(November 19, 2014 at 4:40 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: The justification goal post moving game was played endlessly in the aftermath. First it was WMD and an alleged alliance with Al Qaida. Then it was to spread democracy in the Middle-East. Now it's "we were always at war with Saddam"?
It was a set of moving goalposts in the buildup to the war, too; it was the changing justifications which got my antennæ up about the invasion in the first place. First, they had WMDs, then they were getting yellowcake, then they were going to supply A-Q with WMDs, then they were throwing people into vats of acid.
Hussein's regime was certainly odious; and I don't doubt that some Iraqis welcomed its destruction -- that was another pre-invasion claim, you know -- but the fact is that a nation must first and foremost act in its own interests ... and like it or not, it was in our national interest to leave Hussein in power.
Bush Sr got it right: trim the canary's wings, cage it, and let it shit on its own paper.
Dubya made a strategic miscalculation unparalleled in American history. He squandered the post-911 good will we had around the world; he multiplied enemies during wartime, and divided his forces in the face of the enemy; he repeated LBJ's blunder of not financing a massive war; and he sent too few troops (200,000 counting our Allies) in to secure a nation bigger than California. Adding to that, he then disbanded Iraq's own internal security forces, including police, ensuring that even as chaos descended weapons would go underground.
Some of those objections, especially the one about scattering forces that were at the time doing a great job dismantling A-Q in Afghanistan, drove me to march against the war about a month before it kicked off.
