Listening to the remaining Bush loyalists still attempting to justify the war in Iraq is like listening to Big Tobacco executives trying to justify the selling of cigarettes. How can anyone anywhere, at this point, believe that we were ever justified going into Iraq?
It is so telling that 99 percent of the books written on the subject have come out against the original rationale for the war and the conduct of the war. I don't see anyone, other than Tommy Franks and Paul Wolfowitz staying loyal to Bush and Cheney. Now even "Slam Dunk" George Tenet has finally come out to say in public what we have all known these many years, that it was Cheney and his cronies who pushed this folly from the beginning, even before September 11th.
I wish someone would make public the proceedings of the Cheney Energy Meeting. Regime change was mentioned in that meeting, but little else is know about what transpired. September 11th must have been the great gift his neocon crew was waiting for to start a war. If they truly believed that Iraq would become the model for democracy in the middle east, then they were even more delusional than we suspected.
If Saddam Hussein, as Secretary Rice stated on This Week with George Stephanopolos, was a growing danger in 2001 and needed to be taken out, why then haven't we made plans to attack North Korea? Saddam may have wanted a bomb many years ago, but Kim Jung Il has a bomb. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but otherwise ensured a functioning nation. North Korea, on the other hand, has not been a functioning nation since the 50s.
If we had simply kept the focus on Afghanistan and left Saddam bottled up in his no fly zones, we could have saved 3500 Americans, 500,000 Iraqis and prevented Al Queda from finding a safe haven. At least when they were scattered, they were unable to wage war against us. Now that Bush has given them a wild west style shooting gallery, Iraq has become a magnet for Jihadis.
The sad part of this affair is that we now have nearly 3500 dead brave soldiers who died in a Vietnam style conflict. We got out and allowed the inevitable to happen. Now that the strong dictator form of government has been removed from Iraq, the only choice is to allow the inevitable to again take place.
I'm not for an immediate pull out. It would lead to mass chaos and destroy what is left of our good name, but we must give the virtual Iraqi Green Zone only government an ultimatum. We need to quickly bring all parties into the government and turn them against the Al Queda foreign fighters. Saddam even warned his people to beware the foreign fighters after he was gone. They care nothing about Iraq and only want to prevent anything, but a full Islamic government from taking over.
We may have to wait for a regime change in America for anything positive to come out of Iraq.
