I think peaceful elections is step one in showing our progress in rebuilding Afhganistan.

Given what we now know we should’ve attacked Germany in 1934. Given what we now know we shouldn’t have allowed Columbia to take off. Given what we now know we shouldn’t have elected Jimmy Carter. Given what I now know I wouldn’t have paid to see Easy Rider…come to think of it, I didn’t.

Decisions have to be made on available information not the speculations of a politician years after the fact.

Besides, we don’t know the full story yet.

(1) Do you support invading Cuba? If one person in Cuba can live as free as we do, that war is worth every penny. If you don’t support the invasion, you must be some Communist-loving pinko who doesn’t care about the poor, suffering Cubans.

(2) Do you support invading North Korea? If one person in N.K. can live as free as we do, that war is worth every penny. If you don’t support the invasion, you must be some Communist-loving pinko who doesn’t care about the poor, suffering Koreans.

(3) Do you support invading Iran? If one person in Iran can live as free as we do, that war is worth every penny. If you don’t support the invasion, you must be some Islamofascist-loving jihadist who doesn’t care about the poor, suffering Iranians.

O.K. Sarcasm off. Look, OF COURSE it is better that Saddam and his evil minions are no longer in power… but there are other ways of doing it without war. We had Sadaam contained, and his grip on power was weakening in time. He was not a gathering threat, imminent threat, nor immediate threat
to U.S. security… we should have stayed the course and focussed on Afghanistan… right now the vast, vast majority of that country (except the capital city of Kabul) is in anarchy under the nominal control of warring warlords… I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and distinctly unlike Iraq, they really did greet us as liberators… We should have focussed on rebuilding Afghanistan, keeping troops there to help enforce the sanctions on Iraq…

I will direct you back to the Iraqi blogs who are thankful that Saddam is gone, and GRATEFUL to Pres. Bush, the military, America and the rest of the coalition for freeing them. If one person in Iraq can live free as I do, that war is well worth every penny. The fact that we ARE safer is an added bonus.

Not in Louisville, meep. Here a guy is a drug dealer doing a drug deal with an undercover cop. Attacks the cop, and gets his gun away from him. The cop wrestles him off, and the drug dealer starts running away. He is seen pulling at his waistband. Cop shoots him. Drug dealer found with gun in waistband where he was pulling at his pants. Cop is brought up on murder charges(acquitted, thankfully). Mother of drug dealer sues police department. Black community leaders, including the Rev. Louis Coleman(son recently convicted of drug possession) protest, and say it was a racist killing. Others in the black community say they are terrified, that it didn’t have to happen, and that it could have been their child.

Let me see…if that were the case, if the drug dealer had never been out dealing drugs, and had instead been at home with his “oh so concerned” mama, he wouldn’t be dead at this moment. Hmmm…who’s responsible in this instance? The drug dealer who was committing a crime, and attacked a police officer, or the police officer who was attacked and defended himself?

Captain’s Quarters summarizes thusly:
“One name leaps out from the crowd, however. People may recall the pardon scandals at the end of the Clinton presidency in January 2001, just as Clinton prepared to leave office. One pardon in particular raised eyebrows across the political spectrum, and that same name has mysteriously reappeared in the UNSCAM fallout:

In what the report calls, “an open secret,” the Iraqi government demanded illicit surcharges of 25-to-30 cents on all barrels of oil bought, which buyers had to secretly pay before the deals were sealed. They complied because the Iraqis were selling slightly below market prices.

The report says that the company denies any inappropriate deals.

At the time of the pardon, many people puzzled over why Bill Clinton would pardon a man who fled the country and whose status as a fugitive had been under negotiation with the FBI just prior to Clinton’s action. Instead of cutting a deal with Rich to get him back to the US to face charges, Clinton pulled the rug out from under the FBI. Without the leverage of the charges, Rich had no further motivation to cooperate with the DoJ on any outstanding investigations.

At the time, the presumption was that Rich’s wife had donated enough money to buy the pardon. Now, however, the question may be whether Clinton knew about the corruption and feared that an aggressive Bush administration policy would uncover Rich’s participation in undermining Iraqi sanctions while Rich raised funds for both his presidential library and Hillary’s election. Or maybe the issue runs even deeper than that? ”

Chew on that Actus, Slick is knee-deep in contributing to our age of fear, uncertainity and doubt.

Actually the intent was to continue the bluff because he was afraid of Iran. Another gross strategic miscalculation.

The Democratic presidential candidate and his supporters don’t seem to mind pandering to the self-interests of the French government when making U.S. national security decisions. It annoys me to no end that so little is made of the real reasons our “allies” in the Security Council opposed the war.

We only know that because we invaded. For over a decade, Saddam did everything he could to roadblock inspections, and acted as though he had something to hide. If he had cooperated and come clean, we just might not have invaded. By taking the “poker strategy” (bluff like you’ve got a full house even though you ‘ve got nothing), he contributed to his own demise. We now know that he even had most of his subordinate leadership convinced that he was holding onto some WMD’s, “just in case”.

This is why it was so difficult for us to get the intel right. When even the leadership thought they had something they didn’t, all your humint is going to follow right along. We bought into his bluff hook, line and sinker, but then so did his own people.

While it may very well be that the threat was dissapating, the whole world thought just the opposite (including the French, Germans and Russians). Actus, hindsight is always 20-20. We could not know what we know now without invading, because Saddam intended to continue the bluff until he had something to back it up so that it was no longer an empty bluff.

Saying we should have let the inspections continue, etc. is futile. If we had, we would still be convinced he was hiding something, because he would have continued to act as though he was.

The point is that whoever claimed the saddam nuclear threat was gathering was wrong. The saddam nuclear threat was not only contained, it was weakened.