History will only redeem Bush if my daughter and her Nat’l Guard buds (and John McCain) have enough ass to cash the check Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld’s mouth wrote. Right along with those three, I was blind to the long-term near-impossibility of force-feeding modern elections and representative government to fundamental Muslim tribals in Sandland.
History will redeem Bush if, and only if, we’re able to do another South Korea. Under McCain, we’ll, hopefully, set up some kind of client state, leave enough troops to keep the opposition nervous, declare victory, and move on. If Obama takes over, we cut and run amd wring our hands as the Iraqis convulse and collapse and kill, just like we did when the North Vietnamese slaughtered their way south in ‘75.
Generally agree. However, it’s said that radical arab muslims will never find peace until they love their children more than they hate Jews. That will take longer than a 4-year presidential term. God’s speed to your daughter.
To begin with, American columns should have cut through Baghdad three days after they began to roll, and exited three weeks later, leaving Saddam dead and the pliant Iraqi strongman who betrayed him—candidates would not have been hard to find—to keep the country harmless to the West or suffer the same quick take-down. Rather than being broken on the wheel of irreconcilable Muslim factions, the supple and intact American power would have shattered the Arabs' elation following September 11th, and by threatening their rule been able to discipline the various police states of the region into eliminating their terrorists. Far more efficient that way, without six and more murderous and unavailing years in which neither a single democracy has appeared, nor will one. (The surge is merely coincident with a change in Sunni strategy. Instead of watching the U.S. and Iran arm the Shia for a major sectarian war that our small force in Iraq cannot prevent, the Sunni choose to avail themselves of American arms while simultaneously removing the lunatic jihadists nipping at their heels.) Full essay
When the people of Iraq were liberated they voted willingly under the threat of death in huge numbers.Nobody force fed anything to them. George Bush and the US military liberated them.
Keep in mind that many people around the world had the exact same opinion of Japan and Korea following WWII.
Those orientals were completely incapable of democratic government. It ran counter to everything. It was never going to work.
Look at them today.
Point is, we ARE nation building. The alternative after 9/11 was to bomb them into rubble and then bomb the rubble. That might make them hate and fear us, and to many people, including many on Free Republic, that is fine if they hate us as long as they fear us.
That is the viewpoint the Nazis had, and we are NOT the Nazis. We ARE different. The USA has done more good for more people on the face of the earth than any other country in history. We should be proud of it. We could be pumping the oil in Iraq under armed guard and shipping it to our refineries, but that is not why we are there, contrary to the heartfelt lunatic beliefs of many on the left.
So, yeah. This is an experiment, and it is costing us huge amounts of treasure along with the blood of many of our finest people. It may eventually fail, we might then have more 9/11s, and we can then bomb the Middle East into rubble and make them fear us more than they hate us.
But if it succeeds, a seed may be planted. IF they can learn to live together in Iraq without the iron hand of a dictator like Saddam Hussein, and IF they can find a way to distribute fairly the oil wealth of the country to ALL the citizens, and IF a free market economy can take root and flourish, the countries in that part of the world are going to look at Iraq and wonder why it cannot be them.
I believe firmly in the concepts outlined in Natan Sharansky’s book “The Case For Democracy”, and if given a chance, I think it can be borne out in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan. Naive? No, just that there is plenty of time for the alternative, and the fact that I DO believe in the concept of American Exceptionalism, I think it is our responsibility to try.