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Feesh wrote:

bocanuts wrote:

This proves my point about the constant President bashing.

flyboy55 wrote:

ConchRepublican wrote:

flyboy55 wrote:Please - let us give credit where credit is due. Long after their terms have come to a merciful (for the rest of us) end, both George and Dick will be able to gaze across the water at far distant Iraq, still mired in conflict, bodies piling higher each passing day, spreading not democracy and liberty and rule of law, but turmoil and destruction and death throughout the region, and each give themselves a pat on the back and smile and say in their self-satisfied state "Look what we done."

Huh? Free elections? No death squads? Free speech?

Sure after 9/11 we could have gone into the Middle East and systematically destroyed ANYTHING we felt like. Mosques, camps, whole cities, millions of people. We could have started and finished a Holy War pretty freaking quickly and no one could have done anything to stop us until it was over.

Think of it from an historical perspective - what would a Roman response have been? Jeez . . . the whole place would have been leveled. Mecca? Medina? Stories for the history books.

We have a destructive capability never seen before on the face of this planet and we decided it was in everyone's best interest (theirs, and yes, ours) to take the hard route. Limit collateral damage, put our people in greater risk than necessary, to try an create a better place overall. That in time, the spark of freedom would take hold and their lives would be better, making our lives better and safer.

Maybe the sheet of glass approach would have been preferable?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but you have succeeded in frightening me.

Going back to 1973, I have frequently heard people talk about 'nuking' the Middle East (ie turning it into a 'sheet of glass'). The expression 'nuke their a$$ and take the gas' was one I heard often. The idea of purposefully incinerating millions of humans as a foreign policy initiative is quite shocking and frankly scares the he|| out of me.

Are you suggesting that the people of the Middle East (which covers a lot of territory and different nations by the way) got off 'lucky' after 9/11 because we chose to invade Iraq rather than turn the region 'into glass' with nuclear weapons?

Perhaps you are unaware of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (most of them children) who died as a direct result of the U.S. led embargo against Iraq through the 1990s. Or maybe you are unaware of a similar number of Iraqis (many of them children) who have died violent deaths since the U.S. turned their nation into a 'free-fire' zone so our troops could look for WMDs or hunt 'terrorists' or whatever . . .

In this regard, I'm not sure what you meant when you said our actions would "limit collateral damage". For the past fifteen years, the story of Iraq has in fact been one of collateral damage writ large in innocent blood.

As far as that bit about the "spark of freedom" taking hold and their lives being better, I believe that falls into the category of fable - something comforting and useful to tell the masses while they bear the burden of sacrifice.

But cleaning up the Iraq mess left by the previous administration doesn't only involve figuring out when and how to get the troops out - it involves dealing with the ridiculous amount of debt that this nation will carry as a result of the invasion.

Some estimates (by Nobel prize winning economists no less) put the ultimate cost of our misguided intervention in Iraq in the TRILLIONS of dollars. Your children and mine will be paying this bill for years to come, while the nation's infrastructure crumbles, not to mention having no fiscal 'wiggle room' to deal with the impacts of climate change (water shortages throughout the West and South, falling farm production and domestic food shortage, etc) and change over to alternate sources of energy.

And speaking of alternate energy, we might be further ahead right now if that Hero of the Right Ronald Reagan hadn't closed down entire research programs into alternate energy sources and axed the budget of the Solar Energy Research Institute in Boulder, CO when he came into office twenty-seven years ago.

Spare us from anymore 'cowboys' in the Oval Office.