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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (56095)	8/23/2011 12:31:42 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

Re: "Smarter? Not smarter... I say dumber..." At WHAT COST???????????????? (Believe our tab for helping to remove a violent, deranged anti-American Dictator who has held sway in the LARGEST OIL EXPORTER on the African continent for nearly 42 years will total out to be something like: about a Billion and a half dollars, and NO AMERICAN LIVES.) I don't know how you would total up cost/benefit ratios for every war we have engaged in... but by my scoring system that's a pretty damn cost/effective intervention. Re: "If we used our air power it could have taken no more than one month..." HALF or more of the Republicans were publicly saying "don't do anything at all" (including nearly all of the current crop of GOP Presidential contenders...), while only a handful of GOPPERS were saying what you are "bomb harder/more, and/or intervene with American boots on the ground". (McCain and Lindsey Graham are the only ones I can think of who were saying that... Gingrich flip-flopped over to the 'don't do anything' camp 24 hours after saying 'do more'. :-) Nope, the GOP's neo-con camp was hiding out on this one.... But, I'd argue that putting a more forceful American face on this one would have been stupid and counter-productive (and actually gone against the loudly expressed views of the rebels themselves). It would have given the Dictator a story that he could have sold: that this wasn't an authentic pro-democracy uprising from the Arab street... just ordinary citizens fed up with decades of corrupt totalitarian rule by a mad dictator... but was in fact 'Western Crusaders out to attack Islam and purity and motherhood... etc., etc.'. It would have given him possibly exactly what he needed to survive but at very least it would have put American lives at greater risk and given us a black eye in the world... when there was no reason at all for that in these circumstances because we were on the side of right and good and democracy... and history was falling right into our hands. Why be clumsy and snatch defeat right from the jaws of inevitable victory???????????? (Haven't we learned anything in the decade plus we have burned in Afghanistan and Iraq, and after the Trillion and a half we have poured out in the sands over there, and the many thousands of lives?)