re: the Hitler/Stalin pact
That is not a bad analogy, but recall please that it was very temporary. And HAD to be so, given the antipathy that these two had for each other.
This hardly means that Al Qaeda and Saddam were in bed together. There is no evidence of it, there was no reason for it, as there was reason for both Stalin and Hitler to sign a pact (both buying time, one to build his forces and the other to avoid for awhile a two front war).
The fact is (as has been stated probably too many times in the past) that we have taken out an enemy of our real enemy. And not only that, the enemy we took out was completely boxed in, inspected to death, bombed pretty much at will, and was not really a threat to us. When taking him out, we allowed our real enemy time to heal from losing their base in Afghanistan, split our own country internally, created new feelings of antipathy internationally not only in the Arab world but in the world at large by our tone deaf diplomacy (born of the desire to play MachoMan for the domestic election purposes and Bush's personal stupidity reasons), gave our enemies additional propaganda material to use against us with their potential recruits, diluted our military strength to find and defeat them, distracted us from the job of defeating them, and weakened ourselves financially.
Oh, and made us first look arrogant in the way we handled to the diplomacy leading up to the war, second made us look arrogant in the way Act I of the war was concluded (Bush on the air carrier), and now makes us look foolish since we haven't even come close to controlling the situation we created.
But other than that, it was a "splendid little war," as a previous Secretary of State described a previous little war that we fought with absolutely no chance of losing. |
