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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (27503)	8/30/2006 6:47:58 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541957

I don't know... there aren't many wars which were entered into as obviously, voluntarily and with as little need or urgency as Iraq. It's the difference between accidentally stepping in a puddle and deliberately leaping into an expanse of water... even if you get equally wet, one action is more culpable. Slapping a wasp nest is stupid, but it's especially stupid if you have to go and seek out the nest first, travel a long way to do so, and pack no antitoxin on the grounds that you've got a really strong first slap... In the US's case, the Civil War was hardly planned or wished. Vietnam looked important in a way that Iraq just did not (as witness the disagreements on SI, even at the time and still less now). A lack of readiness before Pearl Harbour does not make a moronic war, nor a weak plan of attack. And you need to distinguish a battle from a war, also. More generally, you might argue that Napoleon's or Hitler's invasions of Russia were failures - but they were campaigns within wars, not entire wars. And both of those also nearly worked. And there were obvious gains to be made if either worked, and an obvious threat if Russia was left hostile, undefeated and bordering. None of these are the case for Iraq; IMO, you miss the point. A bad war is a war that never needed to be fought at all. This really does make US vs Iraq one of the worst.

To: TimF who wrote (27503)	8/30/2006 6:53:44 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

No Tim, this is a bigger blunder than all of these misguided wars. The invasion of Iraq was not only doomed to fail before it began, it doomed the US and people in other parts of the world to suffer for many decades to come. Iraq will continue to get worse -- and it is already a total mess. We have taken a situation where we stood a chance to make serious progress in the region and turned it into a situation where the region of the world where we are most dependent will never in your lifetime or mine be anything less than a hostile mess. Burning civilians alive in Vietnam made for bad press. The image of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down the road with her back on fire -- covered in flames from the jellied fuel bomb we dropped on her village -- was one of so many unfortunate reminders that we murdered millions of innocent Vietnamese civilians and left many millions more to deal with disease and birth defect from our use of chemical warfare. And of course despite the millions we killed we still lost the war and accomplished nothing. But Vietnam, like the others you cite, was little more than a self-contained tragedy. Today, you and I can walk down the street in Ho Chi Minh city and be as safe as any New York. That will never be the case in Iraq. The unilateral invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, was the fastest way to ensure that we will be at the mercy of a totally screwed up situation for decades to come. We can't undo the debacle we unleashed. We can't suck ourselves back from the quagmire we were so eagerly pushed into with lies, bombast and deceipt. But we can be honest about it. As I said before -- every day that Rumsfeld is on the US government payroll is an insult to the American people.