[_3ddw]

I was 17 when we invaded Afghanistan and 19 when we invaded Iraq. Through the lead-up to both of those conflicts I remember watching scores of demonstrators marching outside the White House, chanting slogans against the wars. What did they know that Colin Powell did not?

[specialist]

> What did they know that Colin Powell did not?

Rhetorical question?

WRT Iraq, it was public knowledge that:

a) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, indeed Iraq and al Qaeda were idealogical opponents.

b) Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; cite Hans Blix, others.

c) Iraqi leader Hussein had completely capitulated, meaning GWB had effectively won without firing a single shot.

d) Bush Admin and their sources were lying and didn't care that every one knew they were lying.

WRT Afghanistan, I don't readily recall what intelligence failures were publicly known at the time. Complicity of Pakistan's ISI. Allowing bin Laden to escape. The tar pit of dealing with Taliban, the misc war lords of the Northern Alliance.

Many objected to Bush Admin's focus on Iraq at the expense of the Afghanistan effort.

Many more objected to Bush Admin's violation of the Powell Doctrine, in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many pointed out the advocates for invading Iraq, mostly the neo-cons (aka chickenhawks), simply wanted war, regime change, and so forth. They'd said as much for over a decade. They seized the crisis of 9/11 to enact their plans. It was all very audacious and unapologetic.

[rdl]

> b) Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; cite Hans Blix, others.

I think that overstates the case. There was no good proof they did have those weapons, and a lot of stuff was fabricated or blown out of proportion to support their having them, but there was also a lot of reason to suspect they had them (including that we/our allies had supplied them to Saddam the past!...plus prior use against the Kurds and Shia). I think the consensus opinion now is that Saddam was trying to make others (especially within Iraq) believe he had a viable WMD capability, but that he didn't have an active program at the time of invasion.

[specialist]

If the Bush Admin had found any such weapons, they would have bragged about it.

[tarsinge]

Insightful comment. Regarding:

> Many pointed out the advocates for invading Iraq, mostly the neo-cons

Don’t forget Biden who ultimately co signed the act.

[dragonwriter]

Biden voted for the act which required Bush to make certain determinations, which he did in bad faith. While we can (and I did at the time) argue that the bad faith was predictable, supporting the law is still different than actively perpetrating the bad faith determination to initiate the war.

[TomSwirly]

"I'm going to give the crazy guy the gun, and let him choose whether to kill all these people, and it's not my fault."

So tired of this idea that powerful people are free of responsibility for their actions. Biden VOTED FOR THE ACT which everyone knew was bullshit and hundreds of thousands of innocent people died.

[dragonwriter]

> So tired of this idea that powerful people are free of responsibility for their actions

That's irrelevant; distinguishing between distinctly different acts is not absolving either of liability; in fact, I explicitly noted the basis of moral liability for each of the distinguished acts.

[belter]

And Tony Blair...

[koheripbal]

The invasion of Afghanistan should not be lumped in with Iraq.

The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%. As well as support from NATO, the EU, and many other nations as it was an operation to get Osama Bin Laden after 9/11.

The invasion of Iraq was far more controversial and motivated by oil politics.

They are completely different animals.

[_3ddw]

> The invasion of Afghanistan should not be lumped in with Iraq.

> The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%

Certainly. But that is exactly what leaders are for: Good leaders worth mourning transform knowledge and sage wisdom into actions that should sometimes run counter to popular public will, and do not always bow under public pressure. Good leaders guide their people away from tragic error, at times when popular opinion would lead the population into the abyss, like it did in 2001.

If your conception of leadership is people who at all times merely execute the public will, then what you have are actually automata. Why bother with human leaders at all, then? We could just automate government to follow public opinion based on mass polling.

[q1w2]

Invading Afghanistan to destroy Al-Qaeda after 9/11 was probably the correct decision.

Staying there for 20 years, on the other hand, including after killing Osama Bin Laden on the other hand... That probably had more to do with having US soldiers on both the Chinese and Iranian borders. ...which is also probably why they both quietly supported the insurgency with Pakistan.

[mkr-hn]

And yet, still a bad leader.

[TomSwirly]

> As well as support from NATO, the EU, and many other nations as it was an operation to get Osama Bin Laden after 9/11.

False: Afghanistan offered twice to give up Bin Laden, and Bush refused even to negotiate with them: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...

The Afghan War allowed Bin Laden to escape to Pakistan and live for over a decade in safety and comfort.

[hindsightbias]

That’s a bit of reimagining. Iraq was widely supported

https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...

72% would be a blow out in any election.

[cainxinth]

I was a lowly undergrad polisci major at the time. I never demonstrated but it was clear as day to me that the preemptive invasion of Iraq would not be the cut and dry operation it was sold as -- and I can prove that I'm not claiming 20:20 hindsight because I kept the essay I wrote after hearing conservative NYTimes columnist William Safire speak at my school promoting the invasion in the weeks leading up to it. An excerpt:

> "His discussion on the war with Iraq is where I most disagreed with Mr. Safire. He spoke almost exclusively in terms of logistics and not potential realities. To him Iraq was a threat pure and simple and the United States had the obligation, the right, and the capability to neutralize that threat, with or without the UN. He offered troop estimates from potential allies in Turkey and the UK, and the explanations of the military superiority of the US as if anyone in the audience was wondering if the US had the means to militarily incapacitate Iraq."

And the concluding sentence:

> "Safire said quite effortlessly that Saddam is a threat that must be neutralized at all costs, but he doesn’t think the costs will be all that great. If he and Bush are wrong it will be one of the greatest political blunders in recent history."

Everyone knew that Iraq was a war of W's choosing and was mostly motivated by the influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The doves were uniformly against war as anything but a last recourse, and the idea of starting one on shaky pretenses was abhorrent to us. What we didn't know ahead of time was that the pretenses were even thinner than we imagined and there weren't in fact WMDs, which made the whole thing all the more farcical and tragic.

[1cvmask]

They knew Iraq did not have WMDs. The invasion would not happened if it did.

The rhetoric had changed from WMDs to regime change just before the invasion of Iraq.

Also the character assasination of Kofi Annan (and stories on his son) by Western media at the time for an illegal war (according to the UN rules) was amazing.

The famous John Bolton “Libya model” of disarmament comment comes to mind.

[tokai]

Well Powell had experience covering up a massacre during the Vietnam war, so it was all par for the course for him.

[secondcoming]

UN inspectors had been in Iraq for years looking for signs of WMDs or their development. They never found them [0], so the US got rid of the inspectors and used fabricated 'evidence' from an Iraqi defector as proof of WMDs.

[0] https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix...

[dragonwriter]

> What did they know that Colin Powell did not?

Nothing.

What they knew that Colin Powell also knew was that Colin Powell was lying. Many of the lies weer debunked, in near real time, by the major press (and/or UN weapons inspectors), not just showing that the claims were false but also the specific indications that the US government knew them to be false..?

[dkarl]

You would have been 7 when Desert Storm happened, then. Desert Storm is an episode that will probably be classified as a historical anomaly in hindsight, but in 2001, it was our most recent large-scale military action. Desert Storm was limited, focused, and... wait for the 1990s SNL joke you might be too young to remember... "prudent." Whether it was a good idea or not, whether it accomplished anything positive or not, it seemed to prove we had learned the lessons of Vietnam.

I think that affected everyone's expectations about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was cynical about our motivations and our ability to accomplish anything with the invasions in 2001 and 2003, and was opposed to anything more than punitive action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but still I did not foresee the scope of what happened. I thought there was no way an American administration could get suckered into the same kind of conflict, led on by the same chronic overpromising from generals. They would know that the generals would never tell the truth about what they could accomplish by military means. They would know a majority of the society would be bitterly polarized against us as foreign invaders. They would know the inherent difficulty of what they were trying to do. They would know they weren't being told the truth about the situation on the ground. They wouldn't make the mistake of accepting unrealistic definitions of victory.

That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on. Instead, we made all the same mistakes over again, and looking back we see the continuity of Vietnam and Afghanistan, with the Gulf War just an anomalous blip in between.

[Kafkish]

The 2003 Iraq war was, most people now know, based on a lie. What most people didn't know, and still don't know, is that Desert Storm itself was based on a lie. Like the 2003 lie, it backfired. It's a long story, but if reading what the US ambassador to Iraq at that time told Saddam will point you in the right direction. She's died years ago, but her name is April Catherine Glaspie [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie

[_3ddw]

I wrote a different comment, then re-read your comment above, and deleted my original reply.

All I can say is that I thought about Desert Storm when I wrote my original comment. I may have been 7 or whatever, but I did grow up in the period after Desert Storm and I remember clearly how infallible American military might was thought to be in popular opinion.

> That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on.

God knows. Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"? I'm not sure I would.

[dkarl]

> Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"?

That's a fair question. My first reason was that Powell was in the State Department under W, and the State Department has a more skeptical attitude towards our military capabilities than the military itself does. My second reason, which may be wrong-headed, was that I assumed that the military tendency to misrepresent situations in an optimistic way comes from their desire to do the job. I.e., they say fighting will succeed because it's their job and they want to do it, and then when it isn't going well, they say it's going great because they want to prove that they can do it. Just like a developer downplays the complexity of a challenging project because they're excited about tackling it, and when they get in over their head, they won't admit it because they don't want the project cancelled before they can complete it, no matter how long it takes. (Like that, except with killing.) Since Colin Powell wouldn't be responsible for directing the invasions as a general, I didn't think he would be influenced by that aspect.

EDIT: I think in retrospect what I didn't understand about the Gulf War was that some people viscerally loathed the lessons of Vietnam, hated the idea that the U.S. military could be "defeated," and chose to interpret the Gulf War not as a vindication of applying the lessons of Vietnam, but as proof that the lessons of Vietnam no longer applied. Your comment about the infallibility of American military might reminded me of that.

[coldtea]

>What did they know that Colin Powell—a Vietnam vet, mind you!—did not?

Nothing. They just had different interests: his to promote his career and feed the imperial machine, theirs to end war.

>If you’re not even 20, that outcome might not have been obvious. But if you served two tours in Vietnam and are in your 50s, you should know better

If you care about the country/justice/etc, which is a big if in politics.

[lamontcg]

I was 30 and 32. I just listened to the weapons inspectors. I wasn't surprised at all when all of Hussein's bluster was about putting on a domestic show of opposition and not appearing weak, apparently I understand dictators better than the CIA.

Also when Rice was testifying that if Hussein had HEU that he was 9 months away from a nuclear device I knew she was lying without lying, because I'm probably 9 months away from a (crude) nuclear device if you give me enough HEU (and let me buy some chemicals to make explosives).

The yellowcake nonsense was also clearly nonsense in real-time, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 because Hussein would have put to death any Salafists he could find.

I also was old enough then to remember this guy explaining why invading Iraq was a bad idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7Ik_X1HU0

And fast-forward to today and Michael R. Gordon who put forward the argument in the NYT that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb (the "aluminum tubes") is the same journalist who wrote the sick Wuhan lab workers piece in the WSJ (which once again only quoted "intelligence sources say..." and was otherwise fact-free). When someone is getting you very, very angry at a foreign power you should question why (Democrats would do well to look at all the hype around Russia and all the nothing being done about the Trump administration by Biden).