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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (108379)	7/15/2007 11:30:40 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

skeeter, I'm no fan of Bush and agree with most of what you said. I was 50-50 on the war before it started. I'm about 85-15 against now. I knew before we went in that the neo-cons pulling the strings were a bunch of lying scumbag traitors. I also didn't like the influence some religious sects were and still are having on US middle east policy because they want to pave the way for the "second coming". All that said, even now, I'm still not 100% convinced that this was as big a mistake as most war opponents think despite the fact that it has gone so poorly. One of the problems with an analysis like this is that we know where we are now (and it sucks), but we don't know where we would be now or be heading had we done nothing. Part of the answer to that question is whether you believe Al Qaeda is a handful of loons that should be dealt with as such or whether they are a violent terrorist part of a larger movement to take control of the major governments of the Middle East and elsewhere and put them under Islamic anti-west control. If you believe the latter, then it's almost like a battle of ideologies between the west and the communists where sometimes taking action "might" (stress "might") be the "least bad" of "two bad" options. Unfortunately, the "world" is still very dependent on middle east oil. Personally, I also think the world would be a much less safe place if a bunch of radical Muslims slowly started taking control of places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, etc... and started accumulating WMDs. You may ask what did Saddam have to do with any of this and don't those that are angry at us have a lot of legitimate complaints? The answer is, absolutely NOTHING and absolutely YES. However, those are different stories and they go further back. Saddam was hostile to the U.S. In a world where a bunch of crazies are running around flying planes into buildings and blowing up innocent people you have to at least think about the risks carefully. He was a leader in the region that was also hostile to the west and that at least had the capability of producing WMDs. So it wasn't crazy to at least think about the "risks of inaction". That's the thing that people are failing to consider. You can understand the "risks of action" and then evaluate the "results of your actions" once you've taken them (the results have obviously sucked), but the results are not always equal to the risks you can't evaluate the risks of inaction once you've eliminated the risk. IMO, Bush and his group have been pretty horrible in their planning and execution of this and lied through their teeth to get us into the war to begin with. Despite all that, I don't think this is all as clear cut as most on the left would have you believe.