The McLaughlin Show on Iraq

I really hate it when Pat Buchanan makes sense. He has been such an extremist wack-job so often that he normally rates no more consideration than the village idiot. Today he makes a great deal of sense. Scary, but maybe it takes a wack-job to be in tune with the times surrounding the Bush administration in Washington, D.C.

Pat says about fighting the war against terrorists that our Imperialist invasion of Iraq has caused terrorism to metastasize like a cancer. The central front against al Qaeda terrorism was and is Afghanistan, but our invasion of Iraq has caused the problem to spread to Iraq. It was a real gift to bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Terrorism has also metastasized to Europe, and probably to America. London 7/11 was conducted by native-born British citizens who have been 'infected' by the ideas behind Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. That means that the White House idea that we will fight terrorists in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here in the U.S. is bogus. Our invasion of Iraq has caused the danger to spread.

Personally, I don't think the same would have been true of our invasion of Afghanistan. We had justification for that, and the entire world (including the Islamic Middle East) accepted that. The invasion of Iraq was stupid irrational Imperialism that has had mostly negative results for America and for the Iraqis.

Following the questionable purposes for the invasion of Iraq, and ignoring sick rationale the Bush administration used to justify it, there is the utter incompetence with which the Bush administration has dealt with the occupation. Right now the U.S. military in Iraq can control the ground it stands on, nothing else.

It didn't have to be that way. The set of failurs in Iraq were caused first by the failure to use enough troops in the beginnin. That was followed by the precipitous disbanding of the Iraqi military for Republican ideological reasons. Then there was the ideologically-based incompetence and severe corruption of the CPA under Jerry Bremer. Every bit of this was predictable and predicted, then ignored by the Bush administration.

When the history of the Bush administration is written the key words will be ideological and incompetent. The amazing thing is the great job the Bush administration has done making the really toxic Nixon administration look good in comparison.