A conversation between two vets.

 This is an ongoing conversation between myself and another veteran.  He was first, and my comments are in between the dashes. -A As far as this “war”, I think it’s severely misguided.

The premise of it is good (however fighting a ‘war’ on terrorism is like fighting a war on racism or sexism) Somewhere along the way the cause was misdirected.

Sure Saddam was an evil person, but he wasn’t really doing anything to us. We had him pretty well contained. I feel like out of the “Axis of Terror” we decided to pick on the weaker one of the three. Now we’ve just stirred up the hornet’s nest. We’re fighting this ‘war’ halfassed. We can’t go after these people/groups only part of the time. We need to commit to it or just stop all together. Too many politians are playing the political game and are riding the fence. But I can’t blame them. This is a nasty fight that will last a long time.

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I think that we got rid of the enemy we knew and could anticipate, and traded it for the enemy we don’t know and can’t predict. Honestly, I think that our best course of action would (and I’m not just using hindsight, I’ve been saying this for years) be to have asked Saddam for the head of bin Laden on a plate in exchange for reduced or removed sanctions. Let the two of them fight it out, and then deal with the results. Better to have them fight each other anyway. Hes been our proxy before, why not again?

As to what to do now, GET OUT OF THE CITIES! We have no business being there other than to get shot at. They can’t beat us in the open desert, and the only thing we need to do to create a stable Iraq is train the Iraqi forces and then set up security to prevent forigners from entering and causing a mess. The Iraqi’s will create a democracy, we don’t need to do it at the point of a gun. Plus we can’t.