IRAQ REVISITED

President George W. Bush took us to war with Iraq more than three years ago. The Saddam regime has been gone for all but a few weeks of that period yet we are unable to see an end to our participation. What are we to make of these years and our predicament?

The most obvious is that the rationales for the preventive attack on Iraq were wrong. It is clear to all but the lunatic fringe that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s arsenal, and no policy cooperation connection has been proven between the government of Iraq and al Qaeda. Nor is it believed, except by the aforesaid morons, that despite Saddam’s constant hullabaloney toward Israel and his occasional call for the restoration of the Caliphate of all Arabs under his well tattered banner that any of this science fiction had any real basis.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, DOD Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the neocons who persistently pushed the president’s buttons, and the claque of Senators – Warner, McCain, Lieberman, and Bayh - who can all proudly claim credit for leading us to Baghdad were wrong on all counts.

Far less important in hindsight as far as I’m concerned, we did not enter the fray with enough troops to occupy Iraq when the Saddam government fell. That this was called to the attention of the policy makers by the Army Chief of Staff is merely a sad footnote. Had we sent the number recommended, we’d still be in the extraordinarily difficult position of trying dismount from this terrible tiger, a mere postponement of the day of reckoning when old tribal and religious enemies could settle ancient scores.

For months now extending into years, the Republicans who cheered madly as the president prepared for the conflict and baited their weakling brethren across the aisle as wimps and flip-floppers now call to the attention of American voters that the negativist Democrats are badly split on how to get us out of Iraq, offer nothing but negativity on the war, and want to cut and run – a breach of trust with those who have fought and died.

That leaves the Grand Old Party as the happy warriors going about the business of securing the battered nation while the Dems wring their hands. The president has never said how the Shock and Awe disposal of Saddam in weeks would translate into getting American military men and women out of harm’s way. The only pledge is that when the Iraqi government can defend itself, we’ll stand down. Frankly, the news – obviously cooked by the mainstream media – leads ignorant Americans to believe that things aren’t going well in Baghdad when indeed everything is perfectly swell. Those pictures of people getting blown up each day are simply for consumption by the media.

When the President labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the Axis of Evil, it became incumbent upon him and America to deal with that axis. It is quite clear from books by Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and others and from Congressional testimony from people like Richard Clark that we would take action against the member least likely to be able to respond effectively; so long, Saddam.

Saddam’s fall would clearly demonstrate to the Mullahs and the mad midget of Pyongyang that we weren’t kidding and that they better start talking or the same fate might be in the cards for them. I guess we showed them. Iran is working feverishly to attain nuclear weapons and Kim is believed to already have them. These nations are far more dangerous than they were three years ago, and we’re badly bogged down in a terrible quagmire.

All the fancy dancing to change the rationales for toppling Saddam – democracy for all Muslim nation’s governed by tyrants is a little ragged these days – which seem to be settling on his being a really bad guy who was really, really cruel to his own people can’t paper over what we’ve done to our military. All of the lost and broken lives and hundreds of billions of dollars down the drain with no end in sight and now our difficulty in funding weapons programs that we need against far more important long range competitors such as China leave us in far greater difficulties than when we attacked Iraq.

What we’ve done to our armed forces and to ourselves says nothing about the people we’ve rescued. While life under Saddam was clearly awful, I can’t for the life of me say that the human cost to Iraqis since our attack has been anything but terrible as well. America and Iraq are now in a terrible embrace with no clear way to break free.

In recent months it has become apparent that the fully justifiable war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has take a turn for the worse. The government on Kabul has less control over the outlying provinces than it had – with us as its surrogate – when the slide became noticeable. When we turned our focus from this war that we should have been fighting to take on a nation that was – while loudly rattling its rusty sabers – little threat to us or our allies.

Most Americans have turned against the Iraq War not because they don’t have staying power but because they’ve come to understand that it was the wrong war whose basis was phony, a classic fool’s errand.

Yes, the Democrats are divided – unlike the lemmings on their right. Yes, the Democrats are unhappy – unlike their deliriously smitten Republican friends. Well damn it, anyone who isn’t gravely concerned should be locked up in the booby hatch. It’s too bad this Happy Warrior B.S. seems to be selling among the yahoos. If we don’t get at least one House of Congress intent on providing oversight to this administration, we’ll remain in serious trouble

I don’t fault those who supported the Iraq War when the spoon feeding of faulty intelligence could not be challenged. But now there is no doubt, we were misled into this mess. It’s George Bush’s war and he’s unlikely to ever say he was wrong. But people like Joe Lieberman should be ashamed of themselves; all of the reasons he gave for encouraging the President to attack Saddam were wrong. The Democrats in Connecticut have figured him out, and he’s willing to bring the house down rather than admit error.

Had enough? Vote Democrat – except for Joe!

Blog on!

Wild Bill