Wednesday, December 06, 2006
A nightmare
10 US soldiers died in Iraq. Man, we really fucked this up royally. Actually, George W. Bush really fucked this up royally. If he's concerned with his legacy, he might as well forget it, because he is going to go down as one of the worst presidents ever. The only presidents who I can think of off the top of my head who are worse are the dough-faced presidents of the ante-bellum era and Herbert Hoover.
Gore is calling this the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States. My question is, where was this rhetorical bravado when he was running for president? These Democratic losers sure have a way of growing balls after the fact ... too little too late for them, though.
But maybe it is the worst strategic mistake ever ... let's think.
Well, allowing the country to descend into the Civil War has to be the presumptive favorite for the top spot. It just is.
Second -- how about letting the Russians get to Berlin first? Tough call. If we had taken Berlin, we might have avoided the division between East and West Germany, mitigating some of the effects of the Cold War. On the other hand, the Russians suffered terribly in WWII, and not allowing them their final victory over the Nazis, as well as their Eastern European buffer zone, might have triggered a US v. USSR world war in 1945. I will say with 100% confidence that we would have won said war, but the costs would have been staggering because Stalin was an inhuman monster who didn't care about the lives of his soldiers or his people.
OK, so invading Iraq. Well, the whole "we'll be welcomed as liberators" and "the conflict will pay for itself" ... obviously a miscalculation of embarrassingly epic proportions. Forget the non-existent WMD, which was the rationale for this war in the first place(if you can remember back that far to when this war actually had a discernible purpose).
So now we're destabilizing the region whose oil we desperately need but whose extreme political elements want to kill us. Unlike the Cold War, there is no mutually assured destruction; so while the threat of a nuclear holocaust is nil, there is a very real threat that a nuclear weapon will be detonated against an American city. That's the nightmare scenario, is it not?
Iran makes nuclear bomb. Iran gives it to (or, "let's it get stolen by") terrorists. Terrorists put it in cargo crate. The rest is too terrible to put into words, but we know how it ends.
Then, how do we react? Well we'd only have one option, now wouldn't we? Iran becomes the world's largest pane of glass, and the world effectively ends as we know it.
Is the above likely? No. But the point is that at a critical time in our nation's history, when we're faced by a new type of threat -- asymmetric warfare -- which doesn't play well to our military strengths, the war in Iraq has made us significantly less safe. For every terrorist we kill, we've created hundred and thousands more.
Is Iraq worse than Vietnam? Who knows. And it doesn't really matter anyway. If Bush wants to hang his hat on only having made the 4th or 5th or 11th worst decision in American history, so be it. The point is, this was a terrible terrible mistake. Bush relied on bad information, and he let his own preconceived notions fill in the blanks. The idea of using Iraq to turn the Middle East into a bastion of democracy was a pipe dream.
We're in a hell of a mess ... and the worst thing is that we did it to ourselves.
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Gore is calling this the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States. My question is, where was this rhetorical bravado when he was running for president? These Democratic losers sure have a way of growing balls after the fact ... too little too late for them, though.
But maybe it is the worst strategic mistake ever ... let's think.
Well, allowing the country to descend into the Civil War has to be the presumptive favorite for the top spot. It just is.
Second -- how about letting the Russians get to Berlin first? Tough call. If we had taken Berlin, we might have avoided the division between East and West Germany, mitigating some of the effects of the Cold War. On the other hand, the Russians suffered terribly in WWII, and not allowing them their final victory over the Nazis, as well as their Eastern European buffer zone, might have triggered a US v. USSR world war in 1945. I will say with 100% confidence that we would have won said war, but the costs would have been staggering because Stalin was an inhuman monster who didn't care about the lives of his soldiers or his people.
OK, so invading Iraq. Well, the whole "we'll be welcomed as liberators" and "the conflict will pay for itself" ... obviously a miscalculation of embarrassingly epic proportions. Forget the non-existent WMD, which was the rationale for this war in the first place(if you can remember back that far to when this war actually had a discernible purpose).
So now we're destabilizing the region whose oil we desperately need but whose extreme political elements want to kill us. Unlike the Cold War, there is no mutually assured destruction; so while the threat of a nuclear holocaust is nil, there is a very real threat that a nuclear weapon will be detonated against an American city. That's the nightmare scenario, is it not?
Iran makes nuclear bomb. Iran gives it to (or, "let's it get stolen by") terrorists. Terrorists put it in cargo crate. The rest is too terrible to put into words, but we know how it ends.
Then, how do we react? Well we'd only have one option, now wouldn't we? Iran becomes the world's largest pane of glass, and the world effectively ends as we know it.
Is the above likely? No. But the point is that at a critical time in our nation's history, when we're faced by a new type of threat -- asymmetric warfare -- which doesn't play well to our military strengths, the war in Iraq has made us significantly less safe. For every terrorist we kill, we've created hundred and thousands more.
Is Iraq worse than Vietnam? Who knows. And it doesn't really matter anyway. If Bush wants to hang his hat on only having made the 4th or 5th or 11th worst decision in American history, so be it. The point is, this was a terrible terrible mistake. Bush relied on bad information, and he let his own preconceived notions fill in the blanks. The idea of using Iraq to turn the Middle East into a bastion of democracy was a pipe dream.
We're in a hell of a mess ... and the worst thing is that we did it to ourselves.
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