Steve J. Nelson – I don’t get your point about how much tougher Afghanistan is. Aren’t you then making my point that we should never have left there and that Iraq was a needless distraction?
And yes, Pakistan one part of the problem. And Bush didn’t handle that well either…he went the “make Musharaff an ally” route and never wavered…even after Musharaff proved that he either wasn’t capable or willing to do what needed to be done. Bush didn’t do anything about it…if we needed to go into a second country, it should have been Pakistan. But because they have nukes, Bush couldn’t and so he just did nothing. And, because we have insufficient troops there, Pakistan isn’t the only problem because the Taliban has plenty of territory withing Afghanistan (and growing by all accounts…hence the surge). Either way, it was badly mismanaged, which was my entire point there.
“Do you really think the Iranians completely shut down the program in 2005 then suddenly restarted it just now?”
First, I wasn’t talking about 2005, I was talking about 2001 when the Axis of Evil bomb was launched. Further, I did say that they weren’t “publicly” building nukes. The point was to say that Bush was so impotent (even after we got Iran to reach out to us in 2005) that they decided they didn’t even need to hide it. In fact, it became advantageous not to as they could look good in the region because they could stand up to the big bad Americans and they couldn’t do anything about it. That they went public with it should be an obvoius negative towards Bush.
Same point on North Korea. Even if they were working hard and fast covertly, they couldn’t go as fast as they could if they could do it publicly and without inspectors around (even they admit that). So thanks to Bush they went public, kicked out the inspectors, and accelerated the process. That was also a huge success for the U.S.
Again, I’m not saying how wonderful Obama is or will be on Foreign Policy, but to hear Republicans falling all overthemselves about “Bush the foreign policy wunderkind” just makes me wonder if this country will ever get it together. It’s turning into a sport where you defend your side whether it’s defensible or valid or just fun to do on a blog.
Jack
