Financial Shakeup this weekend

[AMoore]

Darren wrote:

I can't defend GW and I don't want to.

it is obvious that we now have a fairly permanent military base in Iraq. I don't know how long it takes to roll into Iraq's neighbors, but it has to be easier than flying troops from the US.

We now have a massive force, half-way around the world, in a region that is by any accounts volatile.

Maybe I'm a skeptic; I just don't see us ever getting out of Iraq because of the oil and because of the strategic advantage of having such a force there. We could probably launch and sustain 2 large scale military operations, one from the US and one from Iraq at the same time.

I don't think that was by mistake, and its one of the only semi-reasonable reasons I can see to go there in the first place.

It was wrong to go there in the first place -- GW lied about the cost and the premise (and knew it), and now we're stuck. I was/against going in but now I think it's wrong to leave, for several reasons.

The interesting thing will be as time goes on to see what other military conflicts are started and what our involvement will be. Those future unknown situations are going to be what characterizes GW in history, good or bad.

Not that I think it would ever be necessary to do so, but we could have always deployed troops from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanastan (now) and many other places in the Middle East. I don't think we did this for strategic reasons.

One U.S. trident submarine is more powerful than any nation in the world, except the U.S. This is a great threat / defense against hostile sovereign nations with governments. What we need is small groups of commando's and intelligence personnel to combat terrorism. We did not need this Iraq mess.