20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing... after 9-11 every intelligence agency said that Iraq had WMD ...and they did...in the smoldering ashes of the Pentagon and the WTC the idea of leaving Hussein (Sadaam not Barrack) in power with WMD was not in our best interests as the vote to go to war in the Congress proved

Buchanan has always been a can of mixed nuts, but he passed his sell-by date five years ago when he decided that WWII was a mistake of American aggression. So who can be surprised that he thinks the same of Iraq? As a military historian, he could be asking you if you´d like fries with that.

This is really just an excuse for him to say why we should do nothing about Iran, and should abandon Israel.

Was Iraq "worth it"? Only an honest discussion can make that determination, and Pat´s discussion is not honest. Any war has high costs, and one can never really know after the fact what would have happened if we´d taken another path. Plus our tactics and strategies were often dubious, we could have had the same results, for better or worse, much more cheaply in terms of American lives.

My opinion is that yes, it was "worth it", though we paid more for it than we should have. And Iran is a totally different situation.

The problem with this kind of conjecture is that there´s no way to know what might have happened in the alternative. Maybe fifty years from now it will be possible to see in retrospect the real import of these decisions.

No it was not worth it. If America fights wars without using ALL it´s military might and without a WILL to win then it´s not worth it. Japan was also a nutjob nation but two NUKES got their attention real quick.

We will never know because Obama never wanted to win in Iraq. You cannot remove his actions over the last four years. If he had not been president, it is unlikely Iraq would have been turned over to Iran or that we would have been forced to completely leave without any role in the country. People in that part of the world were not sorry to see Saddam removed. And they saw the first tangible acts of democracy in an Arab state when the Iraqis started voting. It is Obama who turned his back on Iran, who put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt, who has done everything he can to isolate Israel, who helped blow apart Libya. Those things have a real and continuing impact on what is happening to Iraq and throughout the entire Middle East.

There were weapons of mass destruction but they were trucked out of Iraq while discussion was going on about going into Iraq. Nearly every senator and representative voted to go in. I still have a list of the names. Later, some of them denied they voted for it. The dems are in control. If they still think it was wrong then pull out of the middle east and let them fend for themselves. Not one more American life needs to be sacrificed for being over there anywhere. Nor any of our allies. That being said, we don´t have many allies any more.

IMHO it didn´t require a retrospectroscope to know that spending our national treasure
(money but more importantly our gallant warriors)on nation building in the the land of Islam was and is a futile effort. Punish aggressors with great malice, put their oil fields off limits to them and then pump those fields dry.Having done that tell´em "Don´t make us come back here again!" Yeah I know this is neither "nuanced" nor Ivy League but it´s the way my world works.
nor

Mistake from the beginning. Semper Fi

Posted down the page:

http://lucianne.com/thread/?artnum=727738

The ROE in Iraq were a sick, pathetic joke even under W and his people.