B Defends Himself From An Attack On The Left

I didn't really think a lot about Afghanistan until I read the Fallows piece.

I think the fundamental difference in thinking is whether or not this was a war of choice. Me, being very neo-con in this one area of my thinking, feel that the timing was a choice, by which I mean the short term timing, this year or last year, etc. Reading Fallows makes me feel the place may have been more of a choice than I previously thought -- I have to think about it some more.

But the notion of a full scale war against radical Islam at some place in the Middle East. That was not a choice at all. That war was started and imposed on us. The only choice was how to fight it.Radical Islam would have attracted terrorists either way. They would have been attracted either because we invaded Iraq, or because we did nothing, and would have been perceived to be paper tigers, ready to be destroyed. And that perception may have been true. But what the U.S. was doing, pre 9/11. floating along in a bubble. That had to stop.

Problem with the Bushies is the same one I keep saying in the form of my joke "Didn't they see Lawrence of Arabia?" The committment is long term, and then you still may be doomed to failure. After all, it took us 45 years to win the Cold War, which was a far far easier task than this one will be.

Bush's failure to prepare the country properly, because Bush misread then and continues to misread now the threat, is the reason Bush has to go. Bush never took the threat of radical Islam seriously, and still does not -- he looks at it in terms of settling personal scores with Saddam, securing the Bush family oil contracts, and consolidating Bush's royal power domestically (something that is separate and apart from consolidating Republican power or conservative power or Christian power, three things that Bush couldn't care about less).