Iraq

OK, my thoughts about Iraq War:

BIG MISTAKE.

I also want to be on record as saying I've always felt it would be a big mistake (clarification - during the short period in which Bush scared the world into believing Iraq still had WMD, I, like many people, was temporarily convinced we better go in there and knock out those god-damned WMDs. But it didn't take long for the world to see the fallacy of that argument for war)

OK, going back to the prewar days - here's my thinking: Oraq is a country made up of three major ethnic groups (Kurds, Sunni, Shiites) as well as a smattering of Christians. These groups historically have HATED each other and have NEVER demonstrated any ability to live together in peace. Why would a US-imposed democracy ever appeal to them??? They don't care about democracy. They care about killing each other. How naive can we be to think we can go in, remove Saddam Hussein from power, and, all of a sudden, a nation is united in democracy, love and idolotry of the US. I truly believe that is exactly what the designers of this war thought would happen.

But the fact that the highest powers in this government thought this was possible really disturbs me. How naive can they be??? WTF??? Of course, these days these people claim they were fed mis- or disinformation regarding Iraq. But I contend it didn't take much to KNOW that Iraq was a civil war just waiting for an excuse to happen. So, if the highest levels of our government didn't know a civil war was highly likely, then I am truly scared of our government. We must be governed by a bunch of ostriches with their heads in the sand. I mean, it doesn't take a PhD in astrophysics to know that Iraq was a powder keg - I knew it, and I'm just a lowly everyman.

I really resent that we were put into this war.

Oh, and another thing the right wingers keep saying is that the War in Iraq is part of the War on Terror. OK - maybe it is NOW. However, Iraq and GLOBAL terror had absolutely NO connection to each other PRIOR to the US invasion of Iraq.

In fact, in response to a leaked governmental memo in which the Iraq war was fueling global terrorism, Bush declassified more of that document and continues to justify the War in Iraq as a war on terror. My stance is - YES, he's turned it into a HUGE war on terror, as well as a HUGE boon to terrorist recruitment globally.

Now he and his allies are taking the stance that radical islam was going to hate us regardless of our attack on Iraq, and that if it wasn't Iraq providing motivation for terror recruitment, they'd find some other excuse.

[I'm not sure how I feel about this - I'll have to comment in a later post]

Even so, our resources would have been much better spent truly chasing global anti-western terrorists rather than diverting most of our energies and resources to a fabricated war that, at the outset of the war, had no connection to global terror whatsoever.