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It wouldn't surprise me if that was what the Bush administration wanted.
I don't. How did it/would it help to achieve their aims?
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Blair, Bremer and others should have gone on trial
In case you didn't know, the US won't recognise the ICC precisely for this reason.
hugo7-
I know about the ICC problem.
The sectarian violence didn't help achieve their aims...they achieved those anyway. But the violence suited them because Iraq contained a lot of people who they would categorize as 'bad actors', and they were more than comfortable with them being killed by other Iraqis. To their mind, it was preferable to trying to police Iraq and dig out the the bad guys. Some American lives would have been lost and it would have become an intractable problem. So they disbanded the army and looked the other way.
Do you follow the Bush shoe-thrower on twitter? https://twitter.com/muntazer_zaidi His tweets give me a useful reminder of what happened. I don't want to forget.
nick_h.
It's complicated, but I think there's some truth to what you say. The US probably caused up to a million civilian deaths by provoking and enabling sectarian wars in Iraq, but it was too dangerous for western journalists to observe it, and Iraqis didn't get the sympathy they deserved from us because they were killing each other. It wouldn't surprise me if that was what the Bush administration wanted. Maybe one day we'll find out, when all the documents are declassified. It's hard to rank rhese things, but it could be argued that the US was just as wicked then as Putin is now. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Blair, Bremer and others should have gone on trial, but they would probably have been acquitted because they would have claimed that they did the best they could, and that Saddam's removal was inevitably going to lead to a civil war, because he'd been stoking sectarian rivalries throughout his rule.
In Syria the West had little control. The main villains were/are Assad, Putin and ISIS. There was a huge amount of coverage of civiian deaths if you watched C4 news. I don't know about the other channels. The West did try to help a great deal, Merkel took in a million refugees, but aid was hampered by Turkey's neverending war with the Kurds. At least Kurdistan finally happened. It's ridden with clan corruption, but it's a start.
And then there's Afghanistan, Vietnam...it's colossal. Mind-boggling.