Another question for the Fenian gang

Argue on the basis of "standing up to the bully," whom we had pretty much crushed in all but name by 2002, and you don't get two votes for this fiasco.
And there were people who weren't just right generally, but who absolutely predicted everything that's gone wrong since. And none of them tok adequate account of the incompetence of the boobs and profiteers who were formulating the policy.

 

Ragu --

I can still remember the exact day when I knew this was going to be a complete waste.

A few weeks before the invasion, word came out that US officials had negotiated terms with Turkey to use their nation as a staging area for a ground offensive. Supposedly, we promised the Turks 1. money; 2. to try and help them get into the EU and 3. That there would be no Kurdish state on their border.

Anyone with a basic understanding of the history of the area -- who didn't have a messianic complex about remaking that area in our image -- quickly realized that we had no regard for the facts on the ground or what a democratic Iraq might decide once Saddam was gone. How could we dismiss one of the three ethinc groups from the area out of hand like that and expect to remake an area that was only made a nation by British decree and had never been held together by anything other than a tyrant?

Now I can't claim to know the facts on the ground now, or the intracacies of the current civil war, and I can't predict what will eventually happen. My knowledge of the history is remedial.

But that knowledge was more than enough to know we were in a world of hurt after Baghdad fell, and more than enough to know that this war was a terrible idea that didn't get any help from any kind of planning. That it might have seemed a good idea to attack a bully from our point of view doesn't matter at all. We completely failed to look at anything from Iraq's point of view, and that doomed us to failure.

 

I think you're wrong, and that's speaking as someone who the left-wingers here usually shun. I remember one of my co-workers saying that if we invaded Iraq, he'd take to the streets in protest, and I responded that although I don't do street protests, I'm with you in spirit. Once the inspectors were in Iraq, I saw absolutely no point to invading. And then when we toppled the regime so quickly and easily and someone asked me, "What do you think now?" my response was, "Who cares? Where's Osama?"

I think a lot of people mirrored my thoughts. I'm not someone who was prescient enough to predict the lousy aftermath, but I never wanted to go in because I thought there was nothing to gain. And I'm all the more pissed that this has morphed into a "nation building" campaign after George Bush said in the 2000 campaign that he wouldn't do nation building. Why don't the Democrats ever bring up that humongous flip-flop, by the way?

 

Ragu, my anti-war stance has little to do with the military, which I obviously support unconditionally. It was the reason for the war I balked at. Being proven right doesn't make me feel good at all, though, lest you think there's some sense of smugness. With the thousands of deaths, being proven "right" just makes me feel ill.

 

Understandable . . . the public (legislators, as well) will bend over backwards to believe
the Chief Executive and his closest associates on matters of foreign policy . . .

. . . so long as they're not constantly being fed bogus rationales for the conflict and
associated actions.

Once it became clear that the original rationalizations were largely a crock,
the public turned, step by step.

And here we are.

 

And most of them worked at the State Department's "Future Of Iraq" project, and that got shut down and they all got fired, and David Phillips wrote a book about it.
There is absolutely no way the administration could have gotten a vote on this war without the WMD fantasies and the al Qaeda lies. Why do you think they embarked on them in the first place? Wolfowitz has said as much.

 

Ragu:

But these boys clearly were never going to play it that way. Rummy's just about the
only one loitering around the Pentagon who thought current troop levels would
be sufficient to complete the "task", thoroughly. Clearly, he was sadly mistaken . . . and let's not even talk about
some of the double and triple stints some of these poor bastards have had to
endure, over there.

And we continue to pay dearly for his crappy judgement.

And . . . please . . . lean back and contemplate the likely price tag an honest, rational
politician would have to affix for the wish list
within your second sentence . . . with no guarantee of long-term success.

A sad situation.

 

Ragu, you're wrong here. It's not the losing, it's the scandals.

A shitload of Americans would chalk up what's happening in Iraq right now to "hey, bad shit happens when you go to war." But when you factor in all the other shit -- the wiretaps, the Plame stuff, the torture, the secret prisons, the Gitmo controversy, etc. -- a level of distrust develops. That distrust is then applied to the specifics of this war -- the WMDs, the terrorism connection, the length of the fight, the liberators, the "we're winning. No really, we're winning" bullshit PR speak. And no one is willing to take the administration's word for anything anymore.

That's why the support has dropped like a rock. People see it as one more lie, one more failed plan by this administration, one more screwup by a group that has redefined the word.