One Take On Bush's Iraq War Anniversary Speech
I wanted to post this earlier, but forgot. From Slate's Fred Kaplan:
Setting aside the Hussein-Hitler comparison, there's some sense to what Kaplan wrote. Bush chose Iraq, not Iran or North Korea, out of his "Axis of Evil." Bush chose to make Iraq a focal point despite evidence that Afghanistan was the place to be to get Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein did not attack America, but Bush did lead the attack on Saddam Hussein.
Ultimately this is his mess, and it's a shame he hasn't done more to clean up after himself.
Imagine that President Harry S. Truman had not put into motion the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods Agreement, NATO, and the various other institutions that propped up Western freedom in the destructive wake of World War II—and that, on the fourth anniversary of V-E Day, the greatest boast he could make was: "Today the world is rid of Adolf Hitler." It would have been a great boast, but beside the point as Paris and Rome collapsed amid poverty, despair, and subversion.
So it is with George W. Bush, whose failure to repair postwar Iraq is particularly disgraceful, since this war was launched at his initiative, not as a response to aggression.
Setting aside the Hussein-Hitler comparison, there's some sense to what Kaplan wrote. Bush chose Iraq, not Iran or North Korea, out of his "Axis of Evil." Bush chose to make Iraq a focal point despite evidence that Afghanistan was the place to be to get Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein did not attack America, but Bush did lead the attack on Saddam Hussein.
Ultimately this is his mess, and it's a shame he hasn't done more to clean up after himself.
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