Hawk, the first things we need to win the war on terror are friends, respect, and credibility. Iraq is a monument to the arrogance of the officials who justified this war on false pretenses, debasing our most important assets.
We have squandered the good will the international community felt after 9/11. And we are destroying the honor and integrity of our own military in the process. We are paying a terrible price for the fantasies of the neocons.
I also think that Bush was not well served, had he been willing to listen, by the leadership of the military. I think it is no coincidence that we are now led by officers who did not fight in Vietnam. Even now, when there are obviously senior officers who strongly disagree with the course of US strategy and operations in Iraq, how many of them have spoken up through their chain of command instead of leaks to the press? But this Pentagon is not one that receives bad news well.
There are already 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. 99.99999 percent have nothing to do with your Islamic nightmare scenario, but the revelations of the past few weeks could change that. Even in Iraq, the vast majority of Iraqis are not actively supporting the insurgency; if they were, we would be driven out in a matter of months. But I suspect it will become clearer after 1 July.
You keep predicting disaster, while every day we watch it unfold before us.
Have you read Woodward's latest book? It's very interesting, and is even being promoted by the Bush reelection operatives. Throughout, the discussions with the President and the senior hawks are concerned with the immorality of Saddam and the need for regime change based on fears over WMD or pollyannish daydreams about democracy sprouting like tulips after a grateful liberation. Nowhere in the book do the President or the hawks discuss the strategic implications of preemptive war in the Middle East, of the cost of sacrificing good will, alliances, credibility if we failed, or even if we succeeded.
We committed our first act of imperial conquest and the leader of the free world didn't even realize it, so caught up was he in the morality and divine approval of his course. He is a deeply stupid President. |
