Nor should we. Like a man helping his neighbor put out a fire in the other man's house. He does it as much (if not more) for his own house as for his neighbor's. We did not go to Iraqi to make it like the United State, we went to Iraqi to protect the United States by fighting the enemy on their soil, not ours.
I know that, and you know that, but our president doesn't seem to know that. In the SOTU he again talked about the Golden Mosque being blown up as one of the reasons we need to be in Iraq. Those mosques are weapons caches so instead of waiting for a Shia to blow up a Sunni mosque or vice versa we should be blowing them all up ourselves. To think that one drop of Amernican blood has been shed over a mosque.
THANK YOU! Someone besides myself gets it!
That excuse is so 2005.
Like it or not, we went in because we thought - as far as I can tell, reasonably but wrongly - that Saddam Hussein was seeking and actually had WMD's. We also justified it on the grounds of creating a neo-conservative "city on a hill," believing ourselves to be on a mission from God to create a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. This "flypaper" theory didn't come into vogue until it was clear there were no WMD's, but that Saddam Hussein instead took advantage of the prestige the innuendo that he did gave him. The Flypaper theory, additionally, has been discredited by the London tube bombings and the countless stopped terrorist attacks here.
There's only one defense of the war necessary - with the best intelligence we had at the time, we reasonably believed Saddam had WMD's and so acted appropriately. Our mistake was not in going in, but trying to do it cheap so that the occupation was incredibly botched. Iraq is a quagmire, yes, but it is one because of actions that happened in 2004-2005, not 2003-2004.