Very well thought-out piece. I’ve always suspected the decision to go into Iraq was as much to settle a family score as anything else. After 9/11, it was very easy to suppress any opposition.
This stimulus package has the same stench on it. But things are so bad that everyone save the stalwart house pubbies are willing to sign off on maybe the worst bill in US history.
Does anybody (even a Dem congresscritter) think this stimulus will stimulate anything? Has to be a vote-buying scheme. Or do they see it as way to dampen civil unrest and avoid the same fate as their counterparts in Iceland? Isn’t that basically what the New Deal was all about? Either way, it feels like something that is being rammed through quickly under less-than-honest premise.
Interesting that you see the current crisis as a referendum on Keynes/Friedman. Maybe the certain failure of this stimulus package will be so instructive that even the most obdurate spendthrift liberals will have to take notice (I can ‘hope’ for ‘change’ too). The Obamanation made some noise before the election about revisiting trade policy. Absolutely nothing now that he’s in power. Probably depending too much on China to underwrite the ‘Stimulation’.
I wouldn’t go that far. I disagree with the premise of your first two paragraphs. algore and Hillary, the French and even Saddam himself thought he had WMD’s. (opportunistic capitalists told him to give them ______ fill in the blank Iraqi dinars and they would invent a raygun to kill Americans and Jews....the joke was on Saddam).
Accusing a man of using billions of dollars of taxpayer money and American soldiers lives just to settle a Hatfield/McCoy family feud is the worst thing you could ever accuse someone of....you better have something to back it up if you are going to bring that kind of accusation.
I believe that he meant well, and time will tell whether he was right or wrong. We’ll know in 40 years. If Iraq turns into a Persian Iranian Shiite satellite state than he was a bozo. If Iraq serves as the beacon of freedom and causes authoritarian regimes and their citizens in the mideast to say “why can’t we be like them?” then it was a success.
I agree wholeheartedly with your take on the last two paragraphs.
I think those who think the decision to go to Iraq was to settle a family score are a few fries short of a happy meal.
When all the intelligence agencies believed Iraq HAD WMDs, it was risky to believe that he didn’t.
When all the evidence pointed to the fact that Saddam had had WMDs, and USED WMDs, and never accounted for the WMDs that he had produced ....it would be risky to believe that suddenly, he didn’t have WMDs.
During the interviews with Saddam, before he was executed, Saddam indicated that he planned on resuming his WMD programs, it supports the fact that Saddam was a very dangerous man.
When evidence shows that Saddam had, with the complicity of a number of cheats and crooks in the UN and various countries, compromised the Oil for Food program into a Oil for Palaces and Weapons Program - it showed how dangerous Saddam would have been once the UN sanctions were dropped (which the French and Germans were pushing HARD to have happen.)
When a General who worked for Saddam indicated that Saddam had managed to move many of the WMDs that we didn’t find out of Iraq and into Syria and Lebanon (the Bakka Valley) - it becomes disingenuous to believe that “Bush Lied” rather than the fact that the evidence CONTINUES to show Saddam was a dangerous man.
And when people suggest that we should have left Saddam in place, why should we not consider those people “Monday Morning Quarterbacks” who are bigots at heart. They act as if the Iraqi people are too stupid to be given a chance at freedom, and they are only fit for being slaves of some vicious despot. Sort of like the Democrat’s mantra about the African man not being able to handle freedom, and driving this country into a Civil War in 1861. And of course, the same Democrats in the South “birthed” the terrorist wing of the Democrat party - the KKK. Their record continues - shameful and bigoted.
Why not acknowledge what everyone should realize - after Saddam invaded Kuwait, he should have been deposed, tried and convicted (and executed) ...for war crimes, for waging war on another country, for murder, for setting fire to over 600 wells when withdrawing from Kuwait, for deliberately leaking oil from wells in the Persian Gulf, etc.
But it is so much more convenient to assume the Iraq war was ONLY because Pres. Bush wanted to take out the guy who attempted to assassinate Pres. Bush (41).