Congress is in recess, the President is on vacation (again), much of Washington is on the Delaware Shore, heck even The Note is away. So there is little, or nothing going on in Washington. Cindy Sheehan and how hard the Democrats will blast away at J...

Well, if he opposed SS "reform," I'd say his political instincts are better than, oh, George W. Bush's.

The mullahs are in power in Iran, hard at work on real, not phantom, WMD. There is a genuine lunatic in power in North Korea, he has WMD and is hard at work on delivery systems. We do billions of dollars of business with a very ugly totalitarian regime in China. Lets not even talk about Africa.

Is the world better off/safer then it was when Saddam was in power? Its pretty hard to even argue that Iraq is better off, given the current carnage.

He's a waste of bandwidth.

I'm guessing you mean a Saddam-like dictator, since obviously we would've kept Saddam in our custody if we had little faith in the incoming gov't.

My position on democracy in Iraq was/is that if the Iraqis want democracy, they'll get it for themselves, & if they don't, we can't lead 'em to it. "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think," as Ms. Parker said.

So removing Saddam & his cronies, keeping the army intact, and letting the Iraqis sort out what would happen next, might've been messy, but as compared to the insurgency, that's less & less of an objection.

The flawed intel and miscalculations were how the war was sold to America. I suppose a different president might have been able to remove Saddam, look around and go “oops, no WMD” and leave the premises, but Bush wasn’t him.

And that would have resulted in Saddam being back in power within a couple of months.

Conservative lawblogger Stephen Bainbridge is getting a lot of what they call in Washington “strange new respect” for his strongly-worded criticism of the President’s international and domestic policies. While liberals like Kevin Dr...

The question now is how do we clean up the mess without massively harming the ability of the US to influence events in the region and conduct a rational foreign policy where the rest of the world does not look at the US as some ignorant cowboy who should not be trusted to weild its great power.

Watching this war evolve over the last couple of years made me feel like I did when the police called me in the middle of the night to come get my teenager that had done something stupid. You still love the kid, and will do anything to keep the incident from ruining his life, but you know the rules have to change and you can not trust the kid like you did before.

My point is merely that the main criticism of Bush from the MoveOn.org crowd have to do with the "Bush lied" business about WMD and so forth whereas that part of the war isn't what went badly.

The more rational "poor planning for the aftermath" argument is one I quibble with at the margins but is not the one that seems to have most people in a froth.

If the war is ultimately a failure, it will be because of an overly ambitious agenda to reshape the Arab Middle East, not flawed intelligence on the nuclear program or miscalculations as to the danger posed by Saddam.

The flawed intel and miscalculations were how the war was sold to America. I suppose a different president might have been able to remove Saddam, look around and go "oops, no WMD" and leave the premises, but Bush wasn't him. (Okay, sure, "he," but it sounds funny.)

Plus, our utter failure to plan the postwar led to the insurgency, which then placed a substantial burden upon us to provide stability in Iraq. The PR consequences of doing so by setting up Saddam II were likely insurmountable.

So I think coming up empty-handed on the WMD's was partially the cause of the emphasis on nation-building. Granted, Wolfowitz & his ilk were for the latter all along, but I think the WMD fiasco put their ideas up front, faute de mieux.