Well it sure wasn't for Nuclear bombs...

what's the point of the question? the people died by the us become less important or what exactly?

I actually can't believe there are some people who still defend the war, a shame really.

There are several points on which the war is defendable. Certainly minorities such as the Kurds are better off now than they were under Saddam and the country is now stabilising.

As it happens I disagree with the war and especially the way in which it was started, but I can see how people can think the war was good for Iraq - especially in the long term.

The sad thing is that the wars and their causes are no deviation from hundreds of years of foreign policy. Of course, many people are involved in the creation of US and UK foreign policy, but their ideology tends to come from the same place.

Toppling a government does not need a huge bombing campaign and an invasion, but government personnel cannot think out of their ideological boxes.

No-one should talk about long-term benefits when hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, both when Saddam was an ally and an enemy. That is a classic example of the dehumanising, psychopathic way that the corporate world  operates.

The CIA have admitted that they will do anything to 'protect National Security Interests,' which is code for more than just defensive security, including the security of globalised capitalism and US corporate interests - such as United Fruit in Guatemala.

Public opinion acts as a constraint to foreign policy, but it tends to be 'managed' by government officials. There is no way in hell the public had any influence whatsoever on the Iraq War other than supporting the decision based on manipulation and double talk. Those guys wanted that war, that much is clear... whether they had convinced themselves about the 'evidence' is another matter, but it is easy to find what you want to find.

I understand what you are saying regarding Afghanistan, but don't believe that Bush had to rush to appease the public, much like McKinley didn't need to rush after the Maine and Wilson didn't rush after the Lusitania. Roosevelt had gradually been dragging the US public into World War Two, so Pearl Harbor just finished it off. This is much the same, especially towards Iraq.

Well... yeah... they do become less important.

If you invade somewhere and kill 100 people.  That's bad.

If 100 people were going to be killed there anyway... that's definitly "Less bad" then just killing 100 people.

Heck, it's more then just the Kurds.  

The war was pointless, dumb.  Was always against it.

Still.... Iraq will be better off in the long term.  That much seems obvious.

The US won't though... making the whole thing pointless from a US point of view.

We'll have created a brand new democracy full of people with more freedoms... who have stronger ties to other nations.   I mean there is a reason Saddam Hussein was in power in the first place and why he used to be friends with the US.

Unlike Afghanistan they had a good base there... polticians already established, well respected.

Gulf War II had some justifications, but it was conducted too clumsily by USA, they generated hate towards themselves with excessive casualties amongst civilians. But the biggest  US mistake was to not crush Saddam's Republican Guard (*) at the end of Gulf War I, that would have weakened enough Saddam to maybe overthrow him, or at least spared Iraq people, and particularly the Kurds, the worst pains and griefs of the final years of Saddam's tyranny.

(*) Pussy Powell, Bush Sr. and others pretended ONU forced them to stop, but as USA actually conducted the war, it could have justified that final effort with totally valid tactic, strategic and security arguments.

This thread needs help.

Any war can be justified by people, including (I can't believe I'm going to say this) Hitler's war. Most justifications are put out because of the pitiful 'moral' grounds that wars are fought on. For example, during the Iraq war - WMDs, the gassing of the Kurds, implementing democracy, Saddam's ambitions and so on. All of these can be seen as illusory and hypocritical when you look at US and UK policy in its historical context - ie propping up violent dictators in South America, supporting and shaking hands with Saddam (I'm looking at you Rumsfeld) when they knew of the chemical attacks in Halabja, overthrowing democratically elected governments on numerous occasions - Guatemala, Nicaragua etc etc.

Saying that (at least) 100,000 civilians would have died anyway is a pretty weak argument - there are far higher casualty rates published elsewhere, but we'll stick to the orthodox figures otherwise people will get their knickers in a twist - as most of the civilians would have died as a result of US/UK imposed sanctions rather than from the clearly brutal Saddam regime, but that's still justifying something on the basis of guesswork.

Of course, Saddam would have argued that he was putting down a rebellion/revolution of northern Kurds - something else both the US and UK have used as justifications for involvement in other nations - Russia, for example.

Oil may not be the direct and prime motivation - there were clear strategic and wider economic aims involved, but it is still up there within the primary economic objectives - Saudi Arabia is right next door and this helps US keep a presence in the whole area.

I don't understand why people are attached to their governments actions when it comes to foreign policy - when they are much more critical (and informed) about domestic issues (though the debate is constrained it has to be said)

Ultimately Iraq 2 was all about oil, because Iraq 1 was all about oil. And if it wasn't for Iraq 1 Saddam would still be America's Middle East Poodle to this day and Iraq 2 would never have happened. Don't forget that most of the attorcities committed by Saddam that were listed as a reason to bring about regime change were pre-Gulf war 1 when America and Iraq were on friendly terms making common cause against Iran. And recall that Iraq didn't make it's own chemical weapons, and it wasn't about to get them from Russia, who was helping Iran in it's military efforts because... well because Iraq was being supported by America. It was always a somewhat fraught relationship, especially given Saddam couldn't be too pal-y with America because of the whole Israel thing. But so long as Iraq (and most of the Sunni world - though recall that Iraq is Shiite majority, but was ruled under Saddam (who's Baath Party is actually secular socialist) under the guise being a minority Sunni tyrant - had issues with Shiite Iran and containing it's regional aspirations, and Iran was a common enemy between US and the Sunni nations they could justify staying reasonably close and Israel remaning a bit of a sore point that could be dealth with "later". Though the Arabs from an ethnic perspective don't have a lot of time, or sympathy, for the ethnic Palestinians - so it's not just about religion.

But Saddam wanted Kuwait's oil wealth (possibly because he was running the country into debt so needed another source of state revenue) and he used a flimsy claim that Kuwait was historically part of Iraq as a pretext for invading and taking control of the oil (there's absolutely no other reason to invade Kuwait). Bush Snr probably would have let that one go, but for the extremel.y negative global reaction to the Iraq invasion and the clamouring to kick Saddam's army out that couldn't be ignored. So Bush Snr came reluctantly to war, but once he was committed he needed to at least see Saddam beaten back. In truth a contained Saddam was the better option, though some wanted him gone, and they survived the Clinton years to make it into the Bush II Whitehouse.

War is only really fought for 1 reason: resources. Whether it be the basic resources of land on which to live, or the value of the stuff that can be found in or under the land. And always the power that comes with having control over resources. Whether it's to take more resources or keep the resources you have. Sometimes there's an ideological angle to a war, but it's still about resources underneath it all.

So given wars are always about resources, what's the resource behind the Iraq wars? Dates? Sand?

Please also remember that the Taliban AND Osama Bin Laden were originally supported by the USA when it was Russia who were trying to own Afghanistan. OBL only really turned on the USA when, after Gulf War 1, the USA established permanent army bases in Saudi Arabia (sure it was at the bidding of the Saudi monarchy, but OBL doesn't like them either).

Then you have to go all the way back to World War I to see how the Ottoman Empire was carved up after the Turks backed the wrong warhorse in siding with Germany (kinda ironic that Germany now doesn't want Turkey in the EU). USA and Britain shared the middle eastern (oil) spoils between them (Hello BP! which used to be called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, who, soon after WWI, struck a mother of an oil find in, guess where...Iraq), and created these unnatural nations, shoving a bunch of people together as a single nation, not realising that simply because "they all looked the same" they weren't the same and in fact there were deep ethnic and religious divisions. The country now known as Iraq had never existed as a nation ever in recorded history until after WW1, in fact it really only became defined by its current boundaries in 1926. Iraq (or a small part of it at least) is where the first known civilisation began and where writing (and hence the creation of an historical record), was born with the Sumerian civilisation.

So, was the latest Iraq war about oil? When in the last century has any upheaval in the Middle East NOT been about oil?