Re: Non-Racist USDA Official Resigns
Date: July 22, 2010 04:06PM
Voter___ Wrote:
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> That's a discussion I'd love to have. Bush's
> response to 9/11 made the economic devastation
> much worse than it needed to be. Part of Al
> Qaeda's strategy is to bleed us economically by
> causing us to overreact to their attacks. We had
> no choice about taking military action in
> Afghanistan, but the war in Iraq was completely
> unnecessary. We can't keep starting wars as a
> reaction to terrorism, but Republicans don't seem
> to have realized that yet. Worse though was that
> Bush wanted to pretend there was no price to doing
> any of it. Now when we have to deal with economic
> disaster and military threats from countries like
> Iran we find we have no money and a military
> stretched so thin we don't have many options.
>
In hind sight, yes the war in Iraq was completely unnecessary - the thing is, both the Democrats and Republicans voted for it. There was information LONG BEFORE Bush came into office about WMD issues - which was used by Clinton for launching missiles and dropping bombs on Iraq. You can argue endlessly over the hind sight result, but up front there was broad agreement to go in. The fact that Sandy Berger had to go and destroy documents prior to the 9/11 Commission getting hold of them speaks volumes to the misinformation on the entire subject.
Bush didn't "want to pretend" there was no cost. In reality, if we had ANOTHER terrorist attack like 9/11, it would have cost far more than the money we had spent on Iraq by the time Bush left office. It was very possible, highly probable based on history, that Iraq was pushing programs to get WMD, nuclear and other programs moving. Iraq was paying out a lot of money in bribes, and offering lucrative contracts to countries to work against sanctions. While the "yellow cake" issue was brought up, certainly it was not the primary issue as to why Iraq was invaded, even with the Plame incident. If that was case, then Iran should be a no brainer today, as it is clear they intend to develop nuclear weapons, and are even more belligerent than Iraq ever was. And where is our administration today? No where - just basically adopting a policy of "oh well, I guess they will have nuclear weapons soon". And if you believe that is not a dire issue for the US as well as Israel, then you are just deluding yourself.
Afghanistan was a lost cause, and yet Obama moved forward with it. Who knows why, but certainly that will probably cost us more dearly than Iraq at the rate things are going. At least Iraq has a chance - Afghanistan never did. And what else is our military going to do? It is stretched thin, and yet by all accounts these days, we have no threats - right? Our navy was always our projection of force arm - and they are not that heavily involved in the ground action in Iraq or Afghanistan - so again, our primary response mechanism to any new issue is just fine. As far as Iran goes, we would not have sent troops in (most likely) to deal with their threats - as it is our troops are right on their border on two sides. Isn't that a position we would WANT to be in to deal with them NOW? It seems like if we wanted to deal with Iran it could be done very easily.
If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University