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Quote by: abub Hmm... I dunno about you, but that seems pretty clear to me. The mission was accomplished (Saddam was taken out of power and his military disintigrated), and now efforts to build up Iraq were to begin. |
Hi abub. The thing is, the mission was not accomplished, not by any stretch of the imagination, which is exactly why we're in the mess we're in today. And the fact the you're sitting there still believing that it was is the clearest demonstration of how the Bush League's incompetence misled the American people and failed this country.
The problem with invading Iraq was never taking it, it was occupying it. In the words of Colin Powell, "If you break it, you own it". Bush's own father understood that it was a bad idea, as he wrote in his book with Brent Scowcroft. Our military is the best in the world at defeating armies and taking ground. It's holding ground in a hostile land, surrounded by an invisible guerilla insurgency, that history has shown repeatedly we are NOT good at. Vietnam, the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, Somalia. It's why I knew from the day Bush first hinted at a war that pinning our military down in a large, hostile country halfway around the world, surrounded on three sides by even more hostile populations, in a part of the world where insurgency and terrorism have become an art form, was a really, REALLY bad idea.
If we'd done everything right it would still have been a bad idea. But no, the Bush League has managed to do every damn thing it possibly could wrong, starting with their assumption before the war, and so falsely impressed on the American people that day on the carrier by Bush in his little flight suit, that we had won the war, when in fact the war had only just started.
As if starting a war by
mistake, for clearly stated reasons that did not exist, against a sovereign country that was not attacking anyone, not mobilizing to attack anyone and not threatening anyone was not bad enough, the Bush League compounded one incompetent blunder after another. They had made no plan whatsoever for dealing with the problems their own
intelligence services had clearly told warned them would be waiting -- an active insurgency, possibly alligned with foreign factions - spelled al-Qaeda -, waging a querilla war, an increase in sympathy across the Moslem world with active assistance from foreign states opposed to our goals, and deeply divided Iraq prone to internal sectarian conflict.
Bush's own senior military, led by Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, advised that we needed more than twice as many troops on the ground to deal with these problems, and for his pains he had his retirement date moved up a year and was promptly relieved. We made no provisions for securing the borders, which were promptly swarming with foreign terrorists, for securing the vast stores of conventional munitions stashed around the country, which to this day are still blowing up our soldiers, or for securing the basic institutions needed to get the country running, which were promptly looted, and to this day we have not been able to adequately restore basic power, water, sewage, or telephone service.
Of course, we did secure the oil fields... after a fashion. After three years, oil production is still below pre-war levels due to constant sabotage.
It was like Boy George was playing soldier.... Yaaay, we win! ....without the vaguest idea of what occupying a hostile country would involve. Cheney promised we'd be out and gone by Christmas of 2003. And Bush supporters like yourself were cheering when the statues came down, smuggling taunting us with. "Yeah? So where's the quagmire?"
Well, look around. We're in it, just like we told you we would be, and we're not getting out of it. 2,500 American dead, and counting, 10 times that many maimed and wounded, half a trillion dollars down the hole, and counting, our once undisputed and respected world leadership in tatters and Iraq spiraling down a toilet of civil strife verging on civil war, with no end in sight. We're screwed if we leave and we're screwed if we stay.
And to make Bush's failures that much more tragic, this is exactly
what Osama bin Laden planned when he provoked us on 9/11. Hit us on our ground so we'd arrogantly go rushing off to pin ourselves down on his ground, the one way history has shown they could actually hurt us. Want to beat the Americans? Look to the little Big Horn.
Mission accomplished. What a goddam reckless, incompetent, negligent fool.
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