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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (703133)	9/22/2005 7:54:57 AM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Perhaps you might find this hard to believe, but I fully supported President Bush in the use of force against the Taliban government of Afghanistan. It was a necessary war. Virtually the entire world agreed and supported America's removal of the Taliban regime. Iraq was a different animal. Saddam was an evil nutcase, but he was a contained nutcase. His army was a corrupt, ineffective fighting force. He had no Navy. His air force was useless. He couldn't fly a helecopter over 60% of his country. He had lost effective control of the Kurdish north and retained marginal control over the south. US intelligence monitored his every move and hundreds of UN inspectors were monitoring activity on the ground. The Joint Chiefs, before being silenced by Rumsfeld, stated that Saddam was not a threat. The political leadership overrode the military leadership on a security issue. Most important from a security standpoint, Saddam was a secular muslim. He had no use for the religious zealotry that inspired bin Laden and, despite the popular belief at the time encouraged by Bush linking Saddam with terror, Saddam was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. One could argue that our friends, the Saudis, were more to blame than Saddam. Saddam was brutal against his people. Bush made that case. But Bush opposed Clinton's use of force in Bosnia where another brutal dictator was intent on genocide even more horrifying than that attempted by Saddam. Why is that? Interestingly enough, even though Bush campaigned against "nation building" in Bosnia the troops are still there. I could go on and on, but Bush the Father had it right. Contain Saddam. Don't get remove him and unleash a civil war that would make things far worse.