let me answer your question with a question:
Unfortunately, your question doesn't answer my question - it cowardly dodges it. Here's the question: Did Putin lie when he said Russian intelligence had evidence Saddam was plotting terror attacks against the US? Your post merely demonstrated that you can't answer the question.
Now to the nonsense in your post:
Is Russia in a stronger or weaker world position now
Who cares? The cold war is over.
"that we've mucked up Iraq
Iraq was more mucked up before.
lost a huge amount of prestige and influence in the world
You say we had more prestige and influence when the world thought we were deliberately starving 50,000 Iraqi children to death every year? UN administrators resigned rather than be involved with the sanctions which they denounced as genocidal. It's just a fact that anti-American
propaganda and sentiment existed long before the current intervention. And will exist long after. Partly because its spread by leftists within the US itself.
taken the terrorist bulls eye off Russia and put it on ourselves
In your opinion, the terrorist bulls eye wasn't on us prior to the current intervention in Iraq. That opinion is in conflict with the reality of 911 of course. Not to mention the USS Cole attack, the African embassy bombings, the first WTC bombing, etc. It also is in conflict with the absence of any organized attacks in the US since 2001 even though al Qaida promised there would be more attacks. (Granted, there have been "spontaneous jihad syndrome" attacks involving Moslems driving cars into crowds, shooting Jewish women, or sniping at people pumping gas and mowing lawns - these aren't organized attacks by terror groups though. )
lost our oil pricing power in the Middle East,
Huh? We never had such power.
increased the price of Russia's exported oil and natural gas by a factor of 4-5x
A result of supply and demand forces. Would have happened regardless of the war.
increased Russian influence in Iran and the Middle East
exponentially
????
, and created budding new alliances AGAINST the US?
New alliances against the US? Like which ones? Name the new alliances against the US if you can!
Now the Bush administration has organized the Proliferation Security Initiative - an alliance of nations allied WITH the US. And NATO is still fighting with us in Afghanistan. Libya, long a US enemy, has made up with the west and allowed US inspectors to remover their nuclear weapons program
materials to Oak Ridge TN. Philippine armed forces and US special forces have severely damaged al Qaida's Abu Sayyaf affiliate. And Ethiopian and Kenyan armed forces aided by the US have pushed al Qaida allied forces in Somalia into a small corner of the country. Only in Pakistan is al Qaida
holding its own.
But of course the Russians aren't clever about the world, they didn't learn anything from the trap we set for them in Afghanistan, and they'd never lie, would they? Sure, W met Putin, looked into his eyes and lo, he beheld a "good" man.
News for you. The cold war with the USSR ended some time ago. Even the liberal papers reported on it. Surprised you didn't know.
But we weren't there trying to protect the S. Vietnamese from N. Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers who were "trying to impose their system on people who didn't want it.
Yes we were.
Maybe no one told you but one of the things we promised long before the war heated up was that we'd allow elections and let the Vietnamese choose what system they wanted and whether to unify. We reneged on that promise. I bet that even you can guess why we refused to keep our promise.
Because free elections would have been impossible in communist-dominated north Vietnam, perhaps?
Tell me, after NVN invaded SVN, when did they hold elections on unification? And how did the vote go?
A majority of Vietnamese rejected what we offered.
No they didn't.
More importantly, a huge majority of those willing to fight and die for their preference ended up fighting and dying to oppose us and, ultimately, they prevailed and made a much better life for their people.
The people fighting for communism in southeast Asia were not volunteers. They had no choice about fighting. Communist Indochina is far behind Malaysia or Thailand. Without communism, VN would be vastly better off than it is.
Almost 60,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam and millions of Vietnamese perished. If there was anything of value to be gained from those deaths it lay in the lesson we should have learned. Your unwillingness to learn that plain lesson does a disservice to every man woman and child who
died there.....every one of them and the ones dying in Iraq as well.
I think the deliberate sabotage of SVN, Cambodia and Laos by the Democratic Congress in the early 1970's made a mockery of the sacrifices made there. Vast harm was done by that act of craven betrayal. |
