For TWELVE YEARS we supported Saddam supporting terrorism. That is a LOT of money. OUR money. TAXPAYER money. And it DID NOT WORK.
"Imperialism" my left toenail. It was common sense by someone with more survival sense than the average lemming - which is more than can be said for the average "paleocon" - and that someone was President Bush.
The next one was waiting all those years to go back in.
And not using the most legitimate argument.
The war ending was contingent on Saddam obeying the UN sanctions.
He broke them over and over again and we waited what, 12 years?
And then the Dems put off going in long enough for Saddam to scrub the country. WMD was the wrong reason even though legitimate. The sanctions broken were reason enough.
Now who's fault was that? If he was using our money then we gave it to him. That was a Poppy creation. It may surprise you to know it was Bush Mentor Gerald Ford who actually gave terrorism the green light. Up till then if someone became a problem yo our security we quietly took them out. No chest pounding moron running around D.C. for almost a year saying Saddam or whoever were coming to get you. OK now if giving them money was wrong which I think it was from the git go then how much more so is nation building at our expense?
If our troops are sent in to a nation for war then they should have a sole military objective to destroy that nation or fight until unconditional surrender and the nation is a threat no more. Thanks to Bush the new Iraq will be far more a threat to us than Saddam ever was before it's all over as they will have modern weapon technology paid for again by guess who?
The war in Iraq wasn't about the W.O.T. it was on behalf of Sauds and is all about oil. We didn't go after any other nation linked to 911. We had more reason to go after Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a few others than Iraq.
There are better and much more efficient ways to deal with terrorism than Bush Doctrines. The first one being find new friends. The second one is using Letters of Marque or Reprisals to hire locals who don't stick out like sore thumbs to get the job done.
BTTT! You’re on a roll.
No. It was an out and out imperialistic move by the neocons and there was no common sense about it. We only finally started to turn the "peace" around and make progress once we booted the neocons out of positions of policy influence and let the military do its job under Petraeus and such folks. The neocons under Bush had less of an idea how to win peace than did the Clinton administration.
These guys were not conservatives, and they have cost us trillions. A president does not just say, yes, let us invade Iraq. He chooses a plan and a group of people to implement that plan. Whether or not invading Iraq in the abstract was a good idea, the plan that was executed ran out when we booted out Sadam and they had no clue what to do next except swing about wildly like the school bully attacked by 100 six year olds.
No, it was not our finest moment, and Cheney, Wolfowitz and a few others will go down in ignominy as a consequence. Rumsfeld, is also tarred by it, which is a pity, because his Pentagon reform was drastically needed, and we still need lot more of it.
It all broke down because State and Defense could not work together to rebuild Iraq, and that problem I have to lay at the feet of the President himself. Interagency is always a mess and he should have waded in and started throwing his weight and people around and tossing them out until they started functioning.
But Bushes are establishment people and never buck the system. It is their downfall in the end.