Reply #243: What if Bush is right? Dream on.

[Jack Rabbit]

It is almost axiomatic that Bush is wrong. To parody the title of this thread, how could he and the neocons have been so wrong about Iraq?

The author of this piece is also wrong: not because terrorist don't need to be defeated (they certainly do); but because Bush and his motley crew don't have the slightest idea how to go about defeating terrorists and have only used the September 11 attacks for the most cynical purposes.

Saddam was taken prisoner seven months ago. Mr. Bush got only a temporary bounce from it, since it soon became obvious that Saddam wasn't the enemy in the war on terror. Iraq was not the proper focus on the war on terror. Those who still believe in the wisdom of the invasion may never be convinced: What part of there were no weapons or there was no association between Iraq and al Qaida do they not understand?

It is simply foolish or dishonest to continue to justify the invasion of Iraq. The invasion was justified by lies; those lies have long since been exposed as lies.

I'd only be repeating myself if I went into the details, so I'll spare the reader. The posts which refute the case for the invasion are all up and down this thread. Some of us knew before the war that it the given rationale were false. Characteristically, we came from the political left. We were right.



Tonight, G. W. Bush looks again like a political lightweight. This is in no small part due to his blunder in Iraq.

Months ago, Tom Friedman of The New York Times shrilled for the war, although he admitted that it was a war of choice. In many posts in this forum, I and others lambasted Friedman. How could a war of mere choice be justified?

It is no longer just the political left that sees the light now. Tonight, a political moderate who stained his record by voting for the IWR said:

As President, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence. I will immediately reform the intelligence system so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics. And as President, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.

Senator Kerry gets my vote in November. I may not agree with everything he says, even about what to do next Iraq, but I am persuaded that if he had the same unfiltered intelligence before him that Mr. Bush and his thugs had, he would have elected not to go to war against Iraq. It would have been the wiser choice. I'll settle for that.