What would Hillary do—invade Pakistan? Bomb it? Send in the commandos? And is such escalation really prohibited just because we are in Iraq—as if we couldn't invade Okinawa because we were fighting inside Germany at the same time? If Democrats keep harping on losing bin Laden, why not simply authorize a war into Pakistan to get him?
First, I don't know what "Hillary" has to do with anything, but nevermind. Second, "as if we couldn't invade Okinawa because we were fighting inside Germany at the same time?"--again this implies that we are in a WWII--if so, there should be a draft, we should be raising taxes, we should get right NOW on a true war-time footing. We don't have the military manpower to fight a WWII, even with our advanced military technology--not unless you truly are willing to use nuclear weapons, or their near equivalent.
And third, "If Democrats keep harping on losing bin Laden, why not simply authorize a war into Pakistan to get him?"--the world for the most part endorsed the Afghanistan bombing, and would have endorsed sending the military into Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban and AQ at that point. It may have been necessary at some point to go into Pakistan to accomplish that, I don't know. We would have had to depend on Musharref for a good deal for that part of it, and whether he could have done what was needed in that part of Pakistan, I don't know. Murky waters indeed.
But all that aside, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney et al prosecuted this whole thing ass-backwards. Not just with mistakes in Iraq, ignoring and even ridiculing Shinseki and his recommendations, sending in guys like Bremer and his minions who were more notable for their support of Bush than for their knowledge of what the hell they were doing in Iraq--no those mistakes were made after another important one--and that was believing that they could go it alone, that the rest of world didn't matter, they would all approve of the move "when it succeeded," not "if" it succeeded, but "when". They were convinced that their military power and their own "genuius" could do it all without political sanction, and were unwilling to listen to anyone else, to wait for the right time, to enlist a true "coalition of the willing." They were "idiots" in the classical sense of the word, wrapped up in their own hubris and dreams of glory, and because they convinced a fair portion of the American public of those dreams for awhile, they believed they didn't need anyone else. They were wrong. |
