Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq

[flagged]

To the contrary, if voters are manipulated it is not a well functioning democracy. It is a farce of a democracy, the subtle manipulation just adds a veneer of legitimacy because it appears to be a democracy. Those who are manipulating people are the ones in power, not the citizens.

Edit: I say subtle in the sense that those being manipulated are not particularly aware of being manipulated.

This is 100% it, but this goes far beyond just Bush or Iraq. If you ever want to understand what's really happening in US geopolitics, their paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses [1], is critical reading. It describes every motivation, goal, and purpose with 0 effort to fluff it up for public. This absolutely transcends parties as well. It is the position of the US political establishment. For instance Robert Kagan is the founder of the Project for the New American Century and his wife is Victoria Nuland who served as deputy head of state under Biden.

It's not easy to give cliff notes, because there's too much to say. But in general, this was at the time when the USSR had still only relatively recently fallen and the US was not only essentially the king of the world, but had 0 meaningful competition for said claim. The goal of PNAC, and of the US political establishment, was to take this scenario, expand it, and perpetuate it. So the primary point was to prevent the rise of any other power and to essentially dominate the world primarily through being seen as the unquestioned premier military power, which would entail dramatic increases in military spending, regular demonstrations of power including preemptive and unilateral attacks on other countries if necessary, and so forth, wrapped in a tidy package of 'spreading democracy and freedom.'

Most famously they acknowledged that all of their goals would be quite difficult without, in their own words, something like a new Pearl Harbor: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." 9/11 happened less than a year later, and everything went into overdrive, a trend that continued long after Bush was but a fading memory.

[1] - https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses

Methods aside, it is funny how quickly Republicans went from "we want to rule the whole world" to "we want nothing to do with the world and btw, foreigners get out".

But you see, this was a bigger crime than the invasion. Because it was ideologically driven on faith, no-one was looking at the actual facts. The US military could knock over Hussein, no problem, but no-one had any plan for what happened next. No state-building, not even a plan for how the civil service was going to work. Absolutely no plan to win over hearts and minds and not create the next generation of extremists. No-one checking prisoners were treated with respect.

The Iraq invasion was wrong, but the occupation was worse.

This sounds to good to be true. Neoconservatives pushing for freedom, democracy, enlightened self-interest? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

No one actually thought or thinks that. It's about control of that region. All they want are figureheads that play nice with American business. That's always been the goal.

IMO that's unlikely. For all his faults he doesn't seem particularly egotistical. He was more likely manipulated by Cheney and the MIC and probably as shell-shocked after 9/11 as the rest of us. Dumb war; dumber pretence; not a dick-measuring contest with his dad.

Cold fusion is basically impossible according to the laws of the universe as we understand them today. You'd have to do some sort of major discovery about the fundamental physics to do cold fusion. It's unclear (and IMHO, very unlikely) this will ever happen. It's very much not a money issue, it's a "we need to wait on some Einstein to make a major discovery of an unknown nature" issue, except that we don't know if that's even possible.

That's assuming cold fusion is real.

There's a problem there. Many people reason about things by assuming that since option A is clearly bad, option B must be more desirable. But in life we often have this fun situation where we get to choose between a bad choice, and a terrible one - there is no good one.

Saddam was, without any doubt, an at-times brutal tyrant. Yet not only was Iraq vastly more stable and peaceful under his reign, but so too was the entire Mideast. That war set off a chain reaction of events that led to a complete destabilization in the Mideast and created a fertile ground for extremist groups to recruit, operate, and generally thrive.

So I don't think so. Like in most contemporary wars, the only real winners are the arms dealers, and the people getting rich off death and destruction.

The problem was that he was holding Iraq together. After he fell, we ended up with a situation where there are about 1/2 as many Iraqi Christians in Sweden as there are in Iraq.

Basically, Iraq went straight to hell, and whatever minorities etc. didn't flee got murdered.

I interpret it as something along the lines of Saddam Hussein's government caring about having a strong or at least functional country enough that they only wanted to kill Kurds and Iranians.

Baathists are better than sectarian madmen, and I suspect we'll see some kind of idiot outcome in Syria as well.

Half a million dead for totally bogus reasons, and you want to try to find positive tradeoffs?

In an alternate timeline, maybe he would have become more of a dangerous liability, but I think it would have been cheaper for the CIA to overthrow him in any case

Not much. Except for the oil companies. In any case the goal was not to make the world a better place.

Maybe? But it destabilized the Middle East, caused the migrant crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis caused a rise in right wing movements in Europe, it caused the rise of ISIS (lots of Iraqi ex-military), ISIS was involved in the the civil war in Syria, it caused a loss of faith in the American government, created a generation of disillusioned combat vets, so on and so forth.

I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.

Yeah, like killing half a million people, creating an environment for ISIS to germinate, grow, and perform unspeakable atrocities in both that, and a neighbouring country (with a little bit of fun terrorism in Europe thrown in, but on the grand scheme of things, the moral weight of a few hundred murdered Europeans pales in comparison to what they were doing closer to home).

It's never a bad idea to create a power vacuum by overthrowing a dictatorship and then utterly fucking up your occupation and handling of the peace.

It's not clear if any invader and occupier could have handled that part well, but it is absolutely clear that the ghouls running the Bush regime were completely incapable of it. That those architects are still part of civilized society, and didn't spend the rest of their worthless lives breaking rocks with their teeth in a chain gang never fails to boil my blood. They put the lie to every principle of freedom and liberty that western democracies claim to stand for.

Similar horrors were inflicted on Libya by the Obama administration in particular and NATO in the general, but they were smart enough to not even sully their hands with making any effort to occupy and nationbuild after the fact. And guess what happened? Also ISIS and also a decade of civil war, and while it's died down a bit, there are still violent clashes between warlords and a humanitarian disaster nobody gives two shits about going on in the background.

Under Qadaffi, Libyans weren't free. But they weren't hungry, either.