To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability.

You'll never guess...

Yup.. Bushie the first!

George Bush Snr, in A World Transformed, 1998

Funny I don't think jr read daddies book :(

From this interesting page:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/iconochasms.html

The 1990s slay me. In the wake of the Cold War, Americans found themselves without an identity.

Like Clinton leading the Democrats to the right at a time when the GOP was suffering (dissolved in Oregon for a period) ... wht was that all about? I grew up a bleeding heart. By the time I dropped out of the University of Oregon I was sick of the left. By the end of the Clinton administration and the arrival of the Bush, well ....

It took the Clinton years to chase me away from the Democrats. It's not necessarily Bill's fault; Congress bailed on him when they should have stood their ground, too. (The whole "Republican Revolution" was an awful period, but it's what Americans deserved.)

But just as it took leftism during the Clinton years to chase me away from leftism, it is the current Bush administration that has done so much to remind me of why my conscience lands me on the left.

And one of the things that really seals the deal insofar as that return to the ideological place where I belong is the simple fact that Poppy Bush was, is, and always will be a twit in my opinion. But it took George W. Bush Jr. to create a situation so unspeakably messy that Poppy comes out of it looking like a nice guy.

And I figure there's something seriously afoul in American priorities. I mean, jeez ... when I was a kid, imagining this kind of future for Americans was damn near treasonous. If I told people in 1981 that the Vice-President would preside over the end of the Cold War and that the result would be an American spiritual and intellectual decline, a vilification of American principles and a rejection of the rule of law that would culminate in the Vice-President's goofball son leading the country into a contrived holy war while terrorizing the US Constitution and doing everything in his power to steer the economy into the ditch ... wow ... I think my father might have resorted to violence.

What a difference twelve years makes. Desert Storm, though a disagreeable mess, still made sense according to American values. Americans now turn their back on those values. Thanks much for the quote, Dougermouse ... it still blows my mind that history is racing to absolve Poppy in the manner it is.

Then again ... this is not your father's Bush administration ....

(Note: That line will be completely ineffective for internationals or those who did not watch much television in America during the 1990s. And for those who know what I'm talking about, well ... it's still an anemic joke.)

:m:,
Tiassa :cool: