The detail hindsight forgets, and the fiction murky memories create
We’ve been coming back to the Iraq War lately for two reasons. One is that the media keep bringing it up in the form of a knowing-what-we-know-now gotcha question aimed at Republican presidential candidates (although they offer no such question to Hillary Clinton concerning the 2011 withdrawl of all U.S. troops . . . not that she would answer). The other, more pertinent reason, is that ISIS is overrunning Iraq at the moment, taking advantage of the absence of a residual U.S. force and Barack Obama’s refusal to wage a real fight against them.
Conventional wisdom long ago decided that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and that for all his faults, Saddam Hussein’s presence was preferable to what came after - not to mention the price we paid in blood and treasure to remove him. I have remained one of the steadfast defenders of the decision to invade Iraq and take Saddam out, and I discussed that in some detail last week.
But I am just a guy who remembers what was happening at the time and found the post-event revision of history unconvincing. David Patten was there, fought in the war and remembers in much clearer details why we fought, and why the current revisionist narrative is total B.S. Many of the post-invasion decisions the Bush Administration made were mistakes, and resulted in a very difficult four-year post-invasion period that only turned our way with the 2007 surge. Patten doesn’t deny that and neither do I. But anyone who now argues that we would have been better off leaving Saddam in power is forgetting the true nature of his regime and the destablizing force he represented in the region.
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
