Mr. Shaw certainly has a selective memory. May as well stop reading there. This sort of stuff has become tiresome by now. The war was "launched" by Saddam's brutal invasion of Kuwait ten years earlier. It was not settled, it was in a stasis where U.S. planes were attempting to enforce a no-fly zone in order to prevent another atrocity such as the one at Halabja and were being shot at for their trouble. Saddam was openly disobeying the terms of the cease-fire and defying UN arms inspections. Saddam was supporting existing terror organizations within Iraq at such sites as Salman Pak. Bush was faced with a decision to remove Saddam or risk Saddam supporting organizations such as the one that had just taken down the World Trade Center. Whether his intelligence estimates were correct about the current status of WMDs or not is irrelevant - if they were inaccurate it was because Saddam did his best to make them that way. There was nothing "unjust" about the invasion.
But what’s preemptive about attacking an enemy who has no intention of attacking you?
Either the author is a mind-reader or he doesn't consider open support of terrorist organizations whose intention was most certainly to attack us to be "intention". Spare me the sanctimony, please - Saddam was a monster and removing him was a moral action. Nation-building afterward was, as well, even if it appears at this point to have been a futile effort. If we hadn't tried it, we'd still be wondering if it would have bought us the ten years it did.
There were no perfect courses of action, not even complete inaction. There was only bad and worse. The author now has the luxury of criticizing the bad. He's welcome to it.
So you’re pleased with the result? Because it was clear all this would happen if we destabilized the region.
The US isn’t very good at foreign policy, especially in the middle east, and most especially when domestic politics are allowed to drag us into suicide missions.
No more Asian land wars, please.
If I am not mistaken, Bob Woodward reported this exchange with VP Cheney in his book, Bush At War:
Woodward: Was the anthrax part of the attack? Where does it fit in? Where did it come from?
Cheney: We believe we know where it came from. We're just not in a position to do anything about it...right now.
The reference could well be to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. So far as I know, Czechia's intelligence chief has never backed down from reporting that the Iraqi ambassador handed a 'Thermos' to Mohamed Atta.
“There were no perfect courses of action, not even complete inaction. There was only bad and worse. The author now has the luxury of criticizing the bad. He’s welcome to it. “
The problem for me is that we seem to get involved in “open ended” conflicts. Starting with Korea. That dumb $hit, Harry Truman should have let MacArthur finish off the Norks and the Chinese. Bush gave us Obama on a silver platter because he got in and didn’t have a plan to get out of Iraq. Ditto for Afghanistan. No more of these “wars!” I do not want to see us pi$$ a way our treasure and kill our young men and women for a bunch of Effing 6th Century savages. As Col. Hunt said tonight on FNC, stay out of Iraq and let them get on with killing each other.
Not to mention the massacre of thousands of Christians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.
This was a secular, neocon project complete with secular bogeyman and utterly oblivious to the intense religious undercurrents and sentiment which pervades the region. Was this what Bush, Cheney et al., had in mind when they invaded? Did they foresee signing off on a constitution which created an Islamic Republic and considered this to be in America's interests? Did they believe that this was worth the loss of thousands of American lives?
If they did see this as a possibility, they should be tried for treason. If they didn't see this coming but marched into Iraq anyway, they're negligent idiots who should not be allowed within 500 miles of Washington.