POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Must win? Win what? Win how? Win over whom?
You are fighting the population itself, a major part of the population. You are not fighting an army or a state.
What is “win” in this context?
As always, Bush speaks in tired pseudo-historical phrases about a situation he doesn't even understand.
How do you win militarily over an idea or a conviction?
It's ridiculous, just as Bush is ridiculous.
He blurs his gigantic bloody blunder in Iraq with his fantasy war on terror.
There never was any terror in Iraq, just as there never is in any state with an absolute government.
From a purely American point of view, Hussein was better for long term interests than the mess that has been created.
Hussein's tyranny had nothing to do with invading Iraq, absolutely nothing. America does business every day with tyrants, as it did business with Hussein so long as he toed the American policy line.
America plainly loves obedient tyrants in other lands, just as Imperial Rome did. There are so many of them it keeps as associates. It is just a heap of intellectual garbage to speak of American values at stake. Nothing American is at stake, except America’s international reputation which has reached pretty much an all-time low.
9/11 was an attack by a group of mainly Saudi Arabian religious extremists, so what is America doing in Iraq? It never made an ounce of sense. Those men were motivated by American policies in the region, both its putting troops in holy places of Saudi Arabia and its unthinking, unbalanced policy towards the Palestinians.
And as I've said, relatively simple security measures could have prevented 9/11. Lazy-minded American legislators are about as responsible as the Saudi group for not having legislated locked cockpits and better ground searches.
