The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant Megathread

[Siege]

Somebody must have let 'ol Siegy into the hard stuff this time. 

What? I don't do hard stuff, other than my cucumber.

[Admiral Yi]

Seeb, there were inspectors in Iraq.

[Razgovory]

He didn't.

Ecxxplain your lie.

UN inspectors entered Iraq prior to the invasion.  They did not find any nuclear weapons or a nuclear program.  They did find some a few illegal missiles which the Iraqis promised to destroy (and weren't operational).  The inspectors withdrew two days before the invasion.  No stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry were every found.  I believe there were a couple dozen chemical warheads that had misplaced and were in poor condition.

[Admiral Yi]

They also did not certify Iraq free of NBC weapons.

[Razgovory]

The US did though about six months later.

[The Brain]

Fact: Saddam could destroy Western civilization in 45 minutes.

[celedhring]

Talk in the Spanish papers that our government is considering sending 25 000 automatic rifles to Irak.

I guess there's no way around it, but I'm not sure flooding that region with weapons is going to do any favors to its long-term stability.

[mongers]

Just seen this, haven't yet checked it for authenticity or source, but hey it's an infographic. 

[The Brain]

Seems mighty America can't send more people than tiny Sweden.

[Valmy]

Are you a fucking liberal now?
You know perfectly well that we all, including you, were convinced saddam had nucleral weapons because the only thing he needed to do, to stay alive today, was to open Irak to UN inspections.
He said no, for no reason, and we all assumed he had nukes.

Why else would you say no to UN inspections headed by muslims UN employees?

Nobody thought Saddam had nukes at most we thought that maybe he was working on developing them.

[Berkut]

For me the question was not so much whether he did or did not, it was that he was in clear and material breach of the agreements he had made.

Of course, the assumption is that the reason he is not allowing the free and unfettered access he promised was because he had something to hide - turns out it was because he thought that spurning the UN was necessary for his own, likely internal, political reasons.

I still don't think that the actual reasons for the war (as differing from the justification for it) were necessarily wrong. The idea of toppling Saddam and trying to setup a functioning representative state in its place was worth trying. The tragedy is that it was worth trying well, and instead was tried poorly.

Of course, now we cannot know if the overall failure was a result of a bad idea from the start, or whether it could have worked better had it been executed competently.

As an interventionist at the time, what I take away from it all personally is a much more skeptical view of intervention - not because I have changed from thinking it can work to thinking it cannot, but to a position that mostly it is just nearly impossible to actually predict long term results. So if you are going to intervene, it should be based strictly on short term goals or to resolve short to medium term problems, with the healthy realization that the outcome in the long run is going to be a bit of a crap shoot, and often driven by factors beyond any reasonable ability to predict in advance.

[Berkut]

And yes, I am pretty bored sitting here at the bank hoping something doesn't break.

[PJL]

I think the current actions being taken right now against ISIS and other Islamists can be summarised as being the worst possible one to take apart from all the others that have been tried. Firefighting is probably the best short to medium term solution right now as long as no-one in the region has a desire to tackle long term solutions.

[Berkut]

I don't even know what a long term solution looks like.

[grumbler]

I don't even know what a long term solution looks like.

Re-drawing borders.