Look at the cards Bush was dealt. Clinton created a quagmire by sitting American troops in the Saudi Arabian desert for 8 years. They were there to enforce a fixed wing no-fly zone and support UN WMD investigations. After 9/11 how do you exit this situation. Osama citing foreign troops on the Muslim holy land said this was the main cause of the attack. What options did Bush have. We were at war with Iraq because of Kuwait. Do you feel Kuwait was justified?
I strongly disagree with your opinion of ww2 maverick. The responsibility of the Iraq war falls mainly on the shoulders of Bush Jr. and secondly on those sheep in congress who followed him. It wasn't Clinton's or Bush senior's fault, fact.
There are no facts in politics, only opinions. Second, the Iraq War did not start in 2004. It started when we lobbed missiles into their country and started killing their people. And to be fair, it even started before that with the first Gulf War. Let me ask you something, if Canada fired missiles into the US and bombed one of our military facilities in let's say Illinois, and killed a few people on the side, would you consider that an act of War? I would. And would we respond? Fuck yeah, we would probably blow Canada right off the northern shelf. That's what I'm trying to get through to you. You act like this is a football season where there is a beginning and an end and then we start all over again. That's not how the real world works. When we bomb another country and kill their people, that event is not a GAME. That doesn't go up in the win column. And the next President to come in doesn't get to start with a clean slate. No, each new president enters the game with the clock running and has to deal with all the events that happened before. What I'm trying to say is the Iraq War has been on going for decades now. There is no off season. There is no free agency or draft or half time or TV timeouts. Bush didn't start anything. He continued it. Can you blame him or his administration how he handled his time on the clock? Sure. And that's exactly what opposing parties do. Republicans rail against Clinton, Carter, LBJ, JFK and the dems shout at Nixon, Reagan, Bush sr, jr, etc. The intelligent people see beyond that. They see we have a flawed foreign policy that has been consistent for 75 years. Sure the players change, the colors of the uniform change, the backdrop changes, but the policy is the same. All I know is, if we as a country got bombed, had sanctions placed on us, had our leaders get assassinated, etc on a regular basis, we wouldn't be sitting here discussing it. We would probably unload our nuclear arsenal on the world. Hopefully one day you will see through the right/left paradigm and start thinking more clearly. Once you let go of your hate towards the republicans and start looking at policy only, things will become more clear to you. Until then, you will resort to the logic of a 5 year old and just say it's Bush's fault. I use to play that game when I was 5 with my sister. I would simply blame everything on her. Of course I stopped doing that when I like turned 7 or 8. I realized it that early it was stupid excuse. Some people take longer though, and I do understand that.
No Ricter, it's always been like this because it has always been our foreign policy. Don't defend it Ricter. And the next time you get on a plane and you see a couple of Saudi nationals sitting across from you, ask yourself this question: I wonder if these guys are pissed about what we are doing on their side of the world. I wonder if I'm going to pay the ultimate price for our policies today, right here, on this plane. Then tell yourself, this is how it's always been. You'll sleep like a baby.
Keep on harping. It is starting to sink in. Actually, what you are saying here is something that I have believed for a long time. And I don't think it means I am intelligent. I think it's simply is a matter of reaching an obvious conclusion. I'm not blaming bush for a foreign policy that goes back at least to 1898. What I tried to get across, but failed utterly to do, was my opinion that Bush's reaction to the 911 attack was simply wrong and had horrible consequences for the U.S. that are in addition to all the other consequences of a foreign policy that goes back at least as far as the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines. So of course I entirely agree that the deep seated hatred of the United States that exists in many countries, is not due to Bush alone; he is a minor player in that regard. I'm talking about 3-4 trillion in unnecessary debt, the unnecessary and unconscionable killing of 200,000 + people, the patriot act, and the attack on the Bill of Rights, the suspension of habeus corpus, the redefining of enemy combatant. The W. is responsible for that; not Nixon, not Carter, not Reagan, not Bush I, not Clinton. And Obama is just as bad if not worse when it come to Bill of Rights Issues, the Patriot Act, and foreign policy. You're just wasting your time if your trying to convince us that little Bush's damage wasn't any worse than what any of the other presidents caused, starting with McKinley. OK, so there were some administrations that came close, Kennedy-Johnson for example. Yes they lied and killed a million, half of them non-combatants, and like Bush, accomplished nothing but destruction. They were as bad as Bush, though there was no patriot act and no all out attack on the Bill of Rights, no government sanctioned suspension of habeas corpus, no government sanctioned torture that we knew of. The first step for all of us is to realize that the country we live in is not the country we learned about in 9th grade civics class. The next step is to learn that we are all guilty until proved innocent, and that we live in a country that is rapidly becoming a police state.
Maybe, the larger and more obvious conclusion is that we run a "war economy" and have done so for as long as anyone can remember.