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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster
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To: Cage Rattler who wrote (20615)10/8/2009 2:44:17 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof  Read Replies (3) of 103300
 
For the record... I actually *supported* the decision to invade (but narrowly), judging the risk/reward ratio to narrowly favor America's national interests after guesstimating the eventual total expense to the US at about 1/2 Trillion Dollars and weighing that against the possible strategic gains.

I agreed with the Neo-Cons' argument that Saddam's Iraq represented "low-hanging fruit" and that we'd have a fair chance (due to the ethnic make-up of Iraq, and it's status as 'most secular nation in the Middle East') to nation-build something functionally close to a working Democracy there... (or separate Shia/Kurd nation-states, with perhaps a rump Sunni zone in the old Trans-Jordan region), and that *either* result stood to benefit us.

And that Iraq's unique position astride the Islamic Sunni/Shiite religious divide offered a reasonable chance of strengthening Shiites (thus: weakening monolithic Sunni Islam, and the Saudi/W'habbist style of Islamic fundamentalism that had attacked us directly through al Qaeda...) --- *this much* certainly came to pass, Iran and the Shia have come out as big winners --- and that this might possibly even produce conditions that might *eventually* result in the long-delayed "Islamic Reformation" (similar to the Christian Reformation that happened centuries earlier in Europe).

And that the invasion and occupation ALSO offered us a chance to try to 'make it up' to the Kurds --- who the first President Bush had so cruelly and disastrously sold down the river more then a decade earlier.

All this was posted on these threads numerous times while the decision to go to war was being debated in America....

What I never counted on though, when I was making my personal assessment about 'would such a war be a net plus, or a net minus to America' was that Bush II would so completely screw-up the occupation phase (the military victory was both as brilliant and quick as it was inevitable...), by tossing out THREE YEARS of Pentagon/CIA/State Department occupation planning just a couple of months prior to the invasion... and going instead with a cockamamie, half-baked, under-resourced Neo-Con hatched pie-in-the-sky foul up occupation 'plan' that resulted in at least a *doubling* of the cost (and time) to America... and was only pulled back from near failure close to the end by the 'double-down expedient of the "surge".
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