tony @ 132, 133, 139

I am no Bush hater. I voted for him twice, and I frequently defended him against his enemies, who hated him because they hate America.

But he was a miserable strategist who failed to grasp the opportunity handed to him by fate. He did not even name, much less attack, our real enemies – the Saudi Arabia-Yemen-Pakistan group. Instead, he concocted the fiction that they were our “friends”, engaged in some kind of crazy joint enterprise, and chose to take what seemed then to him the easy route of knocking over Saddam.

Now Saddam, I grant you, was wearing a “kick me” sign before and after 9/11. He was a nasty man and a miserable ruler, and if the job of President was that of dispensing perfect justice all over the planet, you could make the case that invading Iraq was a wise thing to do.

But the actual effect of invading Iraq was to waste our blood and treasure, and to weaken the martial spirit of the nation, so that when the real war begins, as it must, we will be much less likely to prevail.

And, you will protest, I’m ignoring Iran. That’s true, because it is my view that if there were American governors installed in Riyadh, S’ana, and Rawalpindi by July 4, 2002 that the martial ardor of the mullahs would have been considerably dampened. Even if it were not, with large American army groups to the East and West, Teheran’s military choices would have been severely constrained.

When George W. Bush addressed the joint session on September 16, 2001, he could have asked for the sun, the moon, and the stars and been granted it that very night. Instead, he failed to understand the enemy, failed to imagine victory, and instead asked for Iraq, which by any stretch of the imagination was a misconceived and foolish adventure which gained the Iraqi people a dead Saddam and gained us nothing.