Friday, March 22, 2013

Obligatory Iraq post

Since it's the 10th anniversary of the start and we simians have 10 fingers for typing, it's obligatory to post an Iraq remembrance essay.  My earliest recall was arguing with a conservative friend at Tied House against starting a war with Iraq (this would have been late 2002).  I always felt that if i could convince him that the Iraq War was a bad idea then the war would not happen - yes i realize that emotional logic not intellectual logic {a favorite comment made by a critic about Leolo} - but in either case I did not convince him and the war started.

I argued, via Email, that the war would cost $1T and he scoffed 10^10, and now the estimates are $ 6T.  Obviously a decade ago it was hard to conceive, much less argue that the cost would be so high.

I was part of a Yahoo group the Word Wrestling Federation and the moderators sister argued "we were attacked on September 11th".  I pointed out "not by Saddam", but she did not respond.  The WWF eventually broke up due to acrimony - guess it was too touch a task to keep liberals and conservatives talking civilly to each other - right after Bush re-election.

I could just never understand why folks were in favor of the war given that it wasn't Iraq who sponsored or organized or planned the September 11th; it wasn't Iraq behind the attack on the USS Cole; it wasn't Iraq behind the embassy bombings; it wasn't Iraq behind the Khobar Tower bombings.  Was it war fever?  Perhaps it's partly because of age - i'm old enough to remember the aftermath of the Tonkin Gulf resolution (too young to have been politically cognizant at the time), so would not understand how anyone could be conned by such specious arguments?

At this point, the only positive is that we will not engage in another large scale war in my lifetime, and hopefully not in my son's.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?