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While the conventional wisdom has it that America's foreign policy is hamstrung by our inability to reduce force levels in Iraq, Victor Davis Hanson says our determination to see it through may leave us with more, not less, freedom of action with regard to Iraq's neighbors.
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Make no mistake about this. The United States and its allies can defeat the forces of islamo-fascism that now rule much of the middle east. But if we run away from this particular black hole on the face of our planet, it will follow us and eventually swallow us.
Forcefulness applied to policy always works better than weakness, either in pulling along allies or in accomplishing such a goal without them.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/050117_seduced.htm
How Americans Were Seduced by War
By Paul Craig Roberts
Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders who they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us."
What happens when Americans wake up to their betrayal? It is too late to be rescued from catastrophe in Iraq, but perhaps if Americans can understand how such a grand mistake was made they can avoid repeating it.
In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, The New American Militarism, Andrew J. Bacevich writes that we can avoid future disasters by understanding how our doctrines went wrong and by returning to the precepts laid down by our Founding Fathers, men of infinitely more wisdom than those currently holding reins of power.
Bacevich, West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and soldier for 23 years, is a true conservative. He is an expert on US military strategy and a professor at Boston University.
He describes how civilian strategists—especially Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Marshall—not military leaders, transformed a strategy of deterrence that regarded war as a last resort into a strategy of naked aggression.
The resulting "marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends" has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale."
The greatest threat to the US is not terrorists but the neoconservative belief, to which President Bush is firmly committed, that American security and well-being depend on US global hegemony and impressing US values on the rest of the world.
This belief resonates with a patriotic public. Bacevich writes,
"in the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword."
If Americans persist in these misconceptions, America will
"share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize."
Bacevich understands that the problem is not how to deal with terrorism but how to deal with the hubris, laden with catastrophe, that America is God’s instrument for bringing history to its predetermined destination.
Being assigned such an exalted role creates the delusion that America’s virtue is unquestionable and its use of preemptive coercion is infallible, delusion that led to the "cakewalk war" that would entrench Democracy in the Middle East and have the troops home in 90 days.
American hubris, which flows so freely from President Bush’s mouth, explains why half the US population yawns over the US slaughter of Iraqi civilians and communist-style torture of Iraqi prisoners.
The "cakewalk war" is now almost two years old and has claimed 10 percent of the US occupation force as casualties. Yet, the delusion persists that the US is prevailing in Iraq.
The new American militarism would be inconceivable, Bacevich writes, "were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals."
Books written about "militant Islam" could equally describe militant evangelical Christianity. How did a Christian doctrine of love and peace become an apology for war?
Bacevich explains that evangelicals, aghast at Vietnam era protests of America’s war against "godless communism," turned to the military as the repository of traditional American virtues. For evangelicals, endtimes doctrines converged eschatology with national security.
Prophecies merged America’s fate with Israel’s. Islam inherited the role of godless communism and became the target of the war against evil. America emerged with the "same immensely elastic permission to use force previously accorded to Israel."
America’s security and the well-being of the world are threatened by America’s unwarranted belief in the efficacy of force. War is ungovernable:
"The shattered reputations of generals and statesmen who presumed to bring it under control litter the twentieth century. On those rare occasions when war has yielded a seemingly decisive outcome, as in 1918 or 1945, it has done so only after exacting a staggering price from victor and vanquished alike. Even then, in resolving one set of problems, ‘good’ wars have fostered resentments or created temptations, leading as often as not to further conflict."
The new American militarism has abandoned the Founding Fathers, deserted the Constitution, and unrestrained the executive. War is a first resort.
Militarism is inconsistent with globalism and with American ideals. It will end in abject failure.
The world is a vast place. The US has demonstrated that it cannot impose its will on a tiny part known as Iraq. American realism may yet reassert itself, dispel the fog of delusion, cleanse the body politic of the Jacobin spirit and lead the world by good example.
But this happy outcome will require regime change in the US.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts is the author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
Hehehehehe.
Now there's a man who's well connected with reality!
Glad to see you finally acknowledge yourself to be an ally with the Pat Buchanans and Paul Craig Roberts' of the world--right-wing, isolationist, anti-progressive, etc. Good to see you waking up to yourself, man!
Sorry but this is an out right lie of the facts, as 10% of the US occupation force are not casualties. When you count in all the troop rotations, the casualties are less the 4% of the US forces.
I very much enjoyed reading both articles, although I agree more with Victor's assesement. We are at the last big struggle from the enemy trying to stop the elections. Other countries are starting to notice, and the world is changing.
We've already won in Iraq - all we need do is persist a bit longer and collect the politico-military profits of our victory.
I've been saying for some time now that by June of this year we'll no longer hear to much about Iraq - as the democracy sinks roots and the terrorists are destroyed or head for the hills, attention will turn elsewhere. Specifically, I expect it will turn on Iran, but the main thing is that once Iraq starts to become an undeniable-even-by-idiot-reporters success, it will drop off the news coverage...just as Afghanistan has.
Even if you include ALL of those, however, the casualty rate is still the lowest in all of history for any major operation of comparable size. Use HONEST figures, and it's more miniscule still.
But I don't expect facts to get in the way of the reactionary set. They'll just call whatever they don't like "Nixonian" and gloat about how it's all just like Vietnam, just like Vietnam ("Quagmire! Quagmire! Squawk! Polly wanna quagmire!")
But hey, never mind, we can just keep repeating the "cakewalk" mantra because it justifies our prejudices.
Next up: someone brings up flowers.
Same topic- follow up article by Roberts; actually, a corollary- this is more on the media:
End-Timers &Neo-Cons
The End of Conservatives
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during 1981-82. He was also Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.
I remember when friends would excitedly telephone to report that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy had just read one of my syndicated columns over the air. That was before I became a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration, and the neoconservative ideologues who have seized control of the US government.
America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic. Many Christians think that war in the Middle East signals "end times" and that they are about to be wafted up to heaven. Many patriots think that, finally, America is standing up for itself and demonstrating its righteous might. Conservatives are taking out their Vietnam frustrations on Iraqis. Karl Rove is wrapping Bush in the protective cloak of war leader. The military-industrial complex is drooling over the profits of war. And neoconservatives are laying the groundwork for Israeli territorial expansion.
The evening before Thanksgiving Rush Limbaugh was on C-Span TV explaining that these glorious developments would have been impossible if talk radio and the conservative movement had not combined to break the power of the liberal media.
In the Thanksgiving issue of National Review, editor Richard Lowry and former editor John O'Sullivan celebrate Bush's reelection triumph over "a hostile press corps." "Try as they might," crowed O'Sullivan, "they couldn't put Kerry over the top." There was a time when I could rant about the "liberal media" with the best of them. But in recent years I have puzzled over the precise location of the "liberal media."
Not so long ago I would have identified the liberal media as the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and the three TV networks, and National Public Radio. But both the Times and the Post fell for the Bush administration's lies about WMD and supported the US invasion of Iraq. On balance CNN, the networks, and NPR have not made an issue of the Bush administration's changing explanations for the invasion.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and National Review think there is a liberal media because the prison torture scandal could not be suppressed and a cameraman filmed the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine. Do the Village Voice and The Nation comprise the "liberal media"? The Village Voice is known for Nat Hentoff and his columns on civil liberties. Every good conservative believes that civil liberties are liberal because they interfere with the police and let criminals go free. The Nation favors spending on the poor and disfavors gun rights, but I don't see the "liberal hate" in The Nation's feeble pages that Rush Limbaugh was denouncing on C-Span.
In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.
The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."
This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.
That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media where noncontroversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules.
Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.
Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.
The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof. Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.
There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.
American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts' delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing implications for their country of their reckless doctrines.
Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the US invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."
It is amazing that only a short time ago the Bush administration and its supporters believed that all the US had to do was to appear in Iraq and we would be greeted with flowers. Has there ever been a greater example of delusion? Isn't this on a par with the Children's Crusade against the Saracens in the Middle Ages?
Delusion is still the defining characteristic of the Bush administration. We have smashed Fallujah, a city of 300,000, only to discover that the 10,000 US Marines are bogged down in the ruins of the city. If the Marines leave, the "defeated" insurgents will return. Meanwhile the insurgents have moved on to destabilize Mosul, a city five times as large. Thus, the call for more US troops.
There are no more troops. Our former allies are not going to send troops. The only way the Bush administration can continue with its Iraq policy is to reinstate the draft.
When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single one of them will be able to explain why destroying Iraqi cities and occupying the ruins are necessary for "our freedom." But this inability will not lessen the enthusiasm for the project. To protect their delusions from "reality-based" critics, they will demand that the critics be arrested for treason and silenced. Many encouraged by talk radio already speak this way.
Because of the triumph of delusional "new conservatives" and the demise of the liberal media, this war is different from the Vietnam war. As more Americans are killed and maimed in the pointless carnage, more Americans have a powerful emotional stake that the war not be lost and not be in vain. Trapped in violence and unable to admit mistake, a reckless administration will escalate.
The rapidly collapsing US dollar is hard evidence that the world sees the US as bankrupt. Flight from the dollar as the reserve currency will adversely impact American living standards, which are already falling as a result of job outsourcing and offshore production. The US cannot afford a costly and interminable war.
Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country.
This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.'
2) 'Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof. Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.
There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.'
3) 'When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single one of them will be able to explain why destroying Iraqi cities and occupying the ruins are necessary for "our freedom." But this inability will not lessen the enthusiasm for the project. To protect their delusions from "reality-based" critics, they will demand that the critics be arrested for treason and silenced. Many encouraged by talk radio already speak this way.'
The Couch Potato's Burden. Remember these three points when drafting the Manifesto! DAN
'I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many of the prejudices of the few.'
Benjy Disraeli, noted flamer....DAN
We also have proof that we are willing to fight when we say we will.
Those two things increase our standing and also increases our deterrence.
As for the ankle-biters, when I was a little kid I read Heinlein a lot. His prognostication in tech was only so-so, but his knowledge of people was superb. One of the things I read and thought profound was (paraphrased from memory),"Your enemy doesn't think he's evil." That little bit of wisdom, like many I picked up from Heinlein, has stood me in good stead. I just wish liberals had read more Heinlein, they impute evil intentions to everything their opponents do.
I support the war in Iraq because I think that Bush is trying to transform the region into something approaching freedom. Maybe he's doing it for the oil and to enrich Haliburton and the Carlyle Group, who knows and so what? If he introduces democracy in a region where might=right, isn't that a good thing no matter his motivation?
Interesting article - shows that the critics of the war, be they on the left or the right, essentially have to resort to the same lies in order to be in opposition to the war.
I've seen Roberts' here and there over the past 20 years, but reading the article, it could easily have been lifted from The Nation rather than from a conservative publication...all of the shop-worn lies about the war are there; including, and most disgustingly, Roberts assertion that a Marine executed a "wounded Iraqi prisoner"; this when everyone knows that a prisoner is someone who has surrendered, not someone who is still moving in a firefight.
It used to get on my nerves, now I just get a bit angry over the knowledge that writings like that article, translated into the Arab press, convince terrorists to keep fighting long after they have been defeated. People like Roberts will eventually pay the price for their crime, in the hereafter if not in this world - as for me, I'm going to continue to back up the President as he leads us in this noble fight for liberty.
'they impute evil intentions to everything their opponents do'
Noonan:
'People like Roberts will eventually pay the price for their crime'
So, Veeshir, as you can see, it's not merely liberals who impute evil intentions, as Noonan proves. Dissent, ooh- pass the last cigar. DAN
Have you really never heard of sins of omission?
It's possible to think a man a terrible person but with the best of intentions: just culpable for not having bothered to figure out that his actions won't achieve his intentions.
Both articles you quoted are so full of factual error and terrible reasoning they're damn near comedy. I don't have time just to address them in detail.
Dean: things like heart attacks, off-duty sports injuries, and car accidents are casualties. Anyone rendered incapable of duty, whether said incapacity is related to hostile action or not, is a casualty.
All that said, right now we don't have much of a strategic reserve to fall back on.
The problem with force increases -with all due respect to former General Shineski- is that they should have been instituted back in 2002. As a rule of thumb it takes about two years to create and train a new division. That puts the start time (if you want the troops to have been available for Iraq in 2004 or earlier) in 2001/2002. Another rule of thumb is that it takes roughly $180,000 to train and equip a new recruit. Creating two new divisions (the most popular numbers seem to be 40,000-50,000 troops, or approximately two divisions) would cost seveal billion dollars ($180,000 x 40,000 recruits = $7.2 billion) just for start-up, and the increased costs of operations would have bumped the now infamous $80 billion even higher.
I submit that it would have been politically impossible for the Bush administration to have raised two new divisions, with the concomittant expenses, at that time. Hell, it was hard enough getting the original invasion and $80 billion supplementary bill approved.
Furthermore, don't you have your own blog? Or are you so starved for attention you have to litter my comments up?
I mean, good lord man, do you think you've posted ANYTHING so far that anyone here hasn't heard a thousand times ad nauseum? WHat are you, 12 years old?
Casey: Herein lies the big problem w the fracture of news sources. Pro &anti on any issue can always say the other side is simply wrong, and that's all they do, with a heaping of ad hominem. While I disagree with some of his metaphors I think he has clearly reasoned the war's ills.
Mike: I've tried pasting links, like the Zmag piece, but Dean's server won't accept links w more than 60 characters, and many articles have twice that. Take it up w Dean.
As for it's being rude- not all of us have broadband or high speed connections that allow pop-ups to allow two browsers up at once. Sorry. DAN
Especially when you keep saying things that are simply counterfactual, and quoting nother people saying things that have been thoroughly debunked.
For example, which of the more than a dozen reasons for our removal of Saddam do you feel was "disproved?" Or are you still on with the shallow lie that WMDs were "the reason" for our action?
Is there a word for posting long cut-and-paste harangues in comment threads? I don't think "Trolling" fits.
Roberts already covered that on your end, Dean.
Owen: 'I've tried pasting links, like the Zmag piece, but Dean's server won't accept links w more than 60 characters, and many articles have twice that.' What was unclear? DAN
I am not trying to slam you, it's just some of the protocol used around here, the oil that keeps this little world spinning on its axis.
That said, the case for going to war was argued before we went to war. Congress heard the arguments, they had access to the same intelligence the administration had. They came to a conclusion and resolved on the use of force and they published the reasons for those conclusions. Going over this ground again is futile. It's really in the hands of the historians now.
The questions that we ask are now that it is two years post-invasion, what should we be doing? What looks like the best combination of liberty and security to protect both our homeland and our freedoms? What is the best foreign policy approach to various "hotspots" such as North Korea and Iran and Syria? What places bear watching lest they become hotspots? This long-term mission to spread democracy all over the globe, how much realpolitik can we engage in when doing this and not lose our good names? What places ought we hit first with this advocacy for democracy and what ones can wait? Where is the low-hanging fruit and where are the tough ones that, nevertheless, we ought to take care of first?
These are important questions and we should be debating them*, not re-hashing old arguments about our going to war; nor making a silly stand in the Senate on issue with a foregone conclusion. This is about being serious, and isolationism is no longer a serious foreign policy position and had actually ceased to be one in 1907 when the Great White Fleet sailed around the world.
What next friends? The future's foundations are being set right now.
*N.B., these questions have the presumption that the United States is a force for good in the world, that military force is not always a bad solution, and that Islamofascist terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and secular tyrants such as Kim Jong Il are wrong and don't get the benefit of the doubt. If these base presumptions can't be met, then there is no debate because we'll never agree on anything.
The more things change...
Here's an address for info on The Great White Fleet.
www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq42-1.htm
On the other hand, Dean &pro-warriors will find any thing to grasp on to to justify war. Yes, of course there was 'fine print' reasons to justify war, but WMD was 72 point Bold, and the rest regular 6 pt.-a la Condo's 'mushroom cloud' comments, so replayed these last few days.
My position is my then &now positions are the only consistent ones with the known facts at the time. Dean imputes anti-war folk with being inhumane were we to pull out, or that it's racist, even though the racist position is clearly his version of the White Man's Burden. I say these people can sort things out for themselves.
The Confederacy was at least as ethically repugnant as Saddam's regime, yet the Euro powers stayed out of our 1/2 mill bodycount bloodbath. Were they wrong to do so?
As I've argued with Dean, as I argued prewar w Lefties, I've not imputed his honor, patriotism, nor ethics, when, were I a real Leftist, I cd've had him screwed, blued, and tattooed. Yet, repeatedly, Dean imputes such on his dissenters. As do most pro-warriors. That is disturbing, to folks attuned to that. I just accept it.
In another arg. Dean says we'll have to look for choices if our policy fails- well, what will be his determinant? 5k Am dead, 10k, 35k? And what level of democracy will be deemed success- Latin Ame banana republic, police state democracy ala Egypt, apartheid democracy ala Israel, Socialist democracy ala Scandinavia? Or just our imperfect sort, still 228 years later?
I don't doubt Dean's intent, nor the Prez's. I am not a fan of his Presidency, but have seen him speak enough to see why folk like him. I suspect most anti-war folk are like me, and see the pro-war side hari-kiriing their minds and ethics, and it's human nature to wince. Yes, there are hard Leftists that are cowards, just as there are hard Rightists who are Apocalyptic Fascists.
But neither is the dominant mode.
Now, as you mention realpolitik, I say this: tactically, in Vietnam (forgetting the ethics) we blew it because we pussy-shat around. Goldwater was the only one advocating a Sherman like approach). If we go to war, then go to war- fuck the mosques, fuck the innocents, and let the chips fall where they may. I'm on our side, and better that 100k of 'them' fall b4 1 of 'ours'. Give'em hell, and all. It won't be pretty, but it'd be far more honest.
And, although Dean &others don't like it, I am tired of 3 or 4 x a week seeing interviews with vets who report that more protection is given to oil fields than commisaries. Not to mention pro-war columnists (be they on the Admin's payroll or not) being interviewed, and always, if Freudianly, slipping up and mentioning, 'Democracy in that part of the world, where the largest reserves of oil and gas are'....
These bespeak the very worst fears of all good people, yet to deny that seems untenable, yet it's done.
And isolationism is not the issue- as I still support the Afghan aim, as have most of the anti-war folk who harangued me. They were/are the enemy, but this misadventure spread the virus. Bush is Typhoid Mary, in that regard. Not evil, but clueless and deadly.
In sum, pro-warriors are as guilty as the Left, and use their tactics, when trying to debate- personal attacks and disinforming with disproven 'facts'. Of course, w a splintered public well, there is no real hope for dialogue, and we'll just have to see when the pro-warrior's failure meter finally buzzes. But, since Dean and others still think Vietnam was a noble cause, I doubt the hammer still works against metal.
I do, however, agree w your tenets, w the proviso that you recognize that the reason the Osamas have truck is because they can so easily point to the exploitation of our Ugly American corporo-exploitive past. In short, our lives wd be much easier if our daddies and grandpas had been far more honorable Americans. DAN
Well, what's the body count for leaving? I don't see any limit to the number of dead - mostly because I'm not a prophet, no one here is. Iraq isn't a war as it is a campaign in a larger war, one that we have just begun to fight. The war is the one on the Islamofascists and their masters, both secular and religious. Part of that war is to make sure when it is over that the conditions that led to the rise of the Islamofascists, such as Bin Laden, are no longer there. That will mean installing democracy and freedom in these places and the slow rolling back of these tyrants and theocrats.
Afgahnistan was the necessary war post 9/11. The attackers were headquartered there, so they had to pay.
Iraq? Why Iraq? There was a causus belli left over from 1991 - The Hussein government had not lived up to the armistice agreement. There was the strong possibility that he still possessed WMD's (no intelligence is ever 100%, it was just a strong possibility), he had used them, he seemed eager to continue using them, he had been gaming everybody for years. It was time to take out this guy because he could be taken out. Good-bye Mr. Hussein, the rules of the game changed.
Turns out the intelligence was incorrect. Does that make the arguments put forth by Dr. Rice, Sec. Powell, Vice-President Cheney, and President Bush lies? No.
Now we're in for the long haul - Phase II: Changing the Conditions on the Ground in Iraq. This is the difficult part in trying to change the governmental and societal conditions that bred the terror masters. Lord, I don't know if this'll work. I'm not an oracle. But I would rather think big and try big on something like this than try for small realpolitik to keep the lid on. In the long run, which may be thirty years, maybe fifteen (either way I'll likely still be alive) the lid will fly off again and it may be a worse event than 9/11.
By long haul, I mean this is open-ended. It has to be. There is no end date because the other guy has to quit first, not us. No war has a scheduled end date. I'm sorry, but I can't accept the idea of an Islamofascist victory in Iraq. That, in my opinion, would be a catastrophe, emboldening these guys. "See! We got the paper tiger, the weak horse, to quit!" An emboldened jihadist movement would be a disaster for the muslim world, at least for half of the population, and would be a disaster for the rest of the world. How many attacks would be needed in order for some nations to clamp down hard, with the fist of iron? Good-bye democracy in many places of the globe. Good-bye easy travel and trade. Good-bye rising living standards for the world's poorest.
Yes, that is a bit much, but the threat is out there and must be faced, or you will have a rising tide of zealots that will eventually cause a backlash of horrific proportions. As an hypothetical, how gentle do you think the French government and people would be if there were serious riots from its muslim population, those rioters targeting French civilians? They would be iron fist inside of chain-mail gauntelet.
We have to fight these guys while they are weak, and yes, they are weak. Kamikaze attacks are the tactics of a loser. Fight now or fight later, but fight you will, and I say fight now. Yes, I would still advocate going into Iraq.
That's my blathering.
PS This is an old theme, but President Bush isn't an idiot and I'll prove it:
Convair F-102A Delta Dagger. The first delta wing fighter, the first supersonic fighter. And an aircraft with so many flaws that the upgrade became a separate design - the F-106 Delta Dart. No one who is an idiot would have the mental ability to process the amount of data coming in to get off the ground, go supersonic, and land. An idiot would be a flaming grease-spot in a crumpled aluminum can on some hillside.
In short, you lie a lot. As a result, you aren't welcome here anymore. Bye now.