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Originally Posted by aceventura3
True - there are costs, but what would the consequences be if we didn't pay those costs. I remember a slogan from a transmission commercial where the guys says - "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later". I think ignoring the Middle East now would be a grave error and cost alot more in the future. I guess you think the opposite. If you are right we have incurred a cost that we can recover from, if I am right and we do noththing, we incur costs that we will never recover from. I think the risk of doing nothing is too high.
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What would be the consequences had we not interceeded in Iraq? Well that's quite simple. Most political and military analists not on the administration's payrole have been saying for the past 10 years that Sadam's power has (had) been steadily weakening. His grip on the civlians in Iraq was slipping. Resistences were popping up all over Iraq, ESPICALLY IN FALLUJAH. While they were probably headed for a civil war of some kind, it would have been their war. They would have won their independance from tyrany. They might hav eve set up a democracy of sorts there. That's where it was heading. There were no weapons of mass destruction, there were no links to global terrorism. There were humanitarian rights violations left and right, most of which were against their own people. There was involvement with the Palestinian/Israeli problems. The Iraqi government was starting to fall apart. They were zero threat to the US, and a negligable threat to their neighbors, even Israel. If we had done nothing, nothing would have been done to us.
It was never my suggestion to completly ignore the Middle East, but as we can now see plainly, invasion was stupid. We've lost the souls of thousands of American soldiers, we have countless injured American soldiers, but more importantly we have tens to hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. Why more importantly? Well, because they never made a commitment to join a military. They never signed up to risk their lives. They were born. They lived under tryany, trying to survive. Just as the power that tyrant was yielding was beginning to slip, missles from warships hundreds of miles out to sea came and destroyed lives. Was that taken into account in your "incurred costs that we can recover from"? We can't bring those people back from the dead, American or Iraqi, so I'd say that's something we can't recover.
It's alright for us to stop being selfish for 5 seconds. It's alright to consider the harm we've done, and how to apologize for our mistakes. The best leaders in history understand that they are not Gods. They are the same as those they represent, and to err is human. I make mistakes and so do you. So does the president. If I'm right, that means that our future is broken on the rocks of ignorance. We have dug ourselves into a hole deeper than anyone else, ever. Our only safety net is other's dependence on us, and that won't last forever. The risk of invasion was and still is too high.