MARK: "While Don continues to ignore the thousands of lives Clinton's inaction on the terrorism issue caused..."

MY REPLY: Excuse me, but 9/11 happened on Mr. Bush's watch.

ME REPLY: Sure lets blame it on the new President still getting his legs with an obvious economic problem as a first priority rather than the guy who had 8 years to deal with the problem and a good economy most of the time. Al-qeuida built up its operations during Clinton's administration and 9/11 planning started during his administration. Bush can be faulted as well, but Clinton should shoulder most of the blame for barely even trying to stop al-queida. Bush's error is understandable given his circumstances, Clinton's is not.

MARK: "...and the indescriminate killings by Hussein that are at least for now stopped, he is correct on the economy to some degree."

MY REPLY: Tell that to the thousands of innocent Iraqis who lost their lives as a result of GW2. Fact is, most of the indescriminate killings occurred well before Clinton came to office - during the Reagan and Bush administrations - in fact these presidents endorsed Saddam's efforts in this regard.

ME REPLY: Don that's a load of crap. Bush1 did not support Saddam's response to the post GW1 uprising. Bush's own response appears to have been a huge mistake because the military uprising he wanted never took place, but it remains to be seen if his concern for Irag falling into Lebanon style chaos was correct. The current situation seems to support that, but I think Bush 1 should have obliterated Iragi helicopters in the no fly zones as a moral responsibility for encouraging the revolt. I have seen no evidence Reagan encouraged these killings either. Supporting Iraq against Iran does not mean support for killing Iraqis.

MARK: "I'm fed up with a lot of Bush's domestic failures but dread some liberal Democrat mucking up the followup in Afghanistan and Irag even worse than Bush has."

MY REPLY: How could anyone muck it up worse than has Mr. Bush? As of today, the number of pos-war deaths have exeeded the number of war deaths.

ME REPLY: That is a useless and misleading statistic. What it should be compared to is the massive number of casualties Democratic and other critics predicted before the war. It is just as stupid as the comparisons to GW1 which had a far shorter and proportionately far smaller use of ground troups. This is pure spin on what is still a resounding military success by any objective measure. Name one ground campaign and occupation against a nation even half as large that is even within an order of magnitude of the casualties suffered so far. I believe the closest is about two orders of magnitude higher if I recall casualty numbers versus troup deployment numbers I've seen before correctly.

Bush's obvious failure is in an inability to provide stability not the number of casualties. The casualties are heart breaking and we all hope they drop to immediately, but that is not a fair evaluation of the military aspect of this campaign.

Regards,
Mark