Posted on 03/24/2013 9:21:43 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
The air has been full of 10th-anniversary Iraq war retrospectives. One that caught my eye was a smart piece by Tom Curry, national affairs writer for NBC News, who wrote of one element of the story, the war's impact on the Republican Party: "The conflict not only transformed" the GOP, "but all of American politics."
It has, but it's an unfinished transformation.
Did the Iraq war hurt the GOP? Yes. The war, and the crash of '08, half killed it. It's still digging out, and whether it can succeed is an open question.
Here, offered in a spirit of open debate, is what the war did to the GOP:
• It ruined the party's hard-earned reputation for foreign-affairs probity. They started a war and didn't win it. It was longer and costlier by every measure than the Bush administration said it would be. Before Iraq, the GOP's primary calling card was that it was the party you could trust in foreign affairs. For half a century, throughout the Cold War, they were serious about the Soviet Union, its moves, feints and threats. Republicans were not ambivalent about the need for and uses of American power, as the Democrats were in the 1970s and 1980s, but neither were they wild.
After Iraq it was the Republicans who seemed at best the party of historical romantics or, alternatively, the worst kind of cynic, which is an incompetent one. Iraq marked a departure in mood and tone from past conservatism.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
and others labeled “crazy” around here.
;-)
To be fair, President Bush and the Republicans made use of their “second chance” in Iraq....the troop surge of ‘07 won the war.
To be fair Bush claimed ‘stay the course’ for two years while things got worse and worse and only after GOP losing 2006 midterms goes to the new Dem congress demanding $$ for the surge. May have planning on doing it after the election no matter what.
Like that wasnt going to be seen through (outside of talk radio world which was ga-ga for these back in those days).
Speaking of winning, what did we win?
Oil?
Military Bases?
A military ally?
Regardless of whether it was truly earned by Bush or not, the Iraq War has been, is, and forever will be known as Bush’s War. The media has seen to that.
Conservatives usually form their own opinions, which are most likely 180 degrees from the rot pushed by the state run media.
We eliminated tens of thousands of radical Islamic Extremists in the Middle East. We killed Saddam Hussein and his sons. We unleashed the Arab Spring in which dictators throughout the region toppled.
We could have forced Iraq to fight a two-front war and squeezed them into the middle. Instead, we had to redeploy our forces to Basra and ceded the north to Husssein, who was able to use the time to convoy his WMD's to Syra and flee Baghdad.
-PJ
The invasion phase went well. Perhaps, Bremer was wrong to dismantle the Ba’ath political infrastructure in Iraq. That forced broke Sunni soldiers to join the insurgency.
-PJ
Syria wouldn’t take Saddam in....however, he might hide among the population (majority Sunni)
We didn’t win the Iraq war???
Who was that hanging from a rope?
We spent tons of $$$ and lives knocking out Iran's closest-most-threatening enemy and we didn't even get a military base there in return.
We got Obama more trusted on national security than the GOP is.
That spells DISASTER!
Why do we need a military base in Iraq when we have Kuwait and aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf?
Bingo.
The GOP has utterly lost sight of what it is.
Pro-American. Pro-freedom. And Pro-rights.
We import from China. We sell supposed support for gay rights, and we ban with the best of ‘em.
STOP IT.
Stand firm GOP. For American jobs. For American rights.
For America.
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