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• Friday, December 5, 2008 06:22 AM

  @Xrandadu Hutman

  I'm trying to understand where you're coming from...truly...I know we've exchanged barbs (easy to be snarky in these things as noted by my recent mocking of kylan or whoever that was) but, help me here because I really would like to understand where you're coming from and vice versa.

  You see a war that never should have been. Perpetrated by people who lied and then broke international law to invade Iraq based solely on a personal agenda that they then used 9/11 to market to the american people. They then had no real interest in planning or even A plan to take care of iraq once their goals were accomplished and during the aftermath of the war further engaged in illegal and immoral activity such as torture with no regard for the iraqi people, their culture, their sovereignty, or their dignity. In your view this was a crime from top to bottom and Bush, as the commander in chief, should bear the brunt of the responsibility for this crime and be punished accordingly. Is that right?

  For me, saddam had flouted international law for over a decade including the use of illegal weapons while he murdered and tortured his own people. In the face of that the world community put him and his country in a box and increased the level of suffering for everyone as a means to oust him from leadership. 12 years passed and nothing changed. 9/11 happened. Our leaders decided based on their own personal agendas and what they viewed as part of the "source" of the problems we faced that it was time to act where we'd not acted prior even though there was no real connection to the perpetrators of 9/11. Saddam and all that he represented needed to be dealt with once and for all. They used specious hard intelligence and fear mongering to sell this war and carried it out in the face of international objections. They succeeded in ousting saddam but, failed in the aftermath. They used what they thought were necessary means to gain intelligence from captives in this war and ignored sound advice from seasoned professionals from beginning to end in how to execute this war, how to deal with the aftermath, and how to gain information from captives.

  I think everyone feared saddam having and using chemical weapons. Trust me, no one WANTS to wear chem gear and do anything except sit still. That alone to me is evidence that information existed that he had them and he did nothing to change that. you argue that none of this should have happened and looking back at how badly so much of it went I can see that. But, as a human being, I am glad we decided to act and take out saddam. I am extremely dissapointed with how we did it but I think we took action when no one else would and I think Bush deserves some credit for that. Not much else but, he tried...

  In writing all that I also personally get the same feeling I did during the rodney king incident. Did those police go too far, yes I think they did. But, for me, you take a swing at a cop after driving 100 miles an hour down the highway on PCP and taking a taser and still not dropping to the ground....you get what you get.

  I think that Bush is a very sad person who, much like Reagan, surrounded himself with people who were extremely empowered and thought they were acting in the interests of the country. I think he looks back and personally doesn't understand how it all went so bad with such good intentions. He's a fall guy and a putz who has to live with the knowledge that smarter men made him the patsy for a failed war. That's why I think people like Rumsfeld deserve more of the blame. Does Bush bear blame too - absolutely. But at the end of the day I think it was Rumsfeld who did everything he could to enforce his agenda and that's what we're living with today. Bush allowed him to do that and, I agree, he deserves blame for that. But I believe the person who drove this agenda deserves more blame, whether he's the top dog or not. And I think with a different secdef, this war would have been much different. If shinseki had been given leadership on this from the start, we'd be having a much different conversation. That is why I can still believe that we did the right thing with the wrong plan.

  And I come to that opinion as a certified Bush hater who felt exactly as you do about all of this. And all I can say is what made me rethink it was reading and listening to a guy named Thomas PM Barnett. I'm not speaking for him but, his views of the world, how it works, and our actions not only in Iraq but at large really changed my perspective.

  And sorry I called you obtuse and rabid. Again, it's just too easy to be snarky in these posting. My apologies.

  —Mark Denney Read Mark Denney's other letters
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