Me Too!

Sullivan (again):

"I was dumb enough to think back in 2002 that we were actually going to send half a million troops for ten years. I thought 9/11 merited such a response. Of course, the president disagreed, never took the war seriously, and ran a bad invasion on the cheap and on the fly."

I would add to all of that, that I was naive enough to think that we would go to Iraq and continue to honor our own commitments to ourselves in Afghanistan, not to mention the commitments we made to others, both here and elsewhere.

I would also add to that, I was naive enough to believe that Americans would fight and win this war with the same value system that won World War II and the Cold War.

We now know that the predominant values used to fight this war are market capitalism, Orwellian constructions of words like "torture," and (to give my poor favorite hobby horse one more swift kick in the flanks) a desire by a critical mass of this country (a majority?)to use this war as an excuse to return this country to what they falsely believe was a happier time before the Sixties (by which, I mean, of course, the 1860s).

We need to get back to the values that won the Cold War and away from the values that lost the Civil War. If I need to admit a mistake, it is in my failure to use whatever thimble full of power I may have to address those issues. I will try to do more of that in the future.