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On Thu, 7 Oct 2010 09:49:34 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:


wrote in message
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On Thu, 07 Oct 2010 06:04:07 -0400, Secular Humoresque
wrote:


I agree we had no business being in Iraq but Clinton and Bush 1 were
there keeping the fire stoked. We should have come home in 1991.

Nope. They were containing Saddam. It worked.

What the hell does that mean? The sanctions were largely ineffective
and he was in the process of pushing us out anyway. Most of western
Europe had abandoned the effort. It was basically just Clinton and
Blair against the world.

They were working. They weren't perfect, but they were working, and he
wasn't a threat to the region.

This was still all about Israel. If we didn't take out Saddam, Israel
was going to try to and we would have been drawn is as Israel's ally
when the war escalated, a far worse position than just being the
cowboys with bad intel.

This has little to do with Israel, even though that's a convenient
forgetting of the facts.

OK let's just jump ahead 10 years and look at Iran. What is going to
happen there if we don't act?

I don't know. It's not clear that Israel can do much, but ultimately, we
don't need to attack Iran unless they do something truly aggressive.

Unfortunately our Afghan war has still put is in the position of being
at war with Islam.

Only in the eyes of the radicals. Unfortunately, they're very good at
spreading that lie. Look at the hatred people in _this_ country have
toward
Muslims.


You see the same thing in every war. You have to dehumanize the enemy.
That is the nature of war. It is the only way you can convince young
people to kill their fellow man and convince their parents to pay for
it..
In this case it is a double whammy since we are not paying for the
war. We are borrowing the money from the same generation we are making
die for the war.



Well, maybe we should stop hating Muslims. That would be a good start.