but look at this
comment posted at Daily Kos by GussieFN (in a thread about this post:
In its April 21, 2003 edition, in the Conventional Wisdom section, Newsweek gave Janeane Garofalo a big fat red down arrow, with the following explanation:
Predicted 'doom' for U.S. forces, promised apology to Bush if troops greeted as liberators. We're still waiting.
Ooops. I think Newsweek owes Janeane an apology.
The elder President Bush was infinitely wiser than his son:
Elder Bush in "A World Transformed"
GHW Bush and Brent Snowcroft wrote, in 1998 (pg. 489-490), that occupying Iraq would have the following results:
"The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."
Bob Graham, on October 10, 2002, in his floor statement on the Iraq Resolution, ended by saying: "I close with the words spoken in one of the darkest periods of history of the Western World, in 1941, by Winston Churchill: "Never, never, never believe [that] any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.""
-Never- believe a war will be smooth and easy. Not a cakewalk.
I can't believe how much I'd prefer a return to the reign of Bush the Elder.
