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

To: goldworldnet who wrote (763598)	7/19/2007 4:31:47 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: "My concerns have always been about money." OPPORTUNITY COST is real. (We don't live in a fantasy land where it isn't. Cost must always be measured against actual results... and against the results that would be possible with ALTERNATE approaches.) Re: "I had no problem with military action against Iraq." I supported it also, but more narrowly. I expected it to be costly and that the benefits might be more narrowly balanced against the harms. (Of course, I never expected the WH to so TOTALLY SCREW-UP the occupation.) IMO though, the optimal time to have acted was in the 'eighties (we should have never pulled Saddam's bacon from the fire during the Iran/Iraq War... if we hadn't he would have fallen then). The NEXT best time to have acted was in Desert Storm. Wounding Saddam's Iraq but not finishing it off (& calling for the Shiite and Kurdish revolts against Saddam... then going back on our word and standing by while they were SLAUGHTERED) were un-strategic, harmful, and deeply SHAMEFUL. Over-throwing Saddam under Bush II was the third best opportunity we have had --- which goes far in explaining why the risk/reward profile was not nearly as good as the first two times.... Re: "... I just didn’t expect to adopt the whole country and build everything back for them, but we’ve committed ourselves to it" No. The 'Pottery Barn rule' is CRAPOLA and SPIN. Meaningless Politically Correct mumbo-jumbo. Like Governor Gilmore said in his open letter to President Bush in the WAPO: Only the national strategic interests of the United States of America should define what our policies are --- nothing else. Re: "... and we can’t let terrorists determine our foreign policy." But that is EXACTLY what we are DOING right now --- playing the game that they WANT US to play, energizing the jihadist movements, empowering them, shooting ourselves in the foot. ====================================================== Is Iraq a 'defeat'? DEPENDS on what you think the goals were! 1). If the goals were a unified peaceful Iraq... then, yes, it's a 'loss'. 2). If the goals were SEPARATE mini-states (Kurdistan, Shiite Iraq, Sunni 'Trans-Jordan' or something), with the Arab Shiites of Iraq being politically empowered for the first time in history, and Kurdistan independent for the first time in modern history... then the war gets marked-up as a 'win'. 3). (But, if the goal is more narrowly defined as simply the over-throw of the Dictator Saddam... with nothing much else part of the calculus of 'win or loss', then it was marked-up in the 'win' column very clearly over four years ago... and we have possibly been just spinning our wheels and wasting massive amounts of money ever since, as that goal was achieved a long time ago.) ====================================================== How Lost the War Is Message 23716226