Iraq war redux
Charles P. Pierce nails it again:
What the president announced last night, and what the president did today, strikes me as being beyond reproach. ISIS is a legitimately scarifying group, death-maddened fanatics with a taste for religious insanity and public executions. There is little doubt that they would make bloody shrapnel out of every man, woman, and child on that mountain. Every other alleged power in the region — including al Qaeda — are scared witless of these people and of what they are seeking to create.
I supported Bush 41’s decision to not carry the first Gulf war into Iraq. Yet I was dismayed by our reneging on our promises to the Kurds. At the start of the US’s first Gulf war I was still young enough (barely) to enlist in the military and gave it careful consideration. That’s how strongly I felt about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
I thought Bush 43’s decision to invade Iraq folly from the moment I heard the proposal. Nothing in the intervening years has changed my opinion. In fact, I’d like to see all of the opinion leaders (both politicians and pundits) who advocated for that war to be shunned by polite society, left bereft of friends, and penniless.
Nonetheless, ISIS scares the shit out of me. Far more so than Al Qaeda. To the point that I’m happy to support damn near anything, short of torture, President Obama does to obliterate the “murderous religious fanaticism run amok” represented by ISIS.