Here's a prediction I wrote on September 13, 2001 about what was going to happen. I didn't know then that Vietnam II would be fought in Iraq, but I was pretty sure that we would blow sh*t up, demonstrate we could take casualties (so we looked serious) without conquering the enemy (so we didn't look mean) and wind up worse off, which is exactly what happened.
A punitive expedition (which is how Afghanistan started) was the minimum acceptable response. IF we had killed Bin Ladin and his team at Tora Bora in December 2001, success could have been declared and it would have been over.
The necessary for victory was the conquest of Arabia and Pakistan. Sounds big, I know, but certainly smaller than the conquest of Japan and Germany. Yes, the Soviets did a lot to Germany, but we could have had India's legions for the Pakistan part.
But a 80-division expeditionary force, mostly white and all Western, grinding little brown men to dust and re-educating their children was always beyond the imagination of the Bush family and their crew.
That left him with the need to do "something" bigger than Special Forces on horseback chasing out the Taliban and smaller than a war to extirpate the cancer that is politicized Sunni Islam.
Saddam WAS wearing a sign that said "kick me", and had been for years, but he was an entrepreneur of brutality with a keen sense of survival, so it's certain he and his army could have been bought for the march on Riyadh.
Bush thought small at a time when big thinking was a necessity, and the subsequent disasters are entirely the result of this failure. His pathetic embrace of "enforcing UN resolutions" as casus belli only made failure more certain.
It disgusts me that there are Republican candidates who are not made physically ill by the magnitude of our sacrifices for nothing in Iraq.
For after all, even if the fantasy of a multicultural, peaceful, feminist Iraq and Afghanistan had come true (impossible though that was), our real enemies in Riyadh and Islamabad would still sleep soundly in their beds, as they do to this day.
The key comment from a stellar commentary. A real, principled leader would have gone to Saudi Arabia with weapons in hand, and dismembered the "royal family" there for their involvement in 911. But the Booshes have been, and continue to be the Saudi's "butt boys." In a country of so many really brilliant and productive people is it to our everlasting shame that we have allowed ourselves to be “taken in” by the $hit we've had in the White House since Ronald Reagan left. To my mind, even he was “forced” to take GHWB by the GOPe at the time as their “price” for “support.” As I see it, the same moneyed trash that's working behind the political scene today (or perhaps their progeny) have been running our country as their own private fiefdom for all of my 75 years. Sure, Donald Trump is a gamble, but it's one I'm taking when I look at the odds that tell me that any of the rest of them will just be a repriese of what we've had. I can't imagine that Trump could be worse than what we've eudured for so long.