[secretagent]

The problem with Paul's blowback comments is that the only way to successfully argue this is to know that Paul has a magic time machine. In the real world, when you are in charge of a country, you have choices to make about what is your national interest. For Saddam, we had to weigh the challenge of Iran running the entire Middle East and holding the West hostage for oil. For the Muhajidin in Afghanistan, we had to weigh supporting those rebels versus the Soviet Union expanding. In both cases, we had no time machine to tell us what would happen, we had the situation at hand to deal with. IMHO, the 'blowback' argument from is juvenile at best as one can easily look at history and count more non-blowback incidents than blowback.

All historical analysis and projections of the future suffer from the lack of time machines. Bush himself said:

For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

Bush looked at our ME involvement prior to 9/11 and found it deficient. How could he know that without a time machine?

When Bush says free nations tolerated ME oppression, one can add that that they also aided oppression by alliances of expediency with oppressive ME regimes.

IOW, "blowback".

[mnehring]

..and what is the ‘Blowback’ of ignoring it and letting it fester? Blowback goes both ways. What is the Blowback thus far of our new Iraq situation? Well, we know that Lybia has changed it’s tune- positive Blowback. Again, we can’t predict the future, we only can face the situation at hand, which, one could say is Blowback of prior administrations not following through in the ME (such as the original Gulf War) or treating terrorism as a law enforcement only issue.

[mnehring]

..and just to add another skin of that onion, what is the history of blowback due to inaction?