Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to And none of these would have come into Afghanistan if we weren't in Iraq?

Nope
Robert — (archived)

Even if it's Flame I'm not going to rip you a new one the way Art's doing, but I too wonder if you even read my posts. Most of the answers to your rhetorical question are already in my post, in the description of a situation unique to Iraq.

What if Bush hadn't pushed ahead to invade Iraq? For one thing, we wouldn't have drawn down our forces in Afghanistan as fast to divert resources to the buildup in Iraq. We might've been able to control the border with Pakistan better, and thus eliminated the free flow of terrorists in both directions across that border. We might have captured or killed a much larger percentage of Al Qaeda.

We'd hardly have been sitting on our asses since Afghanistan, and in fact that's the whole point: Without attention and resources pinned down in a war and occupation that do nothing to promote US security, what might we have accomplished? How many surgical strikes into terrorist enclaves around the world could the resources squandered in Iraq have bought us? How many intelligence operatives infiltrating terrorist groups, and Special Forces teams tracking them down and killing them?

Never forget that in Afghanistan we had near-universal support. America's relations with our former allies didn't start to go downhill until Bush rammed his war down the everyone's throat. What might we have accomplished in the last four years if we hadn't burned our friends, and still had their active support in the war on terror?

Why haven't we caught Osama bin Laden? Iraq.

Bush's war has deeply undermined America's security. I hope to hell the next Democratic Congress impeaches and convicts his ass for dereliction of duty. I only regret that Congress can only remove Bush from office and can't put his sorry ass in prison for a long, long time.

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