> terrorism in general? Of course Iraq was invovled with terrorism in
> general, but so is/was Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Cyprus.
For the purpose of the quesiton as it was asked in the poll, I define
the terrorism that we have been fighting since 9/11 as any action
called forth by a Jihadist movement against what they define as their
"infidels". This war is not something that we started, it was
declared as a response to the call for Death to All Infidels (which
has been defined now broadly as westerners and more specifically
Americans.
That is not to say that this is the only form of terrorism - however,
it is what I am talking about in reference to this thread.
> 1.) Does disrupting Saddam's government make things better or worse
> for Americans?
Overall my answer for this question is yes - we have removed a regime
that has refused to cooperate with either the US or the UN. Right now
we are still in the process of stabilizing the situation, however Rome
wasn't built in a day and neither will rebuilding Iraq.
> 2.) Assuming the War on Terror is our top foreign policy priority, was
> Iraq, given what we knew then, the best use of our resources?
In my personal opinion the action in Iraq is majorly overdue - too
many of my friends have been shot at patrolling the UN mandated no fly
zone.
> The problem is that the Law of Unintended Consequences is a
> differential equation with a time dimension and time is only
> abitrarily limited. That means we have no idea how it's going to turn
> out. We can try to make estimates base on a limit, but only in
> retrospect.
Agreed, nobody has a working Crystal Ball - and anyone that says that
they do is lying. However we can measure our success by the knowledge
that we have completed the initial mission that we set out to do -
cause a regime change and introduce some form of a democratic system
into Iraq.
There is a cost involved as well as a reward. The rewards include a
reduced financial resource for terrorists and an increase in
opportunities abroad. The cost that we have paid in a fiscal sense
may seem high, however in the sense of personnel losses we have paid a
very *very* low price indeed. Especially compared with the size of
historical comparisons.
The thing to realize is that things are not over - and they're not
going to be "over" for some time... not everything falls into a time
schedule, be it a 49 minute program or a one week vacation. We're an
impatient people that way and it's us that needs to get over that
issue.
Hatton
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