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Posted By: Joann

Peter,

I know hindsight is 20/20, and all I can say is that I was genuinely opposed to going into Iraq before we went in. One February - must have been a few months before we went in - Bush came to GR and I took a late lunch and went downtown and stood in the snow on the side of Michigan St in GR to shout slogans against going into Iraq at the limo as it went by. It was really quite pathetic, actually. Although there was a fairly good turnout (especially considering that I basically live at Ground Zero of 'Neck Nation), it was basically 15 seconds of nothing. But I still thought it was important to go.

However, I will own up to mine being a case of right answer, wrong reason. I too thought Saddam had WMD. But I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this was suddenly an emergency. I kept thinking I was missing something, but as far as I could see he had been doing the tap dance for years - even decades. I sort of presumed that he had them and everyone knew he had them, so I thought that this suddenly being a disastrous situation meant that is was a pretense for something else.

My absolute opinion at the time, as it is now, is that we went into Iraq to create some action. We went into Afghanistan with a flourish, and made great strides immediately. But months had gone by, and no Osama, and no new news every day. I sensed that people were getting antsy for "something to happen". We were all so amped up on the whole 9/11 and getting Osama, that I really felt like it was getting to be boring to a lot of people. Heck, even I was losing interest.

But I kept in mind what Bush had said in his great speech to Congress or State of the Union - I forget which - shortly after 9/11 (which, by the way, I do and probably always will consider the most powerful speech of my time). He said we would have to be patient. He said it would take awhile and there would be long periods where it might appear that nothing was happening.

When we started rattling our sabres about Iraq, and suddenly the old chestnut of Saddam and the Inspectors became a call to arms, I felt like Bush abandoned his own (actually wise) advice. He didn't want to tell people to continue to be patient with Afghanistan and Osama. He felt like he had to make something happen. Do something so that the American people could keep that pumped up patriotism, to know that we were doing ... something.

He had it right to begin with and should have stayed focused on Afghanistan, Osama and Al Quaeda.

And a final clarification - my argument with him is not really just the whole pretense for going into Iraq although that's part of it. My bigger issue is that he and his staff completely ignored the advice of competent military professionals as to the size of the force needed.

Cheney and Rumsfeld - career politicians with no real experience in running a military campaign - had this political lollipop of the "agile war" all preconceived, and they laid waste to anyone that rained on their sunshiny parade. This was on the news, and was widely reported. The Gulf War was largely successful because we just flat out overwhelmed them with the sheer number bodies and people and technology. We hit them every which way from Tuesday and it was over before it started.

Bush ignored the advice to take a similar approach, and instead took the politically attractive advice of his inexperienced advisors. When it started clearly going wrong, he stubbornly refused to acknowledge the mistake and allowed the resistance to gain enough of a foothold so as to become equal to or even superior to our troops in influence and force.

And for that reason we are now faced with what amounts to a choice of lose or draft.

Joann

PS - and Leon - thanks for allowing the thread. I usually don't participate in the political kinds of threads, but it is nice that we can occasionally express those parts of ourselves that are not card-related.

And I think it's great that, at least so far (kind of holding my breath on this one though), this has been a fairly well-thought out and civil discourse on an extremely divisive topic.