Have we won the War on Terrorism?

[Bauce]

[exploited]

Good points. If I remember correctly, Non even supported Iraq, for reasons that escape me.

[Bauce]

Americans were overcome with emotion. But as for Afghanistan, to be fair to Bush, I think since he wasn't able to deliver Bin Ladens head on a platter, he would have been under a lot of public pressure if he hadn't opened a can of whoopass on some middle eastern country. Obviously still a blunder but the public would have been pretty pissed if he just said "well we froze some bank accounts and we'll get bin laden when we can"

[eynon81]

[Spider]

I was opposed from the beginning, but after it had already been ongoing I also thought it would be irresponsible to not at least remove the dictatorship, since so much and so many had already been poured down the drain, and so I got behind the mission. Too bad the mission was a unicorn hunt. Retrospect 20/20 and all that.

The amazing mismanagement of the thing eventually ended any patience I had with it. The way Georges Sada was disregarded, the decisions the DoD was making administratively....it became crystal clear that they had f**k all idea what they were even doing. The War was handled relatively well. Those people are extremely good at blowing shit up. Which is their raison d'etre after all.The Occupation on the other hand was a dismal exercise in incompetence on the part of a command structure that grew up and was trained thinking about Cold War potentials and had no business running an occupation at all. If they'd been asked to blow more shit up, they'd have been fine. But alas...there is only so much shit that can be blown up to any real effect.

In the search for a bright side, Iraq, at least for now, did wind up with a dead dictator and the keys to a brand new country. One can hope they'll eventually stop bickering and make the most of it.

[PoS]

[broken robot]

[broken robot]

[PoS]

[Indy]

The only reason people "supported" the war at first was that the Cheney administration shamelessly tied it to 9/11.

They clearly felt that Afghanistan wasn't TV-ready enough--not enough good "targets" there, as Rummy famously said--so we needed a more cinematic invasion of a place with people and buildings that go "boom!" when j-dam'd and crowds of people that would "greet us as liberators" as if it were Paris in WWII, instead of bewildered looking illiterates stumbling out of their mud huts in Afghanistan because the vast majority of them had zero idea there even WAS a 9/11.

Point being: Cheney decided early on that his presidency was going to be a war presidency, that this would give him the way to unleash unchecked executive power, and that war was going to be with Iraq. And then Iran.

Of course, numbnuts like Cheney didn't realize that taking down Iraq would actually solidify Iran's power but who cares about actual results when you're riding high on a tidal wave of incompetence, blind ideology and occult partisanship?

He/they had an excuse for everything that went wrong and to this day they absolutely refuse to admit any mistakes whatsoever; in fact, given the chance, he has said he'd do nothing differently. In other words, the man is the literal definition of insanity.

Never ceases to amaze me how somebody can trick us into a war where we lost more people than we did on the actual 9/11 and maimed/wounded tens of thousands more while blowing a trillion dollars to "rebuild" a country and failing in total--i.e., that money is gone. Why he's not in prison I'll never know but as we all know in this country, if we hold one of the Party members accountable that's a win for the "liberals" and we can't have that.