In the immediate post 9/11 environment most people supported, or at least accepted, the Iraq War. We craved security and we wanted revenge -- any revenge.
But the question "what the hell are we doing?" was raised soon after the war started -- albeit whispered in Republican circles. What American interest was being served by the massive loss of blood and treasure? What mission was accomplished and how did it make us safer? What revenge did we extract?
Yes, Obama ending the Iraq War as he did was a disgrace. But sooner or later we will have to come to grips with the truth that Obama's actions compounded the original mistake ---- and that was starting this war.
Nothing good has -- or will -- come from it.
I feel sometimes like I'm on Daily Kos.
There was no immediate response or connection between 9/11 and OIF. Operation Enduring Freedom - IN AFGHANISTAN - was the reactionary assault against those who perpetrated the terror on 9/11/2001.
The Iraq campaign was a far different one, with the UN and Congress involved from the start. Regime change was the stated policy of the American government going back to Clinton's Administration. Didn't you wonder why - after the bombings at our embassies in Kenya and Tanzanya (al Qaeda) - Clinton lobbed a couple cruise missiles into Afghanistan and ... huh ... Sudan?,
The Sudanese al-Shifa "aspirin factory" as the enemy media called it was one of the targets. Why?
Well, it turns out it wasn't producing consumer pain relievers but more nefariously was suspected of being a bin-Laden owned developer of WMD. Guess who their ONLY customer was? If you guessed Saddam Hussein you get a cookie.
Hussein had two females named "Dr.Germ" and "Mrs. Anthrax" in his inner circle with his two ne'er do well loser sons. The Russians, Israelis, Egyptians, Brits, French, Saudis ... everyone ... believed he had the materials and technologies to build and deploy WMD. Even the idiots in the Democrat cabal stated their assurance he had chemical weapons:
http://www.davidstuff.com/political/wmdquotes.htm
He had flaunted every UN Resolution and he was taking pot shots at our Naval aviators enforcing the UN No Fly Zone. That's an act of War if you didn't know.
The problem with OIF was that there was no way to understand in a police state like Iraq what devastation Saddam had wreaked on the institutions and people of Iraq during the sanction era. All the corrupt Oil for Food funding went to weaponry and sponsoring terror was the compelling existential threat.
OIF was hard, but it was not a mistake. Obama cutting and running, after ridiculously hard won success to deliver a fragile - yet relatively stable - democracy was the betrayal. Don't believe just me, read "Duty" by Bob Gates or the Petraeus or Panetta books.
We still have troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. When we break something, we try to fix it again. We were "fixing" Iraq until the jug-eared a-hole took office.
But, it is SO easy these days on Conservative message boards to engage in revisionist history and spew misdirected anger and grievance. Where were some folks on the far right, and were they sentient enough in the 90s when the entire Iraq drama was unfolding, to get what was at stake?
I shake my head sometimes. I don't get it.
