Posted on 08/17/2008 6:00:31 AM PDT by MartinaMisc
IT WASN'T so long ago that erstwhile supporters of the war in Iraq were invoking hindsight to justify their newfound opposition to it. "Obviously if we knew then what we know now," Senator Hillary Clinton said in December 2006, when asked whether she regretted her 2002 vote authorizing military action, "I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."
Many of Clinton's colleagues said the same thing. An ABC News survey of senators in January 2007 found that "an overwhelming number" of Democrats who had voted in favor of going to war - including Joe Biden of Delaware, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, John Breaux of Louisiana, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia - had had a change of heart.
Liberals and Democrats weren't the only ones going wobbly. "If I had known then what I know now about the weapons of mass destruction," Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican, told the Houston Chronicle, "I would not vote to go into Iraq." The conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg pronounced the Iraq war "a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq." Others singing from the same hymnal have included Jonathan Rauch, National Journal's respected semi-libertarian essayist, and (somewhat earlier) Michael Howard, the former leader of the British Conservative Party.
The prevailing wisdom 18 months or so ago was that invading Iraq had been, in retrospect, a disastrous blunder. It had led to appalling sectarian fratricide and an ever-climbing body count. Iraqi democracy was deemed a naive pipe dream. Worst of all, it was said, the fighting in Iraq wasn't advancing the global struggle against Islamist terrorism; by rallying a new generation of jihadists, it was actually impeding it.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
The Iraq war has brought to justice an outlaw despot who could have diverted billions of oil money to terrorism and brought democracy to millions of arabs as a model for other states to follow. I’d say that was worth it.
I think the Iraq war was absolutely necessary. No matter what the left says Saddam did have WMD, did support al Qaeda and other terrorists groups and was a direct threat to the USA. Additionally, he refused to abide by the deal he signed to keep himself alive and in power. That by itself justified our invasion.
Unfortunately, we have the Democrat Party and the media acting just like Russia, demanding to have their selfish way no matter the consequences to others. Putin, Pelosi, Reid, etc., are all a cabal with the same goal, world domination by the Communists. That requires the destruction of American ideals and freedom.
The surge and the rise of the Awakening Sheikhs are often cited as the reasons behind the turnaround in Iraq. Both are important but the successful transformation came about only after the death of Saddam. I doubt it could have happened without his execution.
The Iraq war has brought to justice an outlaw despot who could have diverted billions of oil money to terrorism...
I’m not friend of Sadaam’s, but (in retrospect) he was not as big a problem as the Iranian+Hezbollah and the Saudis. The Saudis have provided the financing that has radicalized the Islamic world and G-d know what the Iranians will do with nukes once they get ‘em. As a result of Iraq, we don’t have the miliary manpower for any contingencies. So when we growl at the Russians or Iranians, they also know we have few real options.
What was most important was to find and kill Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on the homeland as well as destroy Al Qaeda. It has now been almost 7 years since 9/11, even more time than it took this nation to fight WWII against two much stronger adversaries.
Saddam did not attack and kill American citizens on our soil, Osama did. Support for the war on the home front was lost because the President failed to pursue and kill the real enemy and failed to communicate to the American people how the invasion and occupation of Iraq related to punishing the 9/11 attackers.
The American people supported killing Osama bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda. The American people did not sign up for invading Iraq to make the country safe for democracy. The war was justified on the grounds of removing weapons of mass destruction from the hands of a dictator who was alleged to be planning to use these weapons for another attack on the homeland.
Bush’s low approval ratings are due to his failure to pursue and destroy the enemy — the perpetrator of the attack on the homeland. Had he from the beginning defined the enemy as radical Islam, he might have sustained support for the current effort.
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush gave a speech in which he defined the struggle as being one against all terrorists and the nations that would harbor or support them. This was met (in Congress) with an enthusiastic standing ovation. Saddam placed himself squarely in that group (if for no other reason) when he offered financial compensation for the families of suicide bombers who killed Jews.
The standing ovation showed clear support for the idea that this struggle was not just with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Epimetheus - the Greek God of Hindsight
What we did before 9/11 obviously did not work. Doing more of the same will give us more of what we got on 9/11. History is full of instances of countries who fought the last war for the last war’s reasons.
In this case, it is my opinion we had to do something radical. We live in the greatest, most unselfish country in the world. We are a force for good in this world, whether the rest of the world ( or even many in our own countrty ) wants to recognize this basic fact. We are lucky to live here, and the world is lucky to have us.
There have been plenty of things out there on this subject, but two books that echoed my thoughts on this (or I theirs) are: Dinesh Desouza’s book ‘What’s So Great About America’ and Natan Sharansky’s ‘The Case For Democracy’.
One of the things that irks me most about the Left in America, is that listening to them talk about JFK and what a great hero he was just illuminates their hypocrisy. In his Inaugural Address, he spoke the famous passage: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
We are being asked now to bear a burden in defense of democracy. The currency of our burden is the blood of our countrymen and the money from our treasury.
What we are doing over there in the Middle East is a good and noble thing. The fact that we hope to gain something from it does not detract in any way from the deed we are trying to do.
What we hope to gain from it is National Security. Yeah, it is a bit of a pipe dream to think we can plant the seed of democracy in the Middle East and somehow break them out of their Seventh Century mindset. We did not go over there just to free the Iraqis and Afghans. I would like to think I am altruist, as are the rest of my fellow citizens and the entire country, but the truth of the matter is...we are involved in this for our own self interested reasons. There ARE reasons we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in a number of other third-world hellholes like Darfur and Somalia.
Like it or not, we run on oil. We can and should change that, but as the fact stands...we are willing to pay for what they have, and we have an interest in keeping their product (oil) on the market for us to buy.
But more important is the fact that the Middle East is a festering pustule of hate, discontent and violence in this small world of ours. That hate, discontent and violence has been unchecked for the last four or five decades. We have been content to let them do what they like to each other, as long as they keep shipping us our oil.
On 9/11 we had 3,000 of our fellow citizens slaughtered in cold blood. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents, pregnant women, brothers, sisters, friends, co-workers, Americans. Some of them were pulverized to a fine mush under the weight of collapsing buildings. Some faced the choice of burning alive or plummeting a thousand feet to die on the pavement below. Others died screaming in terror as the planes flew past skyscrapers before hitting their targets.
I had an acquaintance of mine who died on one of those planes, American Flight 11. His name was David Kovalcin. My last memory of him is sitting up on a porch until 2 AM on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee drinking beers talking about life long after all the other people had gone to bed.
My new boss on 9/11 was a Colonel in the Army who had just retired weeks before. I was having my first interview with her in her office, when her phone rang. It was one of her former subordinates calling to tell her that a plane had just hit the Pentagon. After she hung up, she looked at me and said “I have a lot of close friends in that building.”
On 9/12, that mindset had to change, because we could not just sit back and wait for the next thing to hit us. If those people who perpetrated the horror of 9/11 had weapons that could kill a million people, they would have used them. They intentionally rammed those planes into the WTC to try to trap as many people in the top of the buildings as they could. If they could get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they would use it without hesitation. We did the right thing for the right reasons going into both Afghanistan and Iraq.
The happy side effect is that many of the people in the region so inclined to murder us DID gravitate to Iraq and Afghanistan, and many of them are now dead. There are going to be more of them, but the truth is, there will ALWAYS be more of them.
What we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan may yet fail. If it does, with a great deal of certainty, we are going to be fighting a bigger and deadlier war at another place and time in the future towards the same end. So, yes. We may yet fail. If we fail, we will be no worse off than we were on 9/12, waiting patiently for the next attack on us. And if that happens, we may be required to use the “glass parking lot” option, or even worse. Then, the “Make them Fear us more than they Hate us” crowd may well then take over, and for our own safety and survival, we may be impelled to make them fear us more than they hate us.
But I am morally satisfied that we have wielded the power we have in an unprecedented way. Since WWII, America has wielded the power we possess to make the world a better place. We may have done it clumsily or wrong, but there can be no doubt that we used our power to make the world a better and safer place, and not to conquer territory, make people our slaves or subjugate them. We have fought a cultural battle, and have largely won. Whether you think that is a good thing or a bad thing is a reasonable debate, but many (if not the majority) of the people in the world would come to America given a chance. They already have our slang, entertainment and Chicago Bulls jerseys in remote parts of the world.
What we need to get into their hands is the real reason America is so great. It is our attitude. Anyone can really BE an American. There are not many countries around the world (if any) that can make that claim. If I go to France, give up my citizenship and become a French Citizen, I will NEVER, EVER be French. But you CAN come here and be an American, no matter who you are. The gift given to us by the Founding Fathers is the essence of what makes our ideas great.
As Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying (and it is so true) Democracy is HARD. Self-Reliance is HARD. And even though 5000 years of history say we may not be able to do it, I say we should try. After all...it IS possible. There was near common unanimity after WWII that we would never be able to establish a democracy in a feudal society like Japan. But it worked. Look at them now.
The point is...if we have to carpetbomb the entire Middle East with nuclear weapons (and we may yet have to do that) history will record that we, as a nation, attempted to give another nation a hand up off the ground to try to end the cycle. We ARE trying to do it that way. As the strongest nation on the face of the earth right now...I think it is our responsibility to make the attempt.
We need to be in it for the long haul. And that is going to be hard.
One speech.
On another occasion he spoke of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the axis of evil. Since that time we have conquered and occupied Iraq, allowed North Korea to obtain nuclear arms, and seem about to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Iran is a nation that almost daily threatens to destroy us. I don’t recall Saddam being quite as vocal about his intent to do American harm as the current leader of Iran.
In this man’s opinion the threat from Iran to the US has always been greater than the threat of Iraq. Apparently the current President disagreed.
I do not call a speech in which Bush asked Congress and the American people to support both an invasion and indefinite occupation of Iraq or any other country.
The Constitution (Article I, Section) clearly gives Congress the power to declare war. Since WWII, Congress and the President have frequently sidestepped the requirement of a declaration of war, allowing the President to invade or commit the armed forces of the United States on foreign soil for indefinite periods of time. In some cases these adventures have gone well (Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I) and in other instances have gone poorly (Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia). With respect to Iraq, we would have been much better off had the President asked for a formal declaration of war before invading the country. It would be much more difficult for Congressmen and Senators to later repudiate their votes for a full declaration of war than it has been for them to walk away from their resolution to allow the President to use force against Iraq. Perhaps there would also have been a debate about the nature of the enemy and the steps we would have to take to defeat the enemy. Broad statements about “terrorists and nations that harbor or support them” do not define the enemy with clarity. By that definition we should have invaded Argentina in World War II for harboring Germans. Few would argue that would have been good policy.
I do fear putting too much power in the hands of the President. While I may trust a Reagan to use the power wisely, I may not trust the next President to judge when and where to commit troops. I accept the fact that a President in today’s world needs to have the ability to respond in the moment to a surprise and devastating attack on the homeland or US forces — waiting obtain a declaration of war would be suicidal. However, the commitment of troops to invade a sovereign nation which has not directly attacked our nation, should require a national debate and formal declaration of war by Congress. If that Constitutional requirement is deemed too restrictive, there is an amendment process.
Shallow thinking. It’s not like we haven’t tried to locate bin Laden. Bush gave people enough credit for realizing islamoterrorism is bigger than just one man.
What was most important was to find and kill Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on the homeland as well as destroy Al Qaeda. It has now been almost 7 years since 9/11, even more time than it took this nation to fight WWII against two much stronger adversaries.
Before we invaded Iraq we dispatched the Taliban, who were sponsoring and harboring Bin Laden, from Afghanistan and ended and equally brutal regime. I think we also killed Osama.
Two compare WWII with our current fight against cowardly terrorists is to parade your nativity. WWII consisted of uniformed armies aligned against each other across well defined battlefields. Terrorist blend with the general population, hiding behind women and children, many of who the murder to create terror, thus their name.
Saddam did not attack and kill American citizens on our soil, Osama did. Support for the war on the home front was lost because the President failed to pursue and kill the real enemy and failed to communicate to the American people how the invasion and occupation of Iraq related to punishing the 9/11 attackers.
Osama attacked American citizens on our soil? I guess he is as I said, dead, since all who attacked on 9/1101 are dead. As I am sure you meant, Osama backed and supported those who attacked us. So did Saddam.
Support for the war dropped for the same reason it was originally there, political calculation by the Left/Democrats. With Saddam thumbing jis nose at the U.S. and the UN, throwing the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, and numerous other actions, the Democrats had little political choice but to support the invasion to force Saddam to comply with his signed cease fire agreement and with the numerous U.S. resolutions.
The purpose of the invasion was never to punish those responsible for 9/11. It was for the seventeen reasons Bush listed and the Congress supported and punishment of the attackers was not among them.
The American people supported killing Osama bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda. The American people did not sign up for invading Iraq to make the country safe for democracy. The war was justified on the grounds of removing weapons of mass destruction from the hands of a dictator who was alleged to be planning to use these weapons for another attack on the homeland.
As mentioned, the American people, the Congress, and nearly all the Democrats and media supported the invasion of Iraq. No one thought Osama was there. The intelligence serves of the United States, France, England, and Russia all said Saddam had WMD. We know he did because he had used them on his own people and on the Iranians. The later question became "Where have they gone? What did Saddam do with them?" The fear was, feared by everyone not just Bush, was that he would put them in the hands of terrorists. That was justified.
Bush’s low approval ratings are due to his failure to pursue and destroy the enemy — the perpetrator of the attack on the homeland. Had he from the beginning defined the enemy as radical Islam, he might have sustained support for the current effort.
Bush low approval rating is due to the constant drum beat for the past four years, a drumbeat by the media and the Democrats, about how dumb he is, how corrupt, etc., all lies - BIG LIES!
The Left/Democrats never have ideas they can defend and sell to the electorate. Their ideas are all historic failures. To deflect attention away from that they simply attack their opponents, calling them ever imaginable despicable thing. The idea is to say, "We may not be wonderful but we are certainly better than THEM! What we need is Change and Hope."
You frequently mix the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq in your argument. You are confused and forming your opinion on disinformation, another frequent Leftist tactic..
Yes, absolutely. And ordinary Iraqis needed to know that we were not going to cut-and-run.
The constant Rat line that we were going to pull out confused Iraqis who wanted to help the cause of freedom. The surge proved that we were in this conflict for the long haul and were ultimately going to be victorious. Only then did a lot of Iraqis come off the fence and throw their support for their own freedom.
Democrats prolonged the war and cost many additional American and Iraqi lives and casualties-—to their eternal shame. We need to remind our friends and neighbors of this fact in the coming election.
Does an idea remain irrelevant if voiced in one speech? Does it require an idea to be voiced one hundred times in order to gain relevancy? This to me is a bit of “attention deficit” thinking.
Iraq doesn’t become less of a target because another regime is more of one. Also, I’m not going to assume that I know more of the pros and cons of the geopolitical realities of a region, since I’m wasn’t privy to the discussions that took place between Bush and his advisors prior to the decision to enforce the UN resolutions with something more than talk.
That should be “I wasn’t” not “I’m wasn’t”.
Is that the same Bush who called Islam the religion of peace?
“Spoken like a true young mind full of mush fed by the media and the Daily Kos”.
Why lead with name calling if you have strong points to make? A true conservative values freedom of speech and is respectful of the words of others. As the left constantly demonstrates, name calling is a tactic frequently used by those whose arguments are weak.
With respect to your first point, you “think” we killed Osama. There is no proof he is dead or alive. In fact our government seems to acknowledge him being alive by validating some of his infrequent messages. It may be he is in Pakistan, a nation which also harbors the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Certainly the President who was so eager to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq, drew the line at pursuing our terrorist enemies into Pakistan, just as he has been unwilling to take military action against the terrorist regime in Iran.
Point 2. You are correct that Osama was not one of the terrorists on the hijacked planes that attacked the United States. He is an attacker in the same way Hitler, as leader of Germany, is consider to have “attacked” various countries during WWII. Osama is widely credited with financing the 9/11 attacks and for heading the organization that perpetrated the attacks. It has also been reported that as head of the organization he personally approved the attack plan. Given the above, I would suggest his involvement in the 9/11 attacks was much more direct than any involvement Saddam may have had. If Saddam’s support for 9/11 included involvement in the planning and execution of the event, our government has been remarkably silent in communicating evidence of that “fact” to the American people.
I disagree with your assertion as to why support for the war declined. As the war continued and the US suffered setbacks, the President failed to continue communicating to the American public. Had he and the Republican leaders in Congress made a concerted effort to counter the left by communicating with the people, he might have sustained support of a majority of citizens. Roosevelt talked to the public throughout the Great Depression and WWII. Johnson and Nixon frequently went on TV to explain to the American people their policies during the Vietnam War and counter the voice of the opposition. Ronald Reagan had no trouble frequently reminding the American people of Soviet threat. While President Bush undoubtedly has unwavering conviction in his policies, he has failed as a leader in being unable to communicate effectively with the population. It often seems as though he doesn’t feel it is his job to try. I can’t imagine that Ronald Reagan would have been as silent as this President under the same circumstances.
Point 3. I did not infer the US invaded Iraq to find Osama. The war was clearly sold to the Congress, the citizens and the UN to keep Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction, which the intelligence services asserted he had in massive quantities. Just as Iraq was not invaded to find Osama, the President did not justify the war as a crusade to turn Iraq into a democratic state. That rationale developed later, once it became apparent there were no massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction in the country. I might add I believe there is a strong possibility that if these weapons did exist, they were moved into Syria during the weeks immediately prior to the invasion. It is reasonable to wonder why our government has not invaded Syria, clearly a terrorist state, if it has evidence the weapons are hidden there.
Point 4. You are correct about the constant drum beat of Democrats and the media over the past four years. Reagan endured the same drum beat, yet he overcame it by going directly to the people from whom all political power in our system is derived. He understood that as the leader of the nation it was his job to inspire them and persuade them to go to a place where the Democrats and the media failed to tread. The American people supported him with landslide victories because he was a strong communicator and overcame the message of those who feared challenging the Soviet Union. I cannot understand why this President, fighting a battle to preserve western civilization, cannot find the strength to keep pounding away the message. In a debate, you generally lose if you remain silent or fail to keep making your point. If your intent is to fight a foreign war for years, you need a plan to keep shoring up support at home. Even during WWII the government kept stirring up patriotic spirit on the home front.
I would also suggest this President’s popularity has suffered because he failed the conservative base of his party. He couldn’t find his veto pen to slow runaway government spending, he arrogantly opposed the will of the majority of the American people on immigration, and he often backs down from fights with the Democrats he could win if he took his case directly to the people.
Pure and simple, Bush has been a poor leader. His weakness derives from his failure as a leader. All Presidents have experienced opposition. The great Presidents know how to rally and inspire the population.
I disagree the Left has no ideas it can sell to the electorate. It has been extremely successful in increasing funding for a myriad of social programs designed to secure the votes of minorities, intellectuals, union members, trial lawyers, environmentalists, and other constituencies attracted by the idea of redistributing the wealth of this country. These policies have continued despite 6 years of Republican control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch during this decade. They have shut down the building of refineries for 30 years, the expansion of nuclear power for 20 years, the expansion of offshore drilling for 15 years. They have been successful in securing billions of dollars of wasteful spending on a bloated education bureaucracy which indoctrinates future voters in political correctness while denying the great accomplishments of our nation and its people. The Republican Party, supposedly the conservative party, seems content to compromise or not fight at all. How can you expect to win the war of ideas if you don’t even put up a fight? Ronald Reagan proved the American people will respond to conservative ideas if they are presented with conviction by a fearless leader who doesn’t hesitate to speak the truth. They responded again in 1994 to Newt Gingrich and the “Contract for America”. In this century the leaders of the conservative party seem to have chosen to play a defensive game instead of an offensive game.
Your final point. I am not confused. As an avid reader and poster to this forum I am far more aligned with the conservatives on this forum than I am with any Democrat. I believe strongly in the Constitution as it was written, not as it is interpreted by the politicians and judges of today. That document requires a declaration of war by Congress before this nation invades another nation. The founders did this for a reason. They did not want the country to engage in conflicts without thorough debate, a strong majority of the population favoring the action (hence the requirement the people’s representatives declare war and not the executive), and the resources committed to see the objective realized. The founders were very fearful of foreign entanglements, particularly outside this hemisphere. The major point of my posting was that the President should have obtained a formal declaration of war against Iraq before invading the country. Invading a sovereign nation is a serious matter. Many of us condemn Russia for invading Georgia yet it is clearly not in Russia’s national interest for Georgia to join NATO and the US to have troops (or advisers) in a nation with which it shares a border. As I recall we had a similar issue with Russia stationing troops and missiles in Cuba. If it was truly in our national interest to invade Iraq, the President should have been able to persuade Congress to vote a formal declaration of war. It would be very difficult for any Democrat Congressman to later repudiate her/his vote for a formal declaration.
My final point. I view the war on terrorism as a clash of civilizations. If we have leaders who want to preserve Western Civilization, they need to start getting very vocal making the case. We are in a fight for survival against Islamists who wish to kill us and destroy everything about our society. Reagan had no problem calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire”. Our President should be talking tough about the danger of radical Islam and not generic terrorists. Instead, he talks about Islam as the “religion of peace” and goes on his knees begging for more oil from the Saudi’s. I prefer a leader who reminds the Saudi’s we saved them from Saddam in Gulf War I and tells them to keep pumping that oil if they expect the US military to keep Iran at bay. A demand they stop funding Islamic terrorists would also be appreciated.
My point is the President, as the leader of the nation, should be using the bully pulpit to continue explaining his policies to the American people. His popularity is low because he seems to be unwilling or unable to justify his cause to the people. Unlike Reagan, he seems content to allow his opponents to dominate the conversation with the voting population. Perhaps they do not respect him as a leader because they don’t see him fighting back.
I also suggest the President should be explaining the geopolitical issues to the people.
On this I agree 100%. At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I think I could sell his actions better than (in my opinion) I hear them sold. I don’t have a good explanation for this. I hope in the long term the reason will become clear.
The vast majority of the “failures’ in Iraq were media created.
The fact remains that Iraq had WMD, and we found all the pieces and parts of their programs.
The fact also remains that an Al Qaeda group, Ansar Al Islam, was in Iraq, under their protection, and was loyal to saddam, operating on iraqi soil, training other terrorists, and this group had ricin in its possession when we killed them.
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