Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Never Repent
I supported Iraq (you know what I mean) and never backed down. Now Bush is retreating into history, where the verdicts remain open. Meanwhile, we have a quagmire of another sort looming. Should Obama try to apply the lessons of the Great Depression? He seems to want to. But he must be cautious. Bush (as I saw it) tried to apply the lessons of World War II. But look how well that went. He pretty well proved that big decisions are difficult and risky, even while deferring those decisions is riskier. Neo-neocon sums up the situation nicely (as usual) in "Making predictions about the economy —- or much of anything else".
5 comments:
Well, she quoted TULOB, so I can't entirely hate her, but ick. So many people are actually suffering right now, no matter how a bunch of bloggers want to define words. People have lost jobs, and have no prospects, no insurance, no way to send their kids to college, etc. So yeah, let's remain "philosophical" about the whole thing. That's helpful. We wouldn't want to do anything drastic, no. I guess I'm in a bad mood, but Don how can you say you supported the war (which I did too, but more in theory rather than in execution and certainly NOT allowing them to vote in an Iran-friendly gov't), which was certainly a bold move, but at the same time be against anything economically bold? It doesn't do much good to get rid of terrorism if we're going to end up dying from lack of health insurance.
I am continually amazed that anyone supported that mess. I sure as hell did not and it sucks that I was right. You couldn't tell that it was well-thought-out b.s.? So many saw this coming.
Too bad, because we will be paying for it in a myriad of ways for many years to come. So will our kids and their kids.
Plus, it didn't make the world a safer place. On the contrary.
Finally I can comment. Been having weird troubles with the firewall.
Didn't make it a more dangerous place either. Things are different, is all. I still think the geostrategic picture is improved. I know I'm kind of old-school, but the thing about that is, the fundamentals never change.
And sometimes, more dangerous now is better than more dangerous later.
Doesn't matter now, done is done, my point was really just about the uncertainties involved with big decisions. Everyone wants to replay 1938 and hand Chamberlain some balls. Well, maybe now we know what might have happened.
We won't know all the consequences of what Bush did for years, maybe not even in our lifetimes. History might very well view him differently from the negative reviews he gets now. We can't know what would have happened if he'd done nothing and Saddam really did end up with WMDs eventually. He built a nuke factory once -- does anyone seriously think he wouldn't have tried again someday? We don't know what would have happened if Clinton had taken out Bin Laden when he had the chance instead of worrying about the 200 or so people in the way and how that would have affected his poll numbers. I think that was one of Don's points, and I tend to agree in principle that hasty rushes to conclusion re big changes could be way off. OTOH, we have to judge what we see in order to make decisions, and from here it seems that the Iraq thingie didn't work out that well for us, at least in the short term, while some of Bush's other policies probably were okay, such as Ashcroft's ruthlessness in getting rid of a lot of the "students" here on expired IDs and such. The FACT is that we have not had another organized terror attack on our soil since 9/11, and we know damn well they would have if they could have. Bush gets some credit for that. And what's kind of funny is that despite all the campaign rhetoric, it appears that Obama isn't going to make as many huge changes as some people thought. But we'll see...
iraq thingie?
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