Why You shouldn't Vote Republican

[netmouse]

Essay in The American Conservative.

It should surprise few readers that we think a vote that is seen—in America and the world at large—as a decisive “No” vote on the Bush presidency is the best outcome. We need not dwell on George W. Bush’s failed effort to jam a poorly disguised amnesty for illegal aliens through Congress or the assaults on the Constitution carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism or his administration’s endorsement of torture. Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why—thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.

As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation—as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides—the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony.
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Comments

[brendand.livejournal.com]

It appears your link(s) is/are broken. :)

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

they worked fine for me just now, though they did take a while to come up... maybe the site has been swamped. did you get an error msg or no response?

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

"f securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation—as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides"

Ah, yes, it seems those damn Jew neo-cons are responsible for the war in Iraq. We seem to really get around, don't we? Good thing we have Buchanan and his crew to keep an eye on us.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed that you read such venom into the suggestion that the US might have been trying to improve things for one of our strongest allies, and that it is one of the the disappointments we should note if the administration failed in that goal.

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

Buchanan has a long history of Jew baiting, and I'm also angry at the continuing narrative that "neo-cons" — all with Jewish names — engineered the war in order to advance Israeli interests.