Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 04, 2010

Roland has got a point, though.

Hard to understand why Roland never got one of the network news anchor slots.

It is true the Surge was a mid-course correction for Bush’s earlier error. But that error was not the war itself but rather not pursuing it from the beginning with sufficient force and determination to make clear to the enemy that they were never going to win. That is how wars get won.

Of course, the mistake of a weak-kneed war was made possible by Bush’s refusal to pinpoint just who the enemy is: all supporters of the fanatical belief that it is moral to murder to spread the Muslim religion. Are you listening, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Hamas and Hezbollah? (Too bad that refusal continues under BHO who seems to be waiting until Tel Aviv gets nuked.)

The surge wasn’t the factor that brought less violence, rather it was Petreaus’ bribes to freedom-fighters to police their neighborhoods.

I have to agree withPSCHEATER, too little too late. You would think we would have learned in an Asian conflict a generation earlier that you cannot fight a war with your hands tied behind your back.

The second paragraph questions why we should stab in the back our only ally in the Mid-East. Good question, Mr Prez. Why?

Idiots who are delighted with that arson analogy probably agree with Ahmadinejad that the fire on 9/11 was the work of a Bush-supported conspiracy, not the Arab jihadists, When Saddam blessed 9/11 (remember?), he did so as the head of the most powerful Arab army, declaring himself an ally of our Islamist enemies and therefore an obvious target for invasion.

Invading Iraq was a no-brainer and we were fortunate to have a nonintellectual president able to grasp that. He immediately retaliated against al Qaeda (starting the Afghanistan war we’re still prosecuting) and then, 18 months later, went after al-Qaeda’s most dangerous supporter.

Bush repeated, at a forty-year interval, the very appropriate U.S. response from WWII. We held off attacking the potentially more lethal enemy (Hitler) until his ally bombed Pearl Harbor.

@billdog: I would have even worse things to say about Little Bush’s psychology, but that was no more a factor in getting an entire country into a war than FDR’s mamma’s-boy psychology was to WWII.

The one relevant Bush psychological factor was that he is simply not very smart, so he assumed the public was too stupid to grasp a laundry list of valid reasons to invade Iraq and overthrow a dangerous dictator who HAD and USED WMD’s, so that’s what he held out as his sole reason. It is just a sad misfortune that Saddam was smarter than Bush and snookered the U.N. and U.S., giving the appearance that Bush’s reason was wrong.

Note that we now have a different president who is highly intelligent, but that just makes him also assume the public is stupid. After all, two of our smartest presidents were Carter and Nixon and look what good it did them. It’s not a president’s brains that matter but his beliefs. Brains he can always appoint (like Reagan did).

The surge had less to do with troops than with cash: paying insurgents not to fight. It did work, but, of course, the U.S. had no business invading & taking over Iraq in the first place. The invasion rested on a tissue of lies, and racist words like Pschearer’s highlight how the world saw Bush-Dick after the invasion of Iraq.

I applaud President Obama for finally ending combat in Iraq, and I look forward to the same end in Afghanistan and a withdrawal of our troops, who have no business there in the first place. These wars have an untold price tag in dollars (overrunning the three trillion figure of 2007), and have cost thousands of lives. It’s time to end the killing and the maiming.

I won’t argue with Pschearer’s assessment of Reagan as stupid, but I will contend that his stupidity hardly made for a successful presidency: the worst recession since the Great Depression (surpassed only by Bush-Dick’s recession), quadrupling the federal debt, bloating the military budget, allying the U.S. w/ Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, supporting the fascistic Nicaraguan contras, deregulating the airlines (so that security had gotten lax when 2001 rolled around), placing U.S. troops in Lebanon to get blown up, ignoring Israel’s ethnic cleansing, creating our homeless problem, & widening the gap between rich & poor: It wasn’t a decade one would want to live through twice.

pschearer. wow, really deep thinking man. Maybe we could try that plan out on, say, Canada? That would have about the same effectiveness in reducing terrorism in the world and they’d never see it coming. We could win in a week and then the world would be safe for boobies who think what you said makes sense!

I vividly remember when W appointed the new ambassador to Iraq - he stated that he was certain that Iraq would be a peaceful and stable democracy as a result of the U.S. invasion. So if the surge worked, then it follows that when we leave, Iraq will be a peaceful and stable democracy and an important ally to the united States and a shining beacon to the Muslim world, right?

I’m glad Trudeau used this timely post-election Bush segue rather than address the drubbing his party received on Tuesday. Brilliant!

Even worse: Most of the country decided that it was taking too long to re-build our house. They were barely finished with the foundation, y’know. So we decided to re-hire the arsonists….

Beware the TeaBaggers now that they’re elected. Being anti-Democrat does NOT make them Republican. We haven’t even begun to see gridlock yet!

Roland: “Someone put it on my question sheet.”

Any chance a cartoonist wrote it there, Roland?

Neocon, we never had any business with Iraq. The war in Iraq, coupled with the one in Afghanistan, cost this nation, in both monetary terms, and in life. Iraq was a pointless war, started by lies.

Sadly, he’s not outraged by what he said. He just didn’t get it.

pschearer, neocon: Iraq was certainly not our ally, but it was far from allied with Al Qaeda - Hussein was basically a secularist and was pushing a secular pan-Arab nationalism, which is an anathema to the extreme Islamism that Al Qaeda endorses.

Further, while at one point Hussein had some WMD and actually used some against his own people (and likely Iran), he never used them against us_ (or really even threatened to), and there was no _real evidence that there was any active WMD program there that could have threatened us.

Iraq just wasn’t a threat to the US. Hussein was scum, but that is true of many leaders around the world. He was a danger to his own people and (to a much lesser extent because of the constraints placed on him) to some of Iraq’s surrounding countries, but that doesn’t make it our role to overthrow him, especially unilaterally and without any international mandate. Regardless of your views that it was obvious that we should have attacked Iraq, there is really no evidence that there was any justification for it.

While I don’t think it was really for oil, I don’t think it was for any of the reasons the Bush administration gave at the time, either…

Further, once Hussein fell, the ostensible target was gone. Everything since then implicitly acknowledges that he (and the threat he allegedly posed to the US) really wasn’t really the point of the war…

neofalconer - you do understand the concept of “lead times”, don’t you? The earliest Trudeau could address the elections will be about 2 weeks from now, and he may well do so then.

My biggest question about Bush, other than how did he bamboozle the electorate to get reelected (oh, right. Rove), is, why did he think that simply removing the ‘Evil Leadership’ would make Afghanistan, and later Iraq, into stable, functional democracies?

theo5 said: neofalconer -” you do understand the concept of “lead times”, don’t you? The earliest Trudeau could address the elections will be about 2 weeks from now, and he may well do so then.”

Of course I do. Trudeau knew exactly what was going to be printed the day after the aforementioned drubbing. Any idiot knew in advance what was going to happen to the failure squatting in the WH.

he who controls the oil——-preetty much controls the world

I just ordered the Doonesbury art book by Brian Walker of the Beetle Bailey Walkers. It looks great.

Actually, the political practice of “winning by losing wars” goes back to the “police action” in Korea. This is where the “striped pants bunch”(diplomats/communists) started running the military.

Neocon, You have praise folly and glorify stupidity.

Bush’s worst decision was to listen to Donald Rumsfeld who said unequivocally that we could reduce the readiness and euippage of the military while simultaneously taking on two fronts of action. If anyone should be tried for war crimes, it should be Rumsfeld, and the crime he should be tried for is treason. HIs imbecilic reduction in capabilities of our military while at the same time expanding their areas of operations put this nation at more risk than anything done by Osama Bin Laden.

Those who say Bush and Cheney should be tried on war crimes really haven’t a leg to stand on except their left one. In an impartial trial, the arguments for going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan were legal, both nationally (remember your Congress voted to give the President the power to do so) and internationally, in accordance with UN Resolutions applying to Iraq after the first desert war.

Holding combatant detainees indefinitely or until the cessation of hostilities is not a war crime, and if you don’t believe that, take a visit to Aliceville, Alabama for example and visit the POW camp there which housed German soldiers until the end of WWII. The extraordinary means of interrogation used on a small number of high value captives hardly amounts to anything like the widespread genocide inherent in real war crimes. Those who espouse “war crimes” charges are just angry that their representation didn’t do more to stop the Iraq invasion by filibustering and having the cojones to be “a party of no” when things they thought were wrong were being pushed through Congress. I’m not sure whether Iraq will ever be completely peaceful and tranquil in my lifetime, but then, I’m not sure whether it would have been with Saddam Hussein and his sons in power either.

In addition, the entire hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan now could have been avoided had President Clinton been more concerned with affairs of state than with affairs of his groin. At least 3 times during his Presidency, there were specific chances to apprehend Bin Laden legally, with the help of other nations, and three times President Clinton was busy having his ego and other things stroked, to do the right thing to protect American and other lives.

Misng, that’s a good point, however, we should never have entered into Iraq. Legal or not, former Pres. Bush led us into that war, and the following occupation, under false pretenses. Namely WMDs, none were found, and ties to Al Qaida, when, prior to the first Gulf War, Bin Laden offered support to Saudi Arabia, in defense against Iraq.

I’m not defending Saddam Hussein, in fact I think the world is better off without him, and his ilk. However, Iraq was a much more stable place with him as the dictator.

The only thing the war in Iraq accomplished, was a larger rercruiting base, and a good recruiting tool, for Al Qaida, the Taliban, and other terrorists organizations.

I’m glad misgnNOLA weighed in to recall the actual history of the Iraq invasion, which British and other military strategists hailed as brilliant—-at least for the first month. Rumsfeld, along with Bush’s general, Tommy Franks, is indeed to blame for not following through in securing Baghdad after April 11 (the day Saddam’s statue was pulled down).

If the neolibs on this forum were not so dismissive of history, they’d recall how the country united behind Bush’s decision to go to war. Bush himself destroyed that unity, first by telling us that no sacrifice was required of us and that we could best help by spending on things we didn’t need; and second by looking for WMDs that existed only in Saddam’s megalomaniacal brain.

9/11 was a perfectly just casus belli, especially when Saddam (and the Palestinians) gave it their full support. Remember the Arab check that Giuliani tore up? Neolibs would have spent the check and wrung their hands over the lot of the Palestinians, those crybabies who have perfected the art of victimization.

Roland needs to steer clear of Shep Smith’s desk.

I can’t believe anyone still thinks invading Iraq was a good idea.

From misgnNOLA: “I’m not sure whether Iraq will ever be completely peaceful and tranquil in my lifetime, but then, I’m not sure whether it would have been with Saddam Hussein and his sons in power either.”

Yes, but leaving Iraq to figure out it’s own fate would have saved us about $750 billion.

Pschearer said: “The one relevant Bush psychological factor was that he is simply not very smart, so he assumed the public was too stupid to grasp a laundry list of valid reasons to invade Iraq and overthrow a dangerous dictator who HAD and USED WMD’s”

The public is smart enough to know the difference between a war of choice & a war of necessity. Bush chose to present unreliable intelligence as fact. Otherwise, the same arguments about removing an evil despot who wants to threaten neighboring nations & even the world, requires that we should have invaded Iran, North Korea, Libya and about half of Africa. I think we are finding that there are limits to how many foreign occupations we can afford.

If we want to be serious about stopping terrorism, we need to work with other nations. Bush’s unilateralism destroyed all of the good will we were receiving after 9/11.