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Read other letters about this article
Mark Denney: "I understand that perspective but I think there are plenty of others who bear more blame for all the things that have happened in IRaq and because of it than Bush."
Why? I mean, he's the top guy in charge. He directs the war policy. All the important decisions are supposed to be rubber-stamped by him. So why is he the one you want to let off the hook? Unless you're saying that he wasn't really in control of, or didn't understand, what was going on...
Mark Denney: "I also separate the decision to invade with the execution of the war."
Even a moral, righteous war becomes an immoral, wrong-headed war if the people waging war don't bother to plan what they're doing and investigate who they're doing it to. Bush disbanded the Iraq Republican Guard and didn't even bother to try to set up post-invasion jobs for tens of thousands of militarily trained men, most of them with families. What does anybody expect to happen when people whose primary skill-set is fighting are left without employment?
Mark Denney: "Hindsight is an easy way to argue this but...."
Dismissing my viewpoint as "hindsight" does not invalidate the jugment or the analysis. Things in the past are always going to be hindsight, but that doesn't mean it isn't important to meaningfully assess them.
Mark Denney: "...given what we knew and the state of the world at the time, we acted in the interests of Iraq and what we thought was the right thing to do given the aftermath of 9/11."
How did we act in the interests of Iraq, when we didn't even have an immediate plan for preventing the looting that occurred within a day or two of invasion? Some of the world's most precious antiquities, historical artifacts from the very cradle of human civilization, are lost forever. Meanwhile, our own soldiers were unsupervised, spending their spare time scraping the gold leaf from ancient paintings into Zip-Loc bags. The whole thing was royally FUBAR because Bush rushed us into invasion to meet the spring attack window the military had told him was the only opportunity until the following fall. And what did Bush know? Nothing, because Bush is famously incurious about other cultures, and plainly didn't give a shit about the common people of Iraq. He just wanted to get revenge on behalf of daddy, who notably has publically cried over his son's failure. For Bush it was never about helping or protecting people, it was, in his own words, a chance to "Fuck Saddam -- we're taking him out!" Bush keeps Saddam's pearl-handled pistol in his Oval Office drawer. He's an ill-equipped cowboy born into a postmodern age.
But I'll take your message as an agreement to disagree, and we'll leave it at that.
