Tom,
<<Where are the appologies from all the liberal commentators and news analyist who desparaged Cheney for his comments on Russert's Meet the Press? He was right and the press was wrong.>>
Um, excuse me, but of course there will be some celebrating. Even a lot of celebrating. No one that I know of ever said that Saddam was popular in Iraq, that he didn't have enemies, that he was a "good" guy unfairly maligned. That isn't the point. You are being as mindless in suggesting that Cheney has been proven "right" by people running around cheering in the streets and looting stores as the people who questioned the course of the war a couple of weeks ago. And mind you, when some of the press was questioning the war, they were mostly repeating what they were told by the crowd that was down on Rumsfeld. We can agree that this criticism was as silly as the criticism of the Afghani bombing a couple of weeks into that event. The events of the next few weeks or even the next few months won't "prove" Cheney right or wrong.
The legitimate fears of anyone who actually thinks about this stuff have to do with what happens over the next two, three, four years. You've likely read about the mess that Afghanistan continues to be in. Some on this board and some in the US think that that mess is, well, just what they "want," or what "they" are used to, it's none of our business. Let them fight themselves as long as they don't export terror. This is far from my opinion--it doesn't take into account blowback. I keep mentioning this notion because it is central to any understanding of war (or any complicated political event, for that matter, but especially war, which arouses so many passions and extreme reactions). If Iraq is like Afghanistan in two years, three years, I won't count this whole thing as a "success." As Tom Friedman has said several times, "If we break it, we've got an obligation to fix it." If chaos or another dictator emerges in Iraq, you can bet that in one way or another terrorists will also emerge. This "lesson" that we've "taught" governments won't matter. We'll be like the little Dutch boy with his fingers in the dike, but there will be so many leaks that we won't have enough fingers to staunch the flow.
of course, that will all be "Billy Bob's" fault, as some so mindlessly continue to yap.
All IMHO of course.
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