[onedoug]

Sounds kinda girly.

[freedomcrusader]

George Bush may prove to be a well-intentioned president who embroiled us in decades of wars in a part of the world that was never vital to America.

The Middle East isn't vital to America? That's a new one on me.

[hchutch]

So much BS, so little time.

[Republic If You Can Keep It]

In the war to secure the islands..... we became ensnared in the great power politics of Asia, out of which came Pearl Harbor, World War II, Korea and Vietnam

Right, Pat.

If we hadn't been in the Philippines in 1898, none of the rest would have happened.

Sure.

[Alberta's Child]

Having found neither weapons of mass destruction nor a link to 9-11, the White House has retreated into its fallback position. It now defends Operation Iraqi Freedom as a necessary war to rid the Middle East of a brutal dictatorship and replace it with a democracy.

Give Pat credit on this one. I predicted this would be the case even before the war began, based only on my conversations with people with family contacts in the Middle East. Every one of these people indicated that they were in favor of the war, and for no other reason than that "Saddam Hussein has to be removed from power."

In fact, I should buy a beer for the one fellow who pointed out months ago that the U.S. would find itself with no friends either inside Iraq or among its neighbors -- "Once the job is done and Saddam Hussein is gone, those people will want to throw the Americans out right after him."

[Tauzero]

bump for Pat

[Burkeman1]

For three years, U.S. soldiers and Marines fought, with 4,000 dying in combat, several times as many as had been lost in Cuba. Filipino combat losses were 20,000 with 200,000 civilian dead, many of disease. Yet, a recent New York Times Almanac does not even list the Filipino insurrection as a major U.S. conflict.

This is probably the most unkown of all US foreign conflicts in our history. In many on-line lists of US conflicts and battle casualties this conflict doesn't even make it while far more insignificant conflicts like the "barbary wars" do. More men died in combat in the Filipino war than died in the Spanish America War which brought us there!

On another note- at least TR put his money where his mouth was about the Spanish American War and put his life on the line.