“(Bush) is doing what needs to be done to make the terrorists think twice before hitting us again.”
Bin Laden must be laughing in his rat cave as he hears that people believe such stupidity.
Let’s review. We attacked Afghanistan. So far so good. But then, instead of focusing on Bin Laden and al quaeda, we attacked Iraq. We attacked a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We attacked a country that had less to do with terrorism than Syria, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions, probably, before it’s all over), thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, maimed 10,000 Americans, lost much of our standing in the world and depleted a large part of the reservoir of the American people’s will to fight. And for what? It’s not a rhetorical question. Please tell me, for what?
All we seems to have come of attacking Iraq is a chance for terrorists to kill Americans. They’ve killed thousands of Americans in Iraq in the past few years. They don’t seem to have thought twice about it at all. They’ve come from all around the world to fight “the great infidel” in Iraq. They’re killing more Americans every day. Why go to America to kill Americans when they’re sitting ducks right in your own part of the world?
If we’d been willing to spend all those lives, all that money, all that will to fight, and all that international political capital on fighting the terrorists we should be after, I’d bet we’d have found the rat cave Bin Laden is hiding in by now. But we’re not focused on him. We’re focused on Iraq. Dick Cheney keeps talking about Iraq’s “long-established ties to al quaeda.” But he has absolutely no evidence to back up this claim, and him saying it doesn’t make it true. On September 12, 2001, Bush insisted that a tie be found between Iraq and the previous day’s attacks. Do you think he did this because he somehow knew of a connection, or because he and his PNAC/neocon cronies had been dying to attack Iraq for more than a decade? (Well, they weren’t willing to die for it, but they were willing to send others to their deaths for it.)
“we should have taken Iraq’s oil to pay for the war.” We have been and we are using Iraq’s oil to pay for the war. And the “weaklings” (please explain how bleeding hearts are weaklings, but those who would blindly and weakly follow an obviously ignorant and foolish man towards the destruction of this great country are not) generally had nothing bad to say about it. The total economic impact of the war could be up to 40 times what the administration originally estimated it would cost. Not 40% more, 40 times, or 4,000% more. So the problem isn’t weaklings not wanting to use oil, the problem is that there is not enough oil to pay for the real cost of the war because an arrogant, ignorant, short-sighted administration thought things would go better than they did, despite evidence to the contrary, and didn’t see the probable outcome of the war despite the foresight of wiser men. The outcome was not unforeseeable.
George Bush Sr. on invading Iraq from “A World Transformed,” published well before his son became president:
“We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq. The coalition would have instantly collapsed. … Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish.
“Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.”
“Incalculable human and political costs” would have been the result.”
Incalculable is right on the money. Ahh, the good old days when a Bush with some sense ruled the land.
