My husband’s a soldier who’s done six tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and he’ll be the first to tell you that the soldiers feel duped by Bush.
Were there WMD’s? Yup.
The fact that BUSH and POWELL said that they were ‘mistaken’ stabbed all of our guys in the back and undermined the war effort. The ‘we’re at war, but please don’t nevermind and keep shopping’ stance by our president undermined the war effort.
Our guys continued to do their job. Even with an unsupportive CIC. Both of them.
I’ve been married to a soldier for more than a quarter of a century. He’s MI and he hates how both fronts were fought.
He doesn’t disagree with Trump one bit. We’re seeing more and more ‘make america great again’ t-shirts and hats on post as the months go by.
I was for going in myself. Whether there were WMD’s or not, the point is we couldn’t know until we went. There were initially some benefits too. Khadaffy started cooperating, and Iran even suspended their nuke program for a short time. The mistake was getting bogged down with “nation building”, pretending we could make the phony “nation” of Iraq a democracy. Once we were bogged down there was no way we could do anything about Iran. Ditto Afghanistan. Nation building where peoples first loyalty is to their tribe or ethnic group is a fools errand. The best you can hope for is to destroy the leadership and then play each faction off against each other.
Right now my biggest concern is that we are going to get into a war with Russia for no reason other than these fools want to look tough. When I hear Bush/Rubio/Kasich/Hillary talk about Al Qaeda allied jihadists as “the people we support” my stomach turns. They learned absolutely nothing from Iraq.