Well, can we just agree that he made the worst foreign policy mistake in history?
Vietnam was probably worse.
Before I take that on, I also saw Brainster's comment about Chamberlain. My goof -- I meant "worst foreign policy mistake in
American history".
The thing about Vietnam is, it wasn't just one president's mistake. It really goes back to Eisenhower. In the mid-1950s we were paying about 80% of the cost of the French-Indochina war, according to Barbara Tuchman's
March of Folly. Kennedy inherited a huge commitment to Vietnam from Ike, and Johnson and Nixon inherited it from JFK. The whole war was one long "mission creep". Johnson put in military advisers, but it was clear they weren't going to stop the North Vietnamese. So he started sending small numbers of troops, and it grew from there.
In terms of size and overall cost, yes, of course Vietnam was a "bigger" mistake than Iraq.
But Vietnam was based on an honestly held opinion, not an outright lie about the facts. The opinion was the prediction of the "domino" effect ... that if Vietnam became a Communist country, other nations nearby would also become Communist.
Looking back from the year 2010, that obviously didn't pan out. Vietnam did become Communist, but it's one of only four remaining countries on the planet with a Communist government. Cambodia became Communist in the aftermath, but only for a few years. I'm oversimplifying that history, of course. But today Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy. The "domino" theory didn't come to fruition.
But the "domino" theory had a basis in fact that was fairly well supported. The Communists WERE trying to spread their now-discredited ideology to as many countries as possible. There WAS a danger that Vietnam's neighbors would become Communist countries. The real objection was, did that justify a monstrous investment of soldiers and weaponry by the U.S. in order to prevent it?
Almost forty years later, history has judged the Vietnam War a mistake. But it wasn't based on an outright lie, like Iraq.
People like Virus would like to forget the reason for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Calling it "a genocidal rogue regime that was our enemy," he claims that we "brought democracy" to "the worst dictatorship in the region". Time will tell whether and how long that democracy takes root. The U.S. was deeply involved in the power-sharing deal that was just negotiated recently. When the Iraqis are on their own, who knows what will happen?
But the invasion wasn't sold to us as "bringing democracy to a bad dictatorship". That's just another outright lie. Besides, we don't just invade and occupy other countries because we don't like the way their governments treat their people, or there would be many, many other worthy candidates. We're Americans. We don't interfere in the affairs of other countries unless they threaten us. I have a neighbor who beats his children. Should I go down the street and kill him?
The reason we were told that we had to invade Iraq and topple Saddam was that he was a threat to the U.S. We were told:
- That he had large quantities of WMD, and that he was working on building an atomic bomb.
- That he had strong ties with Al Qaeda, and that he would give terrorists his WMD so they could attack the United States.
We were told that we were in DANGER if we didn't invade Iraq. We were told that "the smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud," remember?
Which was bunk then, and is bunk now.
There weren't any real WMD. They eventually found some old artillery shells with aging and inert sarin in them. But nothing even close to what Colin Powell told the world we would find.
So it would have been really, really difficult for Saddam to give fake imaginary WMD that didn't exist to Al Qaeda. And he didn't really have any strong ties with Al Qaeda anyway, because he was a secular dictator and Al Qaeda wanted a fundamentalist theocracy to be imposed in Iraq. Which they may get in the long run anyway, after we leave for good.
Vietnam made us look mistaken and arrogant and stubborn. Iraq made us look stupid.
In the most generous assessment, it was a HUGE failure of intelligence. And giving Bush the benefit of the doubt ... without even suggesting that he knew there were no WMD and began the war anyway ... he made a MASSIVE mistake of judgment, because of his well-documented predilection to "finish the job" his daddy didn't finish.
We don't have to wait for more years to pass before the judgment of history falls upon us over the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That judgment has already fallen:
It was a war based on a lie ... the lie that Saddam had mass quantities of WMD and was planning on giving them to terrorists so they could attack us.
Not even to mention how the aftermath of the invasion was so horribly botched, due to lack of planning ...
davefoc, I really appreciate your comments about my post. Thank you. To this liberal Democrat, President Obama has been a big disappointment in many ways. Maybe someday soon I'll get a flash and do a similar post about him, too. But I've been doing them about Bush for so long, they're far easier for me to create.
I am building a storehouse of photos of Obama in my Photobucket, in preparation for the day I decide to have a little chat with him.
