Iraq War discussion ghetto

Because it only took Viking-Sensei three years (and the approaching end of Errant Story) to come up with a better name for "General Discussions"
Post Reply
User avatar
mindstalk
Typo-Seeking Missile
Posts: 916
Joined: November 9th, 2007, 10:05 am
Contact:

Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by mindstalk »

Saving this comic thread from off-topic discussions about just war and our success or lack thereof in Iraq.
Ged
Errant Scholar
Posts: 123
Joined: August 24th, 2007, 5:28 pm

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Ged »

Iraq was a failure in that it gained us nothing worth having. Of course Saddam had WMDs, we gave them to him in the first place after all; but he'd sat on them for more than a decade and there was nothing to indicate that he was suddenly going to use them now. In the long run we've made Iraq more powerful economically which is also bad for us since they can demand higher prices for oil and so on.

We might have made a few people happier. But if making people happy was the aim we should have used the two trillion or so that the war is going to have cost and spent it on countries where it would have gone further. Two trillion is a lot of wells for the third world, or hospitals or whatever.

Strategically Iraq was a mess, it cost us lots and didn’t secure anything for us; in humanitarian terms Iraq was a mess as well considering the money could have been much better spent elsewhere.
User avatar
Boss Out of Town
Team Captain
Posts: 1051
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:49 pm
Location: Near where the Children of the Corn go to school

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Ged wrote:Iraq was a failure in that it gained us nothing worth having. Of course Saddam had WMDs, we gave them to him in the first place after all; but he'd sat on them for more than a decade and there was nothing to indicate that he was suddenly going to use them now.
Actually, Saddam had no WMDs left by 2003. He'd let his WMD program rust away during the blockade, and there were few or no viable munitions left in the country. He couldn't have used any kind of WMD on anyone at the time of the invasion.

We learned last year that a defector--I believe it was Saddam's former Minister of War--revealed this to the CIA and Cheney's people suppressed it. They suppressed a lot of other important bits of data to doctor the intelligence and justify their war; this was just the most egregrious example.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
User avatar
Boss Out of Town
Team Captain
Posts: 1051
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:49 pm
Location: Near where the Children of the Corn go to school

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Ged wrote:Strategically Iraq was a mess, it cost us lots and didn’t secure anything for us; in humanitarian terms Iraq was a mess as well considering the money could have been much better spent elsewhere.
Yep, and in more direct humanitarian terms, a half-million or so Iraqis are dead above the historical mortality rate. A million or so more are scarred or maimed, and about 5,000,000 are stuck in refugee camps after their homes and neighborhoods were subject to ethnic cleansing.

When you hit a guy with a hangover with your car and he gets out of bed a day later without a headache, you don't excuse yourself by saying he's feeling better now.

As horrible as Saddam Hussein was, he wasn't even close to being the world's worst most evil dictator in 2003. I haven't got the stats to hand, but on the UN misery index, out of 140 or so countries listed, Iraq with the sanctions would not have made the bottom 20 and without them it would have been quite a bit higher. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a functioning nation-state, with housing functioning utilities, medical services, and (without the sanctions) enough food for everyone. Women could get educations, work outside their homes, and walk the streets without bags over their heads. People could play modern music without being attacked by fundamentalist morality police. There were Christian and polytheist communties that have since been extirpated. Terrorism was uncommon (Saddam didn't like the competition) and Sunnis and Shites weren't allowed to murder each other in the street.

There were--and are--far more hellacious places to live in this world then Iraq under Saddam Hussein. A pity some of that 2 trillion dollars wasn't spent helping those people.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
User avatar
Graybeard
The Heretical Admin
Posts: 7180
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:26 am
Location: Nuevo Mexico y Colorado, Estados Unidos

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Graybeard »

Boss Out of Town wrote: As horrible as Saddam Hussein was, he wasn't even close to being the world's worst most evil dictator in 2003. I haven't got the stats to hand, but on the UN misery index, out of 140 or so countries listed, Iraq with the sanctions would not have made the bottom 20 and without them it would have been quite a bit higher. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a functioning nation-state, with housing functioning utilities, medical services, and (without the sanctions) enough food for everyone. Women could get educations, work outside their homes, and walk the streets without bags over their heads. People could play modern music without being attacked by fundamentalist morality police. There were Christian and polytheist communties that have since been extirpated. Terrorism was uncommon (Saddam didn't like the competition) and Sunnis and Shites weren't allowed to murder each other in the street.

There were--and are--far more hellacious places to live in this world then Iraq under Saddam Hussein. A pity some of that 2 trillion dollars wasn't spent helping those people.
Got a reference for that "UN misery index"? I have been looking for it for some time, and lots of sources say that country X ranks in position Y on the misery index, without however pointing to links to the actual index itself. I tend to get rather suspicious of unreferenced claims like that.
Image

Because old is wise, does good, and above all, kicks ass.
User avatar
mindstalk
Typo-Seeking Missile
Posts: 916
Joined: November 9th, 2007, 10:05 am
Contact:

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by mindstalk »

Well, going by http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/05/world ... t-off.html it might be called "human development report", not "misery index".
User avatar
Boss Out of Town
Team Captain
Posts: 1051
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:49 pm
Location: Near where the Children of the Corn go to school

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Graybeard wrote:
Boss Out of Town wrote: As horrible as Saddam Hussein was, he wasn't even close to being the world's worst most evil dictator in 2003. I haven't got the stats to hand, but on the UN misery index, out of 140 or so countries listed, Iraq with the sanctions would not have made the bottom 20 and without them it would have been quite a bit higher. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a functioning nation-state, with housing functioning utilities, medical services, and (without the sanctions) enough food for everyone. Women could get educations, work outside their homes, and walk the streets without bags over their heads. People could play modern music without being attacked by fundamentalist morality police. There were Christian and polytheist communties that have since been extirpated. Terrorism was uncommon (Saddam didn't like the competition) and Sunnis and Shites weren't allowed to murder each other in the street.

There were--and are--far more hellacious places to live in this world then Iraq under Saddam Hussein. A pity some of that 2 trillion dollars wasn't spent helping those people.
Got a reference for that "UN misery index"? I have been looking for it for some time, and lots of sources say that country X ranks in position Y on the misery index, without however pointing to links to the actual index itself. I tend to get rather suspicious of unreferenced claims like that.
Here are the most up to date UN rankings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... ment_Index Not sure how one would have ranked it before Saddam picked a fight with the United States back in '91, but with the sanctions and the various massacres after that, things have gone steadily downhill. The US invasion in 2003, of course, trashed most of what was left of the country and the incompetence of our military policy and development plans have left it down near the bottom.

Here are links to a variety of sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_in ... ngs#Social Iraq is currently considered a "failed state" by the people who enumerate such things. Reporters without borders lists Iraq at 158th out of 173 nations in press freedom. This is to be expected in a country where a good part of government is provided by radical militia groups, most of them religious bigots.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
User avatar
Neko7
Mage/Priest War Veteran
Posts: 420
Joined: August 19th, 2007, 11:55 pm

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Neko7 »

Boss Out of Town wrote: Here are the most up to date UN rankings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... ment_Index
(It would be very interresting to see this index now and after the end of the depression/recession since some of the top country are those hited the hardest by this crisis (way more than the US). If the US reach the top 5 after the crisis, we can expect a decade of speculation about the US creating volontarely the crisis to get their hand back at the top world lvl. )
User avatar
mindstalk
Typo-Seeking Missile
Posts: 916
Joined: November 9th, 2007, 10:05 am
Contact:

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by mindstalk »

Neko7 wrote:
Boss Out of Town wrote: Here are the most up to date UN rankings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... ment_Index
(It would be very interresting to see this index now and after the end of the depression/recession since some of the top country are those hited the hardest by this crisis (way more than the US). If the US reach the top 5 after the crisis, we can expect a decade of speculation about the US creating volontarely the crisis to get their hand back at the top world lvl. )
That seems rather excessively conspiratorial. Also, while Iceland or Ireland might be notably suffering, I see no reason the crisis would relatively benefit the US in general. Welfare states ride out recessions better (though if they don't cough up Keynesian stimulus, we might do better), and the HDI takes into account life expectancy, where the US comes in last among rich nations.
User avatar
Graybeard
The Heretical Admin
Posts: 7180
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:26 am
Location: Nuevo Mexico y Colorado, Estados Unidos

Re: Iraq War discussion ghetto

Post by Graybeard »

Boss Out of Town wrote:
Graybeard wrote:Got a reference for that "UN misery index"? I have been looking for it for some time, and lots of sources say that country X ranks in position Y on the misery index, without however pointing to links to the actual index itself. I tend to get rather suspicious of unreferenced claims like that.
Here are the most up to date UN rankings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... ment_Index Not sure how one would have ranked it before Saddam picked a fight with the United States back in '91, but with the sanctions and the various massacres after that, things have gone steadily downhill. The US invasion in 2003, of course, trashed most of what was left of the country and the incompetence of our military policy and development plans have left it down near the bottom.

Even accepting the HDI as valid, which I'm not sure I'm willing to do, I would be somewhat cautious about treating "misery" as the opposite of "human development;" the concept of human misery is not necessarily well captured by the things that go into the HDI as positives. The absence of good things, which is what gives a country a low HDI score, is not the same as the presence of bad things. I was hoping for data that look at countries through a presence-of-bad-things lens, but continue to be unable to find that.

That caveat aside, consider Iraq's position on that list. In 2000, the last year on record for Iraq as of when that Wikipedia article was written, Iraq's HDI put it somewhere between today's Myanmar and Cambodia -- hardly a ringing endorsement of the quality of life in a country that's swimming in oil. More recent HDI data appear to be lacking. However, an important component of the HDI is infant mortality, and based on the two lists in that WP article, it looks like there was a dramatic improvement in that department for Iraq between 2005 (2006 UN list) and 2007(2008 CIA factbook list). That's hardly conclusive, but it is intriguing, particularly given that very few other countries on the two lists showed anything like the near-factor-of-2 improvement that Iraq did.

The whole point is, we just don't know what's going on with human well-being in Iraq, because essentially all of the information available is anecdotal -- witness the fact that the HDI data are approaching ten years old. By itself, that's probably a bad sign, but it's hardly conclusive. It also means that the available information is highly susceptible to glass-half-empty interpretation, and furthermore, that the information can be cherry-picked to support one's preferred opinion. You think life is becoming sweetness and light in Iraq? Point to the fact that oil production is almost back to pre-war peak levels, and is back to the levels prevalent immediately before the 2003 invasion. You think the place is going to hell in a handbasket? Point to the fact that the population of Christians and other non-Muslims has continued to plummet. But the big picture, taking all of these factors into account, continues to be almost impossible to see.
Image

Because old is wise, does good, and above all, kicks ass.
Post Reply