Is the Iraq invasion the worst mistake in US history?

[oblivious]

Comparisons with Vietnam have already become a cliche, but that's not going far enough for respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld. In a November 2005 article in the newspaper Forward, he called the invasion of Iraq "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them."
http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1142724305303470.xml&coll=7

As William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, says, it is the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse211.html

Ian Peleg is professor of government and law at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., where he specializes in Middle East politics, U.S. foreign policy and ethnic conflict in deeply divided societies.
If an escalation of the war in Iraq occurs -- and it is looking almost certain that it will -- the American military involvement in Iraq, which began as an effort to remove Saddam Hussein, will emerge as possibly one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of U.S. foreign policy.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/19/INGMIHNEHC44.DTL

James O. Goldsborough has written on foreign affairs for four decades, both from the United States and abroad, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune and Newsweek magazine for 14 years, reporting from more than 40 countries.

I believe Bush's Iraq war will go down as the greatest strategic blunder in our nation's history. Leaving aside the horrors of the conflict itself -- the terrible toll it inflicts daily on a civilian population that we pushed into civil war -- Bush's war has done more to damage America's long-term interests, reputation and relationships than any other event in our history. Not even Vietnam can match it.
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=euLTJbMUKvH&b=312470&ct=2041541

[Tom Joad]

1. W. Bush is the worst mistake in US history

[Why Syzygy]

2. ditto n/t

[SPKrazy]

22. Yes, W is The Worst Mistake In US History! n/t

[Nutmegger]

3. Yes

because we should have known better after Viet Nam.

[muntrv]

6. Uh,

YEAH!!

[serryjw]

4. Personally, I think everything that is happening is deliberate

.....so it is NOT a blunder.....a calculated F*CK UP!

What I would love to know is COST..How does the $300 BILLION and counting compare to Vietnam/Korea.WW!1 & 2

[LynnTheDem]

8. More than Korean war and 'Nam...and we're only 3 yrs on

PDF;
http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/Cost_of_War_in_Iraq.pdf

More costly than 'the war to end all wars'
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0829/p15s01-cogn.html

Iraq war costs more per month than Vietnam
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/08/31/iraq_war_costs_more_per_month_than_vietnam___report?mode=PF

Iraq war 'costlier than Vietnam'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4201812.stm

[serryjw]

12. Thanks ....Lets exchange links

I found this..
http://democracyrising.us/content/view/320/164/

[LynnTheDem]

13. Thanks.

I collect links. :)

[populistdriven]

27. The BIG Mistake: Bush's tax cuts will be viewed as US's biggest Blunder

[LynnTheDem]

5. More US troops now dead than during the same no. of years of 'Nam

In 'Nam, it was a sudden escalation; Iraq is way far & beyond 'Nam already...and is escalating rapidly.

Worse wounds now than doctors saw during 'Nam.

Oh yeah, stupid MFer bush has indeed made the greatest strategic blunder in US history and before it's done, Iraq will make Vietnam look like a CAKEWALK.

[Nikia]

7. It is similiar to Vietnam

In that it is an unwinnable war and we only make things between their people worse by being there. It might be worse because it makes us look bad in the current world political climate. The best thing that we can do is encourage the UN involvement while withdrawing at the same time.

[Pithy Cherub]

9. SCOTUS selection 2000 is right up there with Plessy vs. Ferguson

just sayin:shrug:

[serryjw]

11. How does SCOTUS sleep at night

When they gave him the presidency it was political. THEY have kids and grandkids also....They will be paying for this war for generations....

[Toucano]

10. Don't forget the domestic toll.

So many human and financial resources have been diverted to pay for this folly, it will take at least a generation to recover -- if ever.

The spending level and tax cuts are unique to this war at a time in history when the baby boomers are close to retiring. The credit of the United States should never have been squandered like this.

[ngant17]

15. rate of deaths, Vietnam vrs Iraq

By my count, at approx. 60,000 deaths over approx. 11 years in Vietnam (1964-1975), that's about 15 KIAs/day on average.

It's difficult to say exactly how many US troops are KIA daily in Iraq, but lowball estimates would begin at 2-3 KIAs/day average, with occasional daily swings in variance which get smoothed out over time.

I believe the average daily KIA count will likely increase this year due to general escalation of sectarian violence which is not going to make it any safer for GIs in Iraq. If you look at the Vietnam example, KIAs significantly increased during the 4th and 5th year of occupation in that country (again, I use 1964 as the basic starting year). If the future can be predicted based on past events like Vietnam, then the worst is yet to come for US in Iraq.

There seems to be a steady trend with KIAs from IR snipers. My guess is that occupied urban areas like Iraq are much more conducive to sniper fire than jungle terrain, less obstacles to hide and cover, GIs have to patrol the streets, ect.

What is more troubling, IMHO, is there are no real language barriers between adjacent nations, like Vietnam, Cambodia, China,
Thailand, ect. Iraq is an Arabic-speaking country, and national borderlines tend to be drawn out based on ethnic languages. There is more reason to believe that this conflict will grow beyond the borderlines of Iraq, unless of course the Sunni-Shia civil war continues to escalate in Iraq. But if there is no 'civil war' after all, as Bush is now stating, all the more reason that the US had better start thinking about making a tactical retreat ASAP.

I agree that the rate of permanent disabilities may end up being much higher in Iraq due to more efficiently-designed explosive devices which were not available or widely in use by Viet Cong in the '60s and '70s.

[LynnTheDem]

19. US War Dead in Iraq Exceeds Early Vietnam Years

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/US_War_Dead_111403.htm

Published on Friday, November 14, 2003 by Reuters

[LynnTheDem]

20. Far graver than Vietnam

Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1305441,00.html

[LynnTheDem]

23. US wounded; worse than Vietnam

But the number of those wounded in action (or injured in combat-zone accidents) is far higher. And while combat deaths have been relatively low since the Vietnam War, the ratio of these nonfatal casualties to war fatalities is increasing - from 3 to 1 in World War II to more than 5 to 1 in Iraq (1,691 to date).

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1001/p01s02-woiq.html

[ngant17]

31. Starting date of Vietnam war

I don't agree with the Pentagon's official date of Dec. '61 as the start of the war in SE Asia. There is substantial evidence that Pres. JFK would have pulled out of the growing confilict if he had not been KIA'ed himself in Nov. '63, KIA in the sense that it was practically a military operation which gunned him down the the streets.

Instead, it makes more sense to choose Gulf of Tonkin in '64 to mark the real start of the war, massive troop movements into SE Asia begin in that year under LBJ. Prior to that year, there were all sorts of clandestine or special operations gorillas running amok over there, that's why the KIAs of US troops were so low then. IMO you get a traditional war when the infantry batallions and divisions are deployed, and this didn't happen until 1964. I think it's comparing apples and oranges to Vietnam KIAs prior to '64 and Iraq KIAs from March 2003. The massive troop movements just didn't happen like that in pre-64 years in SE Asia.

[icymist]

14. The worst mistake in US history is....

granting person-hood to corporations. Read all about it here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4336543

A clerical error inserted into a SCOTUS ruling in the 1860's brings corporations the same rights as human being! All other grand boondoggles follow this one.

[Yupster]

28. I vote for Lincoln's calling forth the militia

and giving each state a quota to raise to help invade the seven seceeded states.

That stupid decision forced Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee to get off ther fence and choose which side they were on. They chose the Confederacy and the Civil War led to 600,000 deaths.

The Confederacy could not have fielded a reasonable army without Virginia, North Cariolina and Tennessee. They were three of the CSA's four most populous states and they had chosen not to secede or send representatives to Montgomery where the Confederate government was forming. In fact Tennessee had just had a popular pledesite on whether to call a secession convention, and the voters narrowly said no.

So Lincoln, in Bull in the China Shop, GW ush would be proud diplomacy forced those wavering states to decide and they left.

Virginia left and brought Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart etc with it. North carolina ended up losing more men than any other state, north or south.

To me, Lincoln wins the award for the stupidest mistake in US history.

[tom_paine]

16. No, the worst mistake was on 12-12-2000

That was the day the Old American Republic died.

[NNN0LHI]

17. Americas financing Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Mujahideen...

...in Afghanistan during the 1980's to terrorize the Soviet Union I think is the biggest mistake America has ever made. We will pay for that blunder for a long time to come.

Don

[The2ndWheel]

18. Only the most recent

I'm not sure what we expect when our free land started with genocide and slavery.

I get sick of my own pessimism sometimes.

[alittlelark]

21. No, the WORST is when Corporations were granted 'personhood' in 1886

http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html

In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that

The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.

The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

[Minnesota Libra]

24. Allowing WWII and Killing Kennedy were worst mistakes...........

edited to add:

.....in US history. Think how different our coutnry would be if neither of those events had happened. Oh, the Kennedy days - how I wish for those days again. They were scary days but our government cared.

[Earth_First]

25. Only it's most recent...

August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945 come to mind as the worst mistake the United States has made.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

26. No. The ratification of the constitution was in 1789.

It left slavery intact and gave too much power to the states.

[reprehensor]

29. No...

The passage of the National Security Act of 1947 was the biggest mistake.

It's evil baby, the CIA, has been raising Hell ever since.

[KAT119]

30. Saddam was correct saying that Gulf War 1 was:"The Mother Of All Wars"

as it led to current Iraq war which is leading to Iranian war and the end of life as we know it-perhaps planetcide!!!

[Solly Mack]

32. I see the Iraq invasion as a continuation of all the "mistakes"

America has made.

Because the root of all of America's crimes, and Iraq is a crime, has been the notion of superiority in some form or another. The need to control. Arrogance. Prejudice. Greed.


Slavery/Genocide of Natives
Slavery/Genocide of Africans brought to America
Institutional racism
Institutional sexism
Robber Barons/workers
Denying the vote
The very real class warfare
Corporations over people
McCarthyism
South/Central American policy
Iran-Contra
Iraq

and all the things I didn't mention

All those things stem from the same attitudes - and America, when her worst is allowed to reign freely, can be a very ugly nation.

Militarily? Iraq was and remains monumentally stupid.
As a foreign policy initiative? (TGWOT) Iraq is a blunder of mythic proportions
Long term strategic interests? America will be doing a lot of mollifying for years to come to make up for it.

But I still see Iraq as a continuation of the worst of America.

[drm604]

33. What about not outlawing slavery in the original constitution?

Not to belittle what a huge travesty this war is, but compare that to slavery and its aftermath.

Also, you could make an argument that the rise of the Republican Party in its current form (with all of its attendant consequences) is a result of that decision.

[Bluebear]

34. Supreme Court decision 2000. Your legacy, Sandra Day O'Connor. nt