge, jury and executioner of others, as long as the same doesn't apply to them, is very simple, I agree.

And that description is best suited to Saddam. Which you happily ignore, and even go so far as standing in the way of those who would put an end to his criminality.

for those who think unnecessary wars are a good idea, as you guys over there generally seem to believe.

BTW, I'm Australian, and only 50% (to my shock and horror) of Australians supported the liberation of Iraq. The other 50% are apparently closet sociopaths who aren't even moved by the thought of men having their tongues cut out for exercising their freedom of speech. Or girls being abducted and raped by Uday. Australia is now a scary country to live in.

It is now perfectly clear what happened.

Yes, it is perfectly clear. The US et al waged a war of liberation. They successfully managed to convert a dictatorship into a democracy, something that racists/religious bigots said was impossible.

They took nothing, they asked for nothing, and they left. It was as pure as a war of liberation can be.

Is this your philosophy: whataboutery? — Kenosha Kid

No, it's not whataboutery. It's the fact that Saddam was a criminal who ordered the rape and mutilation of innocent Iraqis, and by any sane philosophical position should have been brought to justice. The appropriate tool to bring him to justice was a war of liberation, which is exactly what Bush did and what you should have supported.

You should not have supported the alternative of allowing a criminal to continue committing crimes, and trying to stop the police from arresting him.

It's a very simple concept.

It was based on lies, so there was no right intent

After further thought, I think this is where the fundamental problem is. It shouldn't matter if the intent is wrong. What matters is whether the action itself is right or wrong. If you ignore all the bluster, all they were actually doing was carrying out a war of liberation. They weren't trying to annex territory or anything. All they did was replace a dictatorship with a democracy and then leave.

The philosophical position should be to not stand in the way of a correct *action*. You should *support* correct actions, even if others are allegedly misguided.

The US didn't invade Iraq to save raped women. They did it because it looked like a good way to squash al Qaida.

The US doesn't speak with one voice. Decent Americans, and in fact, decent people the world over, supported the liberation war (which is all it actually was), for noble reasons including ending the Iraqi holocaust which included institutionalized rape.

And more to the point, YOU should have been one of those decent people.

And it is completely unconscionable to stand in the way of the police when they are responding to a rape call. Or a tongue-chopping call.

war should be the last resort

Ok, I have another unstated assumption here. I consider war to be a tool, to be used whenever it is strategic to do so. I don't see it as an inherently bad thing that should be used as a last resort. I see allowing human rights abuses such as the rape of women to be the last resort.

I hope if it happens again that some lessons have been learned from Iraq

Now that we know that democracy can be installed by force of arms anywhere, even with Arab Muslims, which many insisted was impossible, Iran will be a cakewalk. It's very simple. You just don't disband the old security forces. It's basically just a decapitation strike. They get the same result they would get if they had a successful revolution (instead of being mowed down by automatic weapons).

lot more success than actual invasions

Let me make this very clear. If Australia ever has a military coup, I don't want the US to impose sanctions and dilly-dally about it for 23 years. I want an IMMEDIATE liberation. Just do a military defeat of the dictator's forces and then arm the good people (ie the ones who supported immediate liberation), and we'll take care of the rest. I don't care how many bad Australians die. And if the bad guys manage to kill some good guys with terrorism, I won't blame the US for it. Nor do I want problems in Australia to deny the next country a chance for liberation. If Australians turn out to be low quality people, with only 50% supporting liberation (unlike the 87% of Afghans), that is Australia's native fault, and you should give the next country the benefit of the doubt and assume they will be more like Afghanistan than Australia. Thankyou.

"If we're proposing to be the world's surgeon, should we be careful to first do no harm?"

Sometimes when the police are responding to a rape call, they kill pedestrians. Does that mean we should disband the police, because they sometimes do harm?

If we accidentally get some things wrong, so be it. That should not be used as an excuse for inaction when there is institutionalized rape, meaning millions of women don't even have the basic right to not be raped. Or even worse - men don't have the right to keep their tongues in their mouth.

"Just the first paragraph alone shows how you don't understand sovereignty"

Yes, this is another assumption. That women have the right to not be raped, regardless of which sovereign borders they were unfortunate enough to have been born into.

This needs to feed into "Just War Theory" and maybe you can read up on "Responsibility to Protect". It's even in Wikipedia.

The Iraqi war was wrong by many measures. It was based on lies, so there was no right intent

YOU should have had the right intent. YOU should have been agitating for a war of liberation for the right reasons. There are tactical reasons why WMD (which was a guess, not a lie) was touted as the main reason for BUSH to go to war. But that is irrelevant. There were millions of people who wanted to see Iraq liberated, and THEIR reasons were noble, and THAT made it a just war.

sanctions killed more people than Saddam ever did

There were no sanctions on food and medicine. If there were any deaths due to that, they were on Saddam for not handing power over to a democracy. Regardless, even if I concede that sanctions were wrong (and indeed, to some extent they WERE wrong - I don't want to see Iran sanctioned either, I want to see it LIBERATED), the war itself was RIGHT.

So it didn't result in a greater good

It did result in a greater good. Many greater goods. For starters there is no longer institutionalized rape and tongue chopping. Iraq is no longer a country of slaves. And there was good for the US too - the US had an enemy convert into a friend. That is a prerequisite for world peace as opposed to world non-combat.

apparently don't accept dissent from your values

Saddam didn't accept dissent from his values that it is OK to order women to be raped. I don't accept Saddam's dissent that I consider that to be abhorrent. So yes, we need to go to war to sort out whether rape is right or wrong. I'm just surprised you would back Saddam in that war and seek to keep him in power.

You think reading a wiki makes you informed, you're just wasting everybody's time.

Quite frankly I didn't get the opinion that institutionalized rape and tongue-chopping is bad from a wiki, but apparently we need a wiki on it for some people. It was just something innate. I have spent decades trying to find out why others don't have the same attitude to state-slavery that I have. It's almost like the world is full of sociopaths.

How can you think that 99% of the Iraqi people thought that Saddam Hussein as abhorrent and be surprised that only 50%(which percentage I think would be likely more) saw him as that? ... why then would we think that foreigners are different from us?

I thought the first part of the above quote, exactly because of the second part of the above quote. If Australia had a cruel dictator, I think 99% of Australians would be against him too. I projected Australia onto Iraq. And again, if Iraq is different from Australia, that's exactly why we need to get in there and shake it up. After 9/11, the US needs every country to be a clone of Australia.

If he REALLY would be despised by 99% of the population, then he surely would have fallen instantly

Note that I saw an Iraqi opinion poll where Saddam was only viewed favorably by 5% of the population. That shows that 5% with automatic weapons are able to suppress 95%. I believed, and still believe, that with automatic weapons and a properly organized security force, it is possible to subjugate 99% of the population.

Yet it doesn't ask what complex issues are behind this.

I think you're overstating the complexity. It is just automatic weapons. The Iraqis actually tried rising up in 1991 and got slaughtered by automatic weapons. The Chinese got slaughtered in 1989 too. Both sides of WW1 were slaughtered by charging automatic weapons too. Automatic weapons really really work, and they're not complex.

We (hopefully) don't make such naive divisions of our own fellow citizens, so why then would we think that foreigners are different from us?

You can't see a difference between a dictatorship and a democracy? We don't have "henchmen of the dictator" in Australia because we have a democracy. They do exist under a dictator. It's not a matter of being naive. The government of Saddam was very different from the government of Australia. But I expected the people to be the same. In one respect the Iraqis were the same as Australians. Both of our countries were split 50/50 on whether the act of liberation was right or wrong. I actually expected the Iraqis to be far better than Australians on that issue, and in turn convert Australia to have 99% support for world liberation. I was wrong about that unfortunately. But I still think I am right for empowering the 50% of Iraqis who wanted to be liberated.

Of course not. But there are norms and customs, "way of the land". — ssu

The "way of the land" in 2003 was that Saddam was ordering the rape of women and chopping out the tongues of people who spoke against him. I thought that 99% of Iraqis would have seen that as abhorrent too, and welcome a liberation. But only 50% did. How can you talk about "way of the land" when the Iraqi people were split 50/50 over a very fundamental issue of whether an external liberation is good or not?

And things what is tolerated in politics and what is not. These either soft or hard institutions that define how people behave. So when I say that there is a collective understanding I mean this. Not that the elite can agree on certain issues and speak with one voice.

There was no "collective understanding" among the Iraqi people themselves. They were split 50/50. How do you know the elite weren't split 50/50 too?

And how can the UN by force of arms install social cohesion and ease the racial tensions in your country?

Australia is already a secular capitalist liberal democracy, which is the "best technology" we know of. That's why I'm not gunning for an invasion of Taiwan or Denmark either. They are "mission accomplished".

Seriously, if a person points a gun at your head, you will be focused on the situation that a person is pointing a gun at your head, not as much on what the person is saying. He might say that he is just wanting to improve your situation, yet that is secondary and the feeling is quite different if the conversation would be had in a normal situation.

It was Saddam who was pointing a gun at the head of the Iraqi people. It is the US et al who instead got the Iraqi people's guns pointed at the head of their leadership.

Am I missing something?

Our politics. — Kenosha Kid

I should also point out that the US doesn't "own" democracy. And it is the Iraqi people's politics that were being forced on the Iraqi leadership, not US politics. I believe we have far more right to help the Iraqi people assert THEIR politics than Saddam had to assert HIS politics on the Iraqi people.

Every society has a power elite. The top administrators, the politicians, the rich people, the cultural elite and the media. This isn't at all a fixed group of people and is very difficult to define who actually is in this group.

Yet what they do and how they settle the competition for power is crucial for how the society works. — ssu

I'm still waiting for my Russian friend, but I have a comment. Are you saying that this nebulous group of "power elite" in Iraq speak with one voice? How did you ascertain that? I get my 50/50 split from statistically valid opinion polls conducted by the BBC etc. I've never heard of anyone surveying the "power elite".

Also, regardless of that, what is preventing an occupying force like the US from shaking things up and changing who the "power elite" are? Or perhaps bribing them? We need a formula for installing democracy by force of arms so that we can get on with the job now that we've had feedback from Afghanistan and Iraq.

But now, it's "We can do anything!"

It is difficult to know what the US would have done without 9/11. Note that at the time (2001) I was still trying to secure Europe. The Baltics were not in NATO yet. I didn't want to spook Russia with an aggressive foreign policy, even though seeing the Taliban hitting Afghan women with sticks made me furious.

So we don't know when (if ever) the gloves would have been taken off.

9/11 provided the impetus to fix the world. You can see the beans being spilled here.

I was also expecting Iraqis (99%) to be sensible and we could liberate a lot more countries. The fact that only 50% of Iraqis were sensible was why we needed to stay and do nation-building, to the point where we could hand the job over to the sensible 50%.

And why didn't they march back then in 1991 to Baghdad and free the Iraqi people then?

Let's listen to a man called Dick Cheney in 1994 giving the reasons just why invading Iraq is a terrible idea. Please listen to it, Paul: — ssu

I listened to it, but I didn't need to. In 1991 the Cold War hadn't been won. Securing Europe was FAR more important than Iraq. We didn't want to do anything to spook the USSR. We wanted the USSR on our side and to not fear anything from us. Western security was and is more *important* than the more *beautiful* goal of liberating Iraq.

Regarding the Kurds throwing fruit at the Americans - I totally agree that Trump is an idiot. He should have stayed in Syria to protect the Kurds - Free Syria. He said he was only there to "secure the oil" (whatever that means). He is a total asshole for doing that. But Bush is not Trump. And the millions of Americans who supported the liberation of Iraq are not Trump either.

First time in long time the US started a war

Panama? Grenada? Haiti? Kosovo?

I'll come back to you on the question of the "elite" as I want to see what my Russian friend's take on that is.

Because democracy has to come from the society itself. The own domestic elite of a country have to be for democracy. The struggle for power has to happen at the election booth and the result has to be accepted by all.

That is an interesting take. I'm not sure how you measure "domestic elite" and why you ascribe such importance to them.

But for starters, the Iraqi people do not speak with one voice. When you say it has to "come from the society itself", many Iraqis are already with the program. About 50% of them considered the US invasion to be a liberation. Isn't that a good enough stance?

Of course that leaves another 50% that we need to deal with, but that's a job that needs to be done sooner or later. After 9/11 it was a job that needed to be done sooner.

I assume that Iraqi politicians are considered part of the "domestic elite". At the last election they were dismayed by the result of the vote and asked for a recount. The recount showed the same result. They accepted the result. Isn't that good enough?

and the Iraqi Parliament having already made a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US forces, I would say this train wreck of a disaster is nowhere being over. — ssu

This is actually a good sign, not a train wreck. The Iraqi politicians know they are free to say whatever they want about the US. And the Iraqi people are free to say whatever they want too.

Under Saddam they couldn't do that. They would have their tongue cut out. It was Saddam that was a train wreck.

Once a decision had been made that Saddam needed to be removed for other reasons, the US did indeed take the exact action of merely liberating the Iraqi people, and not even forcing a bus timetable on them.
— Paul Edwards

This is flatly false.

Iraq in reality became this sandbox for politically appointed and usually inept Republicans (chosen because of political ties and not experience) were with Paul Bremer micromanaging everything in Iraq at the crucial stage. The "de-baathification" of Iraqi legal system went to quite extreme lengths by Americans rewriting traffic laws etc. — ssu

Yes, for one single year the American occupation force was micromanaging everything which is what an occupation force is required to do. But then they transitioned to Iraqi self-rule, and the Iraqis were free to change anything at all they wanted, including those traffic laws. The Iraqis were not required to do a single thing by the US. Nor were they required to pay back the cost of the liberation. It was a gift from God. It was the purest form a war can be. Replace a holocaust with a democracy. Not a step wrong (policy-wise, anyway - there were individual Americans who broke the law and if caught were charged and jailed).

Precisely. You can eliminate many objections by defining your terms and making more assumptions explicit.

Yes, that is what I am here for. Thankyou.

For example, you would want to rule out Russia, with elected leadership, making war against Australia on ideological grounds.

If Australia had a cruel dictator that was raping my daughter, I would rather take my chances with the Russian democracy. Note that in recent Russian history, Russia withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe and the Baltics without being defeated in battle. That should count for something.

fails to spell that out then the theory needs to be adjusted.
— Paul Edwards

As I said, you're not here for debate but for confirmation of your own believes. Boring. — Benkei

We can debate whether Just War Theory needs to be updated or not. Or do you have a dogmatic belief that it is perfect in its current form and there is no possibility of it being changed?

That would actually be an interesting discussion. Again, Iraq had the strongest possible case. There was a holocaust in progress (institutionalized rape and tongue chopping) and the invaders intended to simply set up a democracy and leave, which is exactly what they did.

Even philosophically this is illogical: Let's have foreigners come to your country and install democracy. It's like an application that you can have someone install to you.

What's illogical about that? It was done with great success in Panama. If Australia had a military coup and the US came to Australia to dislodge the dictator, Australia would be a great success story too. If you think Iraq wasn't a success story (with 300+ political parties and higher voter turnout than the US), that just means we need to be there to respond to 9/11 (the response to 9/11 requires the whole world to be converted into clones of Denmark/Taiwan/Australia).

let the winners of democratic elections kill people who take up arms against the democratic government
— Paul Edwards

Isn't this this unofficial policy of all countries already? — magritte

No, the official policy of dictatorships is that the dictator will kill anyone who takes up arms against him. Surely you can see the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy? Or does that call for another assumption?

You'll never explain the Iraq invasion,. It was a family feud for the Bushes

Millions upon millions of people supported the Iraq invasion, including me. Why don't you simply ASK (not TELL) them (or ask me!) what their motive was? Even if you assume that Bush is some sort of alien space bat who hates countries that begin with the letter "I", what difference does that make? Millions upon millions of people (including me) got THEIR policy implemented.

Whereas if YOUR policy (or the policy of the Australian Labor Party) had been implemented, millions of Iraqis would still be enslaved.

9/11 requires us to fix every individual on the planet, — Paul Edwards

And we can start with the people on this forum (as a response to 9/11).

Our politics. And to do so by killing as many people as it takes. — Kenosha Kid

While it doesn't matter how many people Saddam killed?

And how many more people need to die in car accidents in the US before you start campaigning for private car travel to be banned there?

Tangential, here. But it seems to me that the removal of dictators always results in matters becoming worse, at least for a while and usually a long while. I am sure there are examples where removing dictators worked for the good but I cannot think of one. Can you?

What was wrong with the toppling of Panama by the US? The fact that Iraq wasn't as straightforward as Panama is part of the reason why we needed to set up democracy in Iraq as part of the response to 9/11. We need to understand why Iraq isn't identical to Panama and (eventually) do something to (culturally) change Iraq so that it is no different from say Denmark. It should be a normal willing NATO ally preferably. Once Iraq is done it will be a template for the rest of the Middle East, again, as a response to 9/11. 9/11 requires us to fix every individual on the planet, not just the governments.

Which is killing people until they accept your politics. Fascism, essentially.

No, my policy for Iraq (and other countries) at this stage in world history is to install democracy and let the winners of democratic elections kill people who take up arms against the democratic government. Nothing more, nothing less. And that is something everyone should be able to get behind.

It is Saddam who was killing people who didn't accept his politics. But that didn't faze you for some reason.

then your interest is clearly not in freedom, but in forcing unbelievers to convert to your ideology

My ideology is freedom as I define it. ie living under a rational, humanist, non-subjugating government. And democracy is the *only* system of government that is unforced, which is what I supported setting up in Iraq.

I don't think the topic would be as controversial if everyone thought that the US was invading Iraq on behalf of the Iraqi people, for the purpose of their liberation.

Once a decision had been made that Saddam needed to be removed for other reasons, the US did indeed take the exact action of merely liberating the Iraqi people, and not even forcing a bus timetable on them. And it doesn't make any difference if Bush personally just hated countries that start with the letter "I". The rest of the non-Bush world should have supported the action, which was exactly a liberation, no more, no less. They went in, set up democratic institutions, and left. They would have taken any WMD they found with them though.

The other issue is that even though it's been years since the Iraq war, Iraq is still a mess and with that knowledge, it's difficult to call the war a success from the standpoint of helping the Iraqi people.

There is no longer institutionalized rape, or institutionalized tongue-chopping. The Iraqi holocaust is over. Isn't that enough? The rest is down to the quality of the Iraqi people. If the Iraqis aren't the same as the Swiss, so be it.

What about North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia and others? Will the US just invade them all?

That depends on how this debate goes. Iraq was the most justified invasion. If I can't convince you of Iraq, I probably can't convince you on any other country. I don't believe we can take on China, it is too big and has nuclear weapons. I don't want a nuclear war to liberate them. North Korea I'm not sure about. We may have left it too late. It's a pity that Iraq wasn't easier. With Saudi Arabia I don't expect to turn on allied dictators until we've finished dealing with enemy dictators. But after 9/11 (with 15 Saudi hijackers), yes, Saudi Arabia needs to be reformed. We can now point to Iraq's democracy and say "you have 3 months to look like that or the bloodbath will start". Before we didn't have any reference point. Iraq gave us that. It was a vital step in responding to 9/11. Iraq was the country with the most chance of success. No history of Islamic radicalization. These are Arab Muslims we can probably live with. Saudi Arabia needs to be the same.

Right. My point too. No one predicted it. Someone in charge should have.

Even if someone did predict it, they would have had their opinion drowned out by people predicting that the Iraqis would act near-uniformly one way or another. The opposing theories needed to be tested by practice. We have the same problem with Iran. No-one knows for sure how the Iranians will react to a liberating force. We have the Iraq example of 50/50 split and we have the Afghan result of about 87% supporting the war of liberation, but we simply don't have enough invasions under our belt to predict this with any accuracy. Hence every venture is an experiment.

We Americans are technically brilliant, and culturally clueless. So, invasion went great, occupation a mess.

What specifically did you want done differently if a 50/50 split could have been predicted? The most obvious thing was to not disband the old security forces. But it is unclear exactly what sort of mess that may have caused if the Iraqis rejected the security forces as being the same unreformed forces that committed human rights abuses against them. We needed a fresh start, and to arm the good 50% against the bad 50%. That is what was done. And we got heaps of great experimental data. The barrier to war has been lowered because we now know we can do it with a small force. And if in future we reuse the old security forces, we can be in and out in 3.5 weeks. There is no longer any need to do nation-building. ie in Iran we can just leave all of that to the Iranians. In Iraq it was important to close off the theory that it was impossible for Arab Muslims to handle democracy. We don't have that open theory with Iran. Or North Korea.

The missing information, imho, was that we didn't fully grasp how traumatized the Iraqi people were. Once Saddam's knife was off their neck, a great deal of bottled up rage came poring out. And it couldn't be directed at Saddam, so they rebelled against us.

"they" didn't do just one thing. They were split 50/50 on whether Iraq was "liberated" or "humiliated". No-one at all predicted such a split. The predictions were either they would obviously be grateful (I thought this) or that they would unite and fight to the last man against foreign invaders.

Bush thought the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. He thought he was invading Belgium in WWII.

The fact that they WEREN'T like Belgium is part of the reason we needed the war. To properly respond to 9/11, we need to convert all of the Middle East into clones of Belgium. And again, we needed a security vacuum to see what values the Iraqis had internalized. Did they share Islamic values? What are Islamic values? How was Saddam able to commit atrocities and still be a Muslim destined to enter Heaven? Wasn't there anything in the Koran that said if you commit atrocities you go to Hell? Maybe we need to update the Koran in response to 9/11. The invasion of Iraq would be used to inform future action in response to 9/11. It was basically a large social experiment. Also an experiment to see if a light force could be used in a war of liberation as opposed to a war of conquest.

It was all highly successful. We converted an enemy into a (completely unforced) friend.

Well, the 2003 Iraq war fails on a few levels to be considered a just war based on what has been written on the subject. Quite obviously so to be honest. — Benkei

I'll need something specific to be able to contest the claim, and it's far from obvious. Ending the Iraqi holocaust (including institutional rape) is probably the most just war in the history of the world, and if Just War Theory fails to spell that out then the theory needs to be adjusted.

From reading your posts, you seem to have a pre-conceived conclusion

In the 1980s when I was a teenager I had a conclusion that if only the USSR wasn't standing in the way, we would be able to wage war against Eastern Europe's dictators and install democracies and see if the people REALLY wanted communism.

After Eastern Europe I was after the rest of the world.

So both in 1990 and 2003 I naturally supported the wars. The 1990 war had about 90% approval in Australia, and I was not surprised. The 2003 war had 50% opposed which shocked me to the bone.

I have spent my time since 2003 investigating all the reasons people offered for opposing the Iraq war, and have exhausted my independent research and now wish to speak to professional philosophers instead of operating in a vacuum.

and are trying to collect information to strengthen your case.

Or have my case defeated in the free marketplace of ideas, as the case may be. Note that the Russian I referred to earlier used to be anti-war, but after months of debate I converted him, and he wrote a blog post explaining how he got from A to B, which is very enlightening.

Which is fine because many people do that but it doesn't make for interesting discussions.

Well it's interesting to me.

I'll post an overview I wrote years ago about the historic development of just war theory as well.

Wow, that is very long! I've started reading it.

There were long lines of volunteers for the new security forces, despite the fact that the country was occupied by a non-Muslim force. — Paul Edwards

Also note that Sistani was under pressure to declare a jihad on the invading force. There would have been a very messy bloodbath if he had done that. Not at all what we wanted. Fortunately, a combination of the security vacuum plus Al Sadr being allowed to trash Sistani's favorite mosque was enough to get Sistani to call on the Iraqis to do the exact opposite of a jihad - and sign up to the new security forces under US control. It was strategically brilliant. It's a pity we can't rerun history so that you could see the terrible alternative of a Shiite jihad in action.

A key problem in such discussions is that Americans (and many other Westerners) have had freedom for so long we typically no longer appreciate it. Understandable, but an obstacle.

Yes, well said.

As example. A forum user may wail against the war in a thousand posts, but the moment a mod deletes one of their posts they go hysterical. All perspective and context lost. They can rationalize Saddam all day long, but would launch rockets against the mod if they could. So long as it's somebody else's freedom being discussed it's all theory, once it's MY freedom being affected, reality returns.

Yes, exactly right.

Basically they're not putting themselves into the shoes of an Iraqi. Let's see if we can get agreement with your/my position in this thread.

Occupation, a mess.

No, the occupation was done perfectly too, given the information available at the time. It was necessary to disband the old security forces, and hope that that was enough to make the Iraqi people believe, really believe (because it was true) that the new security forces were totally different from the past ones, and were there to protect their rights, not violate them, so it was OK for good people to sign up to the new security forces.

And it WORKED. There were long lines of volunteers for the new security forces, despite the fact that the country was occupied by a non-Muslim force. Some even called those volunteers traitors. But enough Iraqis treated the west as a friend, that enabled us to stand up new security forces that were required to swear allegiance to democracy, not some dictator. And above all, it was a SUCCESS. Iraq now has a very vibrant democracy. Something that many people said was impossible. We have no way of knowing what would have happened if we had used a different approach. It might have led to failure, the inability to stand up democracy in an Arab Muslim country, spelling doom for the project of worldwide democracy.