Not so fast, Mr. President: "Here, take it" is not the way to leave
Iraq, no matter what your advisers may be telling you.
Remember that these are the same people who got you into this mess for all
the wrong reasons in the first place.
Back on 9/12, when Rumsfeld raised the idea that you "could take advantage
of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately,"[1] you
should have told him to go write a memo.
Three days later, when your advisors (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al.) realized
that "Another risk they faced was getting bogged down in Afghanistan"[2] and " Rice
asked whether they could envision a successful campaign beyond Afghanistan,
which put Iraq back on the table,"[2] you should have listened
to Cheney and Powell, and sent the rest of them back to their caves. [Quotes
from Bob Woodward's "Bush At War", pp. 49 (1) and 82-3 (2).]
In an e-mail to a friend last February, I said:
It's not a West Texas bar game that [you] can turn off. It's not going
to be: "Attack, get Saddam, clean things up, then leave with no further
consequences and everyone living happily ever after."
If Dec. 7th 1941
was "a day of infamy that will live forever" to
millions of North Americans, what do you think [your] attack on Islam (their
perception) is going to be to billions of Muslims? Bombing an
Islamic country isn't going to make them love us, and will inflame even
more of them to more terrorism. Look at Kuwait, where the US did save their
bacon, but now is the site of regular attacks on Americans by fanatics.






Article comments
1 - kuros
we have been to iraq before
it is history repeating itself
"Beyond the Euphrates began for us the land of mirage and danger, the sands where one helplessly sank, and the roads which ended in nothing. The slightest reversal would have resulted in a jolt to our prestige giving rise to all kinds of catastrophe; the problem was not only to conquer but to conquer again and again, perpetually; our forces would be drained off in the attempt."
Emperor Hadrian AD 117-138