More Ralph Peters And Thoughts On The War

He was a hit last time, so here he is again dispelling more myths about Iraq.

I think it is important to note that Peters does not say everything is perfect in Iraq. He acknowledges U.S. mistakes and problems with the conditions in Iraq. On the other hand, he does not give in to the "civil war" hysteria of the past few weeks. Of further importance is the fact that he spent a lot of time observing average Iraqis and touring so that he could understand what normal life in Iraq is like right now.

Perhaps I should say a little bit about my view of the war. I disagree with it and I agree with it. How ambiguous can I be? I think that Saddam needed to be ousted, and that has nothing to do with discussion about whether or not he had WMD or is connected to 9/11. Those facts are somewhat irrelevant at the moment. More relevent is the fact that Bush was not certain about the WMD. Bush first believed they were there, when they were not found he backed away from that assumption, and now that evidence of their existence and/or programs for existence has turned up Bush has not said anything about that. It strikes me as odd that liberals do not jump on the fact that the Bush administration will not speak about this evidence. Rather, liberals keep right on denying any possibility of WMD in Iraq before the war. Strange. But that's a rabbit trail.

Back to the main point: the fact that a regime that scary was willing to allow us to believe they had WMD and were hiding them is enough for me. However, the timing was off on the whole thing. If we had waited for Europe to realize the danger they were/are in then we could have gone to war with less dissent later on. We're on the other side of the ocean and the best thing we could do is protect our borders and build up defenses until we have real allies across the seas. Kind of like World War II. Now, this would not have stopped some of the real crazies. The fact is that Vietnam made any extended war a traumatic and unpopular thing to do. Since then we have feared defeat so much that we have only entered wars that we could win in a heartbeat. We will probably think like that for another generation or two, until all the bitter ones have died out.

And those are my more rambling thoughts on that. I haven't made up my mind on everything yet, so maybe I'll distill it all later and write a post that makes more sense another time.