Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
Obviously, we had the ability to kill Saddam, because he's dead now. Obviously he knew it, because he had a spider hole prepared.
We had the ability to kill him after we found him in the hole; we did not to get the bases at the time of the invasion or for a great many months thereafter; so that's really a sort of silly argument.
Or to express my thoughts more concisely, if all we wanted were bases, we should have offered to call off the invasion in exchange for bases. Since the people in the White House are pretty smart and didn't make that offer, I suspect it was about more than bases: at least in their minds.
Of course it was about more. As I said there were over a dozen reasons I can think of and they probably had a few I didn't think of -- I simply believe the bases were among the most important if not the most important of all those reasons.
... give us permission to use bases to attack Iran than an Iraqi Prime Minister who has been told that he's liberated and holds hands with Ahmadinejad. But that's just my opinion.
Who said anything about attacking Iran? That's your construct, not mine.
I'd place the blame for the last five years higher up: a combination of arrogance and ignorance of the basic fact that urban combat can't possibly play out like the 1991 slaughter in the dessert. But that's also just my opinion.
Those factors had a play but were not the principal problems.
Given that one of UBL's objectives was to weaken our the economy, and our massive debt has contributed to the weakening economy, I personally wouldn't brush off the expense so quickly.
You don't have to, I've seen our debt far higher in my lifetime so, hopefully, you won't mind if I yawn and move on.
Slate has a whole bunch of people reflecting on whether they were right or wrong five years ago.
And all these people had what role to play in the whole thing? You really pay much attention to those talking head squirrels? Surprising.

Since I'm batting somewhere between .800 and .900 on the whole thing, you'll forgive me if I sort of ignore the Punditocracy who rarely get much of anything correct in my observation.