Letters to the Editor
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Not your best, Gary
Bush sucks, yadda yadda yadda. You're not telling us anything we don't already know; just more preachin' to the choir (to stick with the God metaphors).
I don't know what lessons 'we' learned from Iraq; 'we' didn't choose to go to war. Most of 'us' are either categorically sickened and depressed by it or simply too stubbornly naive to want to face the possibility that it was a horrible, horrible mistake. My poor Republican mother still thinks Saddam managed to stash the weapons of mass destruction or, even more laughably, hand them over to Al Qaida on the eve of the invasion! And most of my liberal friends (and, it seems, most of your readers) are just stuck on their hatred of Bush and can't see the complexity of the rise to war in the Middle East (which has been seriously debated by every President and his advisors since Ford) or the need to stop obsessing about what we can't change and start thinking about the future.
It's not enough to say 'Bush and his stupid religion have screwed us all for good.' Yes, Bush blew it, big time, but the conflict we are now irreversibly immersed in was destined from the moment someone figured out there was a lot of oil in the ground over there. We might have been able to put it off for another ten or twenty years, but the rise of radical Islamic terrorism had long since begun, and the specter of war between the west and a sovereign Middle Eastern state has been ever-present since the aftermath of World War II.
Bush's mistakes have now left the rest of the world with real problems that have to be dealt with. History will take care of George W. Bush--I say it's time to stop repeating the obvious and whining about what can't be changed, and start seriously questioning what's next: what can we seriously expect from the various candidates who might inherit the current debacle? How realistic is a withdrawal from the region? What will be the aftermath of the civil war, and will we be able to negotiate with the keepers of the spoils? What, if anything, can be realistically done to reduce the presence of western business interests in the Middle East? Can we really prevent an Islamic Fundamentalist state like Iran from acquiring nuclear capability, and how long will it be before they're ready and willing to strike at Israel or another of our allies? Is there an outcome that doesn't involve the West conquering the Middle East, either through the sort of economic enslavement we've used against Mexico and Central America, or through an outright return to colonialism?
And why have the vaunted Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate been so utterly impotent to do anything to slow the downward spiral of a lame duck president with the lowest approval ratings of any president since Nixon?
Any of those questions are much more relevant than a rehash of Bush's woes.