A Beginning

Dear United States of America,

Please turn off your television, stop playing world of warcraft and please get mad. While we were distracted a bunch of criminals of the lowest caliber have stolen our country.

By waving the flag of fear in our face they have in our name commited acts of attrocity. The America that our fathers, grandfathers and forefathers fought and died for is near death.

They will scream from their bully pulpit that this is not the case and that America is stronger than it ever was, but they are only concerned about making themselves rich at our expense. They will send our children to foreign lands to fight their oil wars and grow their war profits.

Now everything I have said has been in the abstract, I think it important that we talk in the factual.

The biggest and ugliest of these is Iraq.

Let's talk about these weapons of mass destruction that we needed to invade Iraq to get rid of. Oh yes, the ones that were supposidely carted off to Syria or something before we showed up. Okay, so why haven't our intelligence assets in Syria found them. If they were that much of a threat and we knew they were put onto planes and flown out of the country why didn't we follow them? Do you really think the Syrians would have been in any better of a position to really stop us if we'd wanted them? Shocking we could have even used the carrot and stick with them...i.e "Give us the weapons or we'll demonstrate the effectiveness of ours..."

The other argument that I hear from people all the time is that thatey actually found weapons of mass destruction, is'ts just that the media is underreporting it. The problem I see with argument is that I don't see how the media could suppress something like that. I suspect if president Bush had gotten wind that they actually found any weapons he'd immediately hold a press conference and say "Haha, I told you there were weapons! You should have listened to me, I was right!" Needless to say, I'm yet to see such a press conference. Not to mention all those people who were for this war would be screaming is so loud that there wouldn't be a way it wouldn't be widely known.

People then go along and quote the Iraq / Al Quida connection. There has never been any evidence that Bin Laden and Saddam were ever even friendly. Considering that Saddam had a pretty secular government and Bin Laden's goals pretty much go against all of that... There's a good reason he ended up in Afganistan and not Iraq. Not to mention the fact Saddam was pretty much running a one man, one rule type government, do you really think he'd tolerate terroist training camps on his soil? The guy was such a control freak the only type of training camps he'd allow would have been the ones that he had complete control of and knew the loyalties of the people coming out of them. Needless to say, he already had plenty of loyal troops. He would have had no use for Bin Laden. The guy is a nutcase and a liability for any country he's in. Seriously, if you talked to the Taliban leaders now and asked "Knowing now, how the US was going to react to 9/11 and what the were going to do to Afghanistan in their pursuit of Bin Laden, would you have let him into the country?" You could almost bet the answer would be something like "Knowing now what we know, we would have kicked him out of the country the same way Saudia Arabia did." Think about it. The Taliban went from owning Afganistan to it being occupied by a couple different forign powers, all because of Bin Laden and his organization. You can argue that it didn't really work out that well for the Taliban. So, in a nutshell the Bin Laden / Saddam argument just doesn't make any sense.

Once the whole WMD argument fell through, the next argument that was brought up was the democracy argument. Needless to say, go watch this (don't worry it's short and SFW). I recommend that people go out and read Thomas Ricks book Fiasco.