Arthur Schlesinger: This is Bush's Vietnam

[muriel_volestrangler]

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=511530

the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place

There was no popular clamour for war. If we had not gone to war, few Americans would even have noticed

Vietnam and Iraq are dissimilar in vital respects. In Vietnam we Americans inserted ourselves in an ongoing civil war; in Iraq we imposed war on the country for reasons that turned out to be false. But Vietnam and Iraq are indeed similar in the "quagmire'' effect - and in the lack of historical experience and cultural knowledge and the consequent ignorance and arrogance that lead us into quagmires.
...
Other reasons - oil, Israel, the search for military bases in place of Saudi Arabia, liberation of Iraq from a monstrous tyrant - are secondary compared to the historic mission for which the Almighty has chosen him.

To accomplish the mission, Mr Bush has transformed the basis of American foreign policy. For the nearly half century of the Cold War, US foreign policy was founded on containment plus deterrence. Mr Bush scrapped that. The new basis of US foreign policy is preventive war. As President Bush has said, "We must take the battle to the enemy... and confront the worst threats before they emerge.''

The immediate reason that Mr Bush opened Pandora's box in the Middle East and invaded Iraq was his moral certitude that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he was working in close partnership with Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida. Those convictions turned out to be delusions. This denouement does great harm to Mr Bush's credibility and to that of the United States; it has got us into a ghastly mess in Iraq; and it has diverted attention, resources and military might from the war that should have commanded the Bush administration's highest priority - the Afghan war against al-Qa'ida and international terrorism. Meanwhile Afghanistan is a mess too. Mr Bush chose the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[izzie]

1. Puts it right on for me.

I was used to the other way as I lived most of my life in the cold war but I still think we are wrong to invade countries that may have people who would hurt us. That leaves China some place I do not like if this is how we are now going to do things.