I am going to jump on board with this one, Its really hard for me to believe that this guy is still alive.
Inexcuseable blunder. Do you see the non-sequitor you just listed? Al Qaida in Afghanistan an pakistan are the 9/11 enemies, so Doofus launches an expensive, unwinnable war against IRAQ! It violated every lesson we learned in Vietnam! Everybody my ass! I objected to this obvious distraction and misuse of militray power from the begining. More importantly, the UNSCOM inspectors including our own US inspectors that had spent the last 10 years destroying Saddams WMD's told us exactly what we would find -- NOTHING!!! Bush ignored them, as you have done. I did not. Invalid conclusion based on erroneous assumptions. So why aren't they all dead after five friggin' years fighting the world's Superpower. Because it's an unwinnable gueriila war! We are playing by their rules on their turf instead of fighting smart like the United States of America usually does. These ragheads have nothing we need! Babysiting their civil war is asinine and thoughtless, much like the SabanFan timeline. Republican President, Republican Congress, Republican Supreme Court. You can't Whitewash this snowballing disaster and try to pin it on the Democrats. NOBODY is fooled by this lame line. I'm surprised anyone with your brains is still defending the Bush Administration. OK, so why don't you tell us why we can't get out.
I don't disagree with any of the facts you noted. I disagree that we needed to be there at all! I disagree that we needed to conduct another Vietnam-type of guerilla war/occupation. I disagree that taking the focus of Al Qaida and Bin Ladin was smart. Tell me honestly. Do you really think the fine US military is being used properly in Iraq? Your job is to kill people and break things, not babysit a bunch of ragheads who can't get their chit together. They don't deserve our help! They don't understand democracy, it's a forlorn hope that Iraq will ever be one. As soon as we leave, be it tomorrow or in 100 years, the place will revert to rule by strongman, just like every other country in the Arab world, including our "allies". Only this time, instead of a secular dictator like Saddam, it will be an islamist dictator. We won the friggin war in 21 days, destroyed the Iraq military and sacked their capital! We should have started coming home on day 22. Leave the bastards to stew in their own crap and kill each other, instead of us. Why have we taken 30,000 casualties, depleted our ground forces, and spent a Trillion dollars trying to turn the place into Indiana? We are going to need our military in other very important wars soon enough and we are in the worst state of readiness since 1939.
Remember all the people who said we couldn't get out of Vietnam, all the doom and gloom? What happened? Did the world come to an end? Hell no. Bush's reasoning was that he knew there was WMD (there wasn't) The congress saw intelligence that Bush allowed them to see (and he cherry picked it) Bush insisted that Hussein allow the inspectors back in (they were back in, we pulled them out to attack) and then once they were in, said that wasn't good enough, you must show us the weapon that you don't have. Before you jump into a pre emptive war against someone who never attacked us, you better damn well have proof positive of the risk, and Bush didn't. And like Red said before, the military are not police, they kick ass and destroy and then get out!! If Bush wouldn't have been stoned thru the Veit. War, he'd have known this!!
I also fault the democrats, some of whom I suspect had qualms, but were to spineless to challenge Cowboy W, because of his popularity at the time.
There is no question that a lot of mistakes have been made in Iraq, and you can certainly argue that going in was one of them. But this was not a war against Afghanistan; it was a war against Al Qaida, wherever they may be. Right now Iraq is one of the places where they are. It does not make any difference whether or not they were there 5 years ago; they are there now and we need to confront them. This is a crucial part of the world and if we can help establish some stability in Iraq, I believe a few years down the road we will look back and be able to say it was all worth it. What we cannot do is allow Iraq to become another Iran or pre-9/11 Afghanistan.
