wcknight:
Funding to attack Isreal is a far cry from involvement with 9/11.
PLUS Saddam has been removed from power. Give the country back to the Iraqis, let them handle their own nation building. Let them fight among themselves. IF they want a democracy, let them fight for it. IF they want an Islamic state, that is up to them.
Now that Saddam is gone, we need to leave asap. It is ridiculous that our troops have to pull 3 or 4 tours of duty over there. No one wants to join the service now that there is a war on, and no one wants our troops over there.
The Iraqis have a responsibility to fight for their own freedom. If they don’t want to fight for it, they don’t deserve it. Most of all at the very least they should be doing everything possible to root out insurgents and foreign nationals. For them to harbor terrorists or to allow foreign nationals to hide among them speaks volumes about where their sentiments are.
We have no business being still in that country. Bush wants people to think we are fighting terrorists over there, but what we are really doing is creating motivation for a whole new generation of more terrorists.
Attacking Iraq may have been marginally justified at best, staying in Iraq is just gross stupidity at its worst. But that’s what happens when you elect the village idiot.
If America were to leave it to the Iraqi’s, the country would either become Syria or Iran. These are the terrorists we are fighting now. They are foreign fighters!
I supported the war when we first went, but now I realize the war hawks may have been a little hasty in their deliberations and I think they failed to meet just war criteria (in the fact that the threat wasn’t, in hindsight, imminent.)
However, it is a misrepresentation of who Saddam was to say that he wasn’t a sponser of terrorism. Saddam paid $25,000 to Palistinian families for their sons to blow themselves up in Israel. Abu Nidal was trained there, Bin Laden spent time in Baghdad, al Zarquai (sp) also was treated in Iraq (when he lost his leg). Does this mean Saddam was linked to 9/11, NO. But does it mean we should have been concerned about him, YES.
I don’t like the terms “liberal” and “conservative” because they are just labels that detract from the truth. Did this war meet just war criteria? That’s a debatable point. At this point, I don’t think it did, but this is said with hindsight bias. Was Saddam a terrorist, absolutely. Am I dissappointed that the leadership of this country jumped hastily to its conclusions? Yes. The evidence at the time was convincing, now its been proven to be wrong.
Now the question is whether or not we stay. The Left likes to point to American deaths in the region and say that’s enough for us to pull out. The human toll of that would be astronomical, and the lives lost to this point would be lost in vain. We would find ourselves staring down another terrorist state. That we simply cannot have.
The radical left in this country, incidentally, is very much like the terrorists in philosophy. They believe they can bring parousia to earth through human institutions. That said, the right in this country tends to be too hawkish, negating truths about this country’s unethical dealings in the Middle East and always giving America the moral high ground.
Bush thought he was doing the right thing, and was mistaken. He is human and we all err. I would vote for him again in a heartbeat. We now need to stick it out in Iraq, or the lives we’ve already lost were lost for nothing.
