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During the lead up and during the invasion it was pretty much 50/50. Once the idiots disbanded the entire apparatus of state security, that went to about 95/5. At least among people with brains.

Indeed. Aside from invading Iraq in the first place, that was probably the stupidest decision of the whole war. Now you have thousands of military trained people roaming the country looking for work, and with a reason to hate the USA even more than before, and most of them have guns.
Exactly who the hell ordered that bit of idiocy?

Twp guesses, and the first one don't count.

Captain Seafort wrote:
Not from the get-go. Mid-late 2003 onwards, once the DoD had proved its utter ineptness in COIN, was when disaster was predicted.

Several countries spoke up and said exactly what would happen (the French most notably), the CF Intelligence Branch also called it.

Cpl Kendall wrote:Several countries spoke up and said exactly what would happen (the French most notably), the CF Intelligence Branch also called it.

Hmm. I was under the impression that the French complaints were simply over their interpretation of UNSC 1441. You learn something new every day.

Creepy. What's with all the fatalities in Kuwait?

Tsukiyumi wrote:Creepy. What's with all the fatalities in Kuwait?

Scuds the Iraqis lobbed over the border to try and disrupt the coalition's line of supply I think.

That makes sense. Some of them could be accidental deaths as well.

On a more positive note, though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKE1axJ0TU

Actually I'd bet those casualties were from helicopter crashes and the like. Always a problem in operations of any size.



Personally I also though Iraq was going to go bad once I found out that we were actually going to try and get the people there to live in peace. I was more supportive when I thought we were just going to kick them to the curb.

Now I've got somewhat more mixed feelings. The Iraqi security forces aren't great but they're actually starting to do something. We're also finally starting to see glimmers of oil money coming in. And Iraqi's HAVE been voting in amazing numbers.

Frankly I wish we hadn't taken Balkanizing the place off the table as I think what would actually be one of the easiest/best solutions.

Roughly make each "color" on a map like this it's own country and then slice a couple of them in half where you get more powerful warlords and such for a total of maybe eight independent areas. Then make the whole thing into some kind of Iraq confederacy if they want to stay together.

Once you do that, though, you open the door for Turkey to either annex or just slaughter the Kurds (not they don't deserve an ass-kicking form Turkey,) plus you change the civil Sunni-Shi'ite violence into actual international war.

We could always dose their water supplies with LSD, and have somebody pretend to be Mohammed (complete with massive stage effects): " Cut it out, you knuckleheads!"

The only soluation for Iraq is to stay there for the forseeable future. There is no way you can pull out with out everything blowing up.

I was very strongly against the war to start with but now its happened and the US is in I think they have to stay.

Teaos wrote:The only soluation for Iraq is to stay there for the forseeable future. There is no way you can pull out with out everything blowing up.

I was very strongly against the war to start with but now its happened and the US is in I think they have to stay.

I've believed for a while that one of the real purposes of the invasion was to establish a permanent presence in Iraq. With Afghanistan on the other side, and our alliance with Turkey, any invasion of Iran would come from all sides...

Of course, things didn't turn out so well in either country. Or perhaps I'm just seeing patterns where none exist...