Bush said that Saddam was a threat. Bush said he absolutely knew that Saddam had WMDs and programs to build WMDs. Since Saddam’s military was effectively castrated Bush couldn’t just strike at WMD targets and be done with it (targets that didn’t even exist).

Bush had to topple Saddam and that meant a ground invasion to find him. How many months did we spend turning over every rock before Saddam surfaced?

Bush thought he could be the bully and take out Saddam and gain an oil prize- Bush, having never served in the military (and I don’t call whatever hour he spent in the TX National Guard military service) underestimated the strength a country can pull together when faced with an invasion.

Simply attacking Iraq’s WMD sites would not have worked because Bush said that Saddam had secret places and the only we we could guaranty our safety was to go in, take over the country and ferret out those secret WMD production facilities.

I dont agree that airstrikes would have done much at all.

Lets say Iraq had 1000 WMDS for the sake of argument and airstrikes got 750 of them. Now you got a pissed off Saddam Hussein who has even more reason to arm Terrorists with WMD’s and send them packing after us.

Either you invade and get them all or you continue with sanctions and containment.

I advocated the latter.

1. Air strikes often don’t need manned aircraft, just a cruise missile or two. Cheap and less risky for our personnel. (No captured pilots for them to beat — or to “waterboard.”)

2.

his conscious dumbing-down of his speech at times will look like he’s got the common touch

The struggling and stumbling made me think of:

a) He changed his tune from earlier, and said we should speak English, instead of when, earlier, he used Spanish during his first campaign.

b) He didn’t speak Spanish so much como turista but rather como un borracho.

This was an unnecessary war

When launched many of us saw it as regrettable but likely to forestall a worse war later.

In hindsight, it can be much uglier than that. I hinted a while ago, elsewhere, at something I have yet to have seen anybody else mention on this site, which would have been an alternative to the war we conducted, while being more forceful against the Hussein regime’s continued game-playing (truly suspicious and threatening conduct).

We are against an invasion of Iran. Why? It’s because that would be lunacy; what is seen as any acttion we would take against Iran would consist of air strikes and naval operations to protect oil transport and defeat Iranian naval adventures.

Few, if any, advocate such action against Iran now. (The hard-core neo-cons had their ambitious and their conceit struck down and they have largely left the Bush administration.) But what this Iranian issue also does is bring to light an alternative that could have been taken against Iraq.

That is, simply conduct air strikes against suspected WMD and missile sites in Iraq rather than invade and occupy and try to reconstruct the country.

It would be particularly effective for us to do this where the UN falls laughably short. Iraq would likely learn a lesson after the second or third time, from a new process the USA could follow. When a rogue nation refuses inspections somewhere or ejects inspectors from somewhere, that site should be destroyed without warning. Two or three times should be sufficient to gain much more, much better, cooperation with anti-proliferation efforts.

This is unfortunately not so much about Bush as it is about the Iraq’s I fully believe are now suffering from the Bosnia syndrome.

They killed each other till they got so weary of killing each other that they finally are now looking for ways to end this carnage.

This I believe has been the hope of the world since the carnage began. Perhaps now with additional troops in place they can hammer out some form of compromise and throw out the insurgents who only care about death and destruction and not the Iraq people.

In the case of the “surge” it has taken him the length of WWII to realize that you have to hold the ground you take or the enemy will take it back. Let’s see, how long has that been a military principle? Several millenia I’d wager. Talk about reinventing the wheel.

Another equally ancient principle is that war doesn’t solve political issues–however, it’s often a necessary precondition (something lefties rarely acknowledge). In this case, given that we’re up to our eyeballs in Iraq (and that’s a huge given, I realize), we can neither stay nor go without paying a terrible price in a variety of terrible ways. There is no easy/simple/satisfying solution. None. Even though we should never have gone in, that doesn’t have any bearing whatsoever on what we should do now. If only it did–that would make things a lot easier to figure out.

And don’t forget that one of these terrible prices is what’s going on in “Afghanistan, which will never get solved until or unless Al Quaeda’s and the Taliban’s stronghold in Pakistan is eliminated. Another potential price is China possibly deciding that we’re too entangled in Iraq to defend Taiwan, leading China to invade and conquer Taiwan soon after the Olympics. These are just two outstanding flashpoints. There are others as well. People all over the world carefully examine every move America makes, and then decide what moves they’ll make.

So taking all that into account, should we praise Bush for starting to do part of the right thing four years late? Yes we should. Centrists show they’re centrists by always giving the devil his due. That’s what “nonpartisan” means.

But now what will he do with the reduced level of violence there? Iraq’s million-odd Christians (many from families that have been in Iraq for literally thousands of years) are nearly all in exile today in Syria and Jordan, expelled by the forces we set loose when we decapitated Iraq’s government. Southern Iraq is more or less a province of Iran. Kurdistan is doing relatively well. Baghdad and western Iraq are still war zones, albeit at a lower simmer.

And the “government” of Iraq shows no interest in compromise with the Sunnis. The purpose of the “surge” was to make peace possible between Iraq’s opposed sectarian factions and apportion the country’s oil wealth fairly. But the “government” there appears to regard the current situation simply as a time to rearm and regroup for the coming civil war. As do many Sunnis.

I’ll give Bush plenty of praise if he can crack that nut.

If Iraq turned into a stable democracy tomorrow it still doesn’t mean the entire operation was worth it. American lives by the thousands and billions of dollars to fix a country that had next to no bearing on us as it was. Gimme a break.