Then I attempt to stir my grey matter, not the white stuff, back into the early 1990s. Now, it would help to H.G. Wells contraption, but that ain't happening. I've killed to many brain cells since then. I remember starting at BSU in 87, then I woke up around 95 when I met my wife; in between that was a self destructive party in the spirit of Bukowski.
We fought a war, a good like this. Heck, if we hadn't gone to save Kuwait, Hussian would have beachfront property on the Red Sea. C'mon, my daughter's brownie troop could run over the Saudi army like a German Panzer on the Polish cavalry. We win, bad guys lose. But you could tell this was not the first dance.
I was reading Hitch's piece, Look Who's Cutting and Running Now: James Baker is the last guy we should listen to about Iraq, as I hit the conclusion, Iread this powerful paragraph:
In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let's give Baker his due—"on side." The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to "address the root cause" and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the "root causes" of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.
Please understand, Hitch was against the first Iraq War, but changed after 9/11. In fact he has been a strong supporter of the Kurdish people. But remember to look at the big picture when our governemnt. Bush 41 screwed up and we are cleaing up his mistakes. Clinton never had the intestinal fortitude to really press Hussian and we are cleaning up his mistakes.
So, who get to clean this up if Baker has his way?
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