I demand a Congressional investigation!

I join Glenn Reynolds in this. From Porphyrogenitus

Ten Real Lies (?) We Were Told About Iraq
Here are the whoppers they want you to forget while they focus your attention elsewhere. All of these were frequently bandied about by huge numbers of people and were the conventional wisdom of many:
1) The Iraqi Army would fight much harder to defend its country than it did in Kuwait.
Most Iraqi soldiers deserted at the first opportunity, having no desire to defend the Ba'ath National Socialist regime.
2) Iraq is not Afghanistan - it will take half a million American troops and at least six months to capture Baghdad, resulting in 50,000 American casualties (of which approximately 10,000 would be deaths).
As with the earlier "Afghanistan is not Iraq" prediction, this one likewise failed to materialize. It took half that number of American troops, less than a third as much time, and a tiny fraction of that casualty estimate.
3) Iraq will draw Israel into the war, leading to a larger Middle East conflagration.
Didn't happen.
4) There would be massive resistance from the Iraqi population defending their country from invasion.
Hardly anyone lifted a finger to defend the Ba'ath National Socialist Regime. Aside from the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, Ba'athist thugs, and foreign volunteers, the bulk of the population simply stayed out of the way.
Even now, if one looks at the pattern of attacks, they are by and large restricted to a region north and west of Baghdad, where Saddam drew his greatest support, and carried out by Ba'athist death squads (typically the same sort of people who were used to terrorize the Iraqi population) and foreign auxiliaries from other Arab states. The vast majority of the Iraqi population, rather than supporting these attacks, are mainly concerned that we end them and produce security.
5) There would be street by street, house to house fighting in Baghdad that would destroy the city, cost thousands of American casualties, and drag on for six weeks or more.
Didn't happen that way. (Full disclosure: I thought this was a distinct possibility and it was something I worried most about).
6) A war would create a huge humanitarian crisis as millions of refugees fled Iraq, overwhelming neighboring countries ability to deal with it.
Didn't happen. Indeed, the UN set up a facility for predicted refugee flows in Jordan, and it remained a ghost camp throughout the conflict. As with Afghanistan, people have been flowing into, not out of, Iraq since the war - pre-war refugees returning home rather than people being forced to flee their homes.
7) A war would create such disruption in the food distribution system and so destroy the water infrastructure that it would result in hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Iraqis dying of starvation and disease.
Again, as with near-identical predictions made with respect to hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dead Afghanis, this did not happen.
8) That mythological boogieman, the "Arab Street", would rise up against us and destabilize friendly, pro-Western regimes in the region.
The only street to rise up has been Persian, not Arab, against the anti-Western Mullahcracy (I know it's hard for the Left to get too excited about the current pro-Democracy movement in Iran, though, because it's not anti-Western enough for their tastes).

This prediction was always odd anyhow since it was often raised by those who in other contexts deplore precisely those Arab regimes that are friendly to us and are unlikely to shed any tears if they fell. So this warning was often insincere. In any case, for many of us who look at the status quo in the region, destabilization is a feature, not a bug.
9) Saddam Hussein has no ties to terrorism, but if we attack him then he will launch terror attacks in the U.S. and we will thus produce the very thing we're trying to avoid. (Throw into the pot with this the various warnings that Saddam would use the bioweapons against us if we provoked him in this way - that he was harmless if left alone but if we attacked we'd suffer dire consequences, &tc; &tc;).
Again, didn't happen. Also, information keeps coming out regarding Saddam's support of and harboring of terrorists such as Abu Abbas (more here) and even ties with Osama Bin Laden.
10) War with Iraq would distract from the war on terrorism and it would derail any chances for the Middle East Peace Process.
The Middle East "peace process", such as it is, has restarted with somewhat better prospects now that suicide bombers aren't getting payoffs from Saddam. The war in Iraq has helped advance the cause of the war on terror by eliminating a source of funding, support, and safe harbor, and served to divert young Arab men who otherwise might be forming terrorist cells ploting ricin attacks in Europe or the U.S.
Is it proper to characterize these as "lies"? Or were they just, *ahem* "intelligence" failures on the part of those who issued these pre-war warnings?

From Porphyrogenitus

-- posted by Chuck at Wednesday, July 16, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main | 0 comments

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Wednesday, July 16, 2003

I demand a Congressional investigation!

Ten Real Lies (?) We Were Told About Iraq