Musings on Iraq.

What I don't understand about Iraq is how everyone blames it all on Bush Jr. There are several points that often get lost in the rhetoric of how we can blame Dubbya, but that I think need to be remembered.

1) This isn't an American war. The conflict began with, the UN and still remains a UN effort, it just so happens the only army in the UN worth anything is the US army. In spite of France's surrender before we ever went in, we are enforcing a United Nations mandate, not a United States mandate.

2) The gulf war never ended. The Sr. Bush thought it would be a good idea to end the war after only 100 hours and simply called a cease-fire after having broken the Republican National Guard. Admittedly, the objective was to stop the invasion of another country, not to press on and destroy Saddam's reign, but the war never officially ended, there was a ceasefire agreement, with specific terms and that was it.

What I have always found odd was Clinton's inability to actually live up to the terms of the ceasefire. We told the Saddam lead government that they had specific obligations to live up to, and they didn't. Clinton's answer? Let's just fire a few missiles every few years.

In spite of voting for him, I don't like Bush, but if nothing else, I respect him for keeping America a country with integrity. When we say, "We'll sign a ceasefire with you if you agree to our terms," we have to be willing to enforce those terms.

3) We're there. Bad intel or not, we went in. We went in and we took the government out. So now we either commit to staying until we can assist in getting up a working government, or we pull out and let the vacuum suck in whatever it will, and frankly I think the consequences of leaving a vacuum are far worse than if we had never gone in to begin with.

So should we stay or should we go? Should we stay or should we go? If we stay, yes, there will be trouble. But if we go, quite frankly, there will be double.