Bush Was Right

As the terrorist threat once again makes its presence known, and President Obama, hopefully, is grudgingly facing the reality of radical Islam, perhaps it is time to finally acknowledge that George Bush was right. Just for a minute, imagine the current Mideast situation with Saddam Hussein still in power in Iraq. Has anyone considered what the Mideast would look like if Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq?

There is no doubt in my mind that Bush and his cohorts trumped up the reason for invading Iraq. The intelligence may have indicated the presence of weapons of mass destruction, but Bush minimally had to have had doubts. He just took the opportunity as the facts presented themselves and ran with them.

I have been writing a Mark Knows It All column for many years now. And I wrote several times back in the day that if you wanted to know why Bush wanted to invade Iraq, all you had to do was look at a map. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States was facing an untenable Mideast situation. Enemies were everywhere, and right where the oil was. Our only true base of operation in area was in Israel, and that was on the wrong body of water. Outside of Jordon, Egypt and Kuwait, America did not have one friend in the region…and that included the Saudis.

After 9/11, America made a quasi commitment to “free” Afghanistan of the Taliban and Al Qaida. But what good was Afghanistan…the graveyard of empires? No population. No industry. No natural resources, and a piss poor location. If we wanted to make our presence known in the Mideast, we had to do better.

Iraq filled the bill. Here was country with a strong, educated middle class made up of mostly of moderate Moslems. The dictator had managed to keep the jihadist hoy ploy out of the country. It had oil. It had a major port. The Kurdish population in northern Iraq was friendly. To the north of them was Turkey, the most secular of Arab states.

So look at the map now…we have major base in Iraq, a major base in Afghanistan, and our navy to the south. We have surrounded Iran, the granddaddy of whack job Arab (excuse me…Persian) states. At the end of the day, Iran posed then, and poses now, the greatest threat to the United States as a state sponsor of terror which is well on its way to gaining a nuclear weapon. This is a state that could possibly annihilate Israel and parts of Europe with its nuclear capability, and spread that threat to the United States. We are there, with guns pointed right at them.

So, do I think Bush trumped up the WMD excuse to invade Iraq? Yes I do. But I believe his true reasons were well founded on sound principles of regional balance of power politics. If we weren’t in Iraq now, American interests in the Mideast would be tenuous at best. And for all of the American lives lost in the Iraq war, a subsequent war without our current presence in Iraq would result in a loss of catastophic numbers of Americans, as well as Europeans, Israelis and Arabs.

All you have to do is look at the map.