Out of touch with Reality

Reuters reported today that Senator John McCain thinks that Senators Clinton and Obama are weak on national security and their Iraq stance would hand al Qaeda a victory.

This assertion is laughable as the Iraq war and this disastrous War on Terror that was started by the Bush Administration in response to the attacks of September 11 already ARE victories for al Qaeda!

Let's review. Before the Iraq war, Iraq was a secular state run by the evil Saddam Hussein. Note the use of the word "secular", Islam was allowed but religion had nothing to do with the government of Saddam Hussein. See for instance the third paragraph of the "Modernisation" section of Saddam's Wikipedia page.

As a result, al Qaeda HATED Saddam's regime and had called for Islamic forces to rise up and overthrow them. However, Saddam's regime was so brutal and kept such tight control of the country, that al Qaeda had made zero progress towards that goal.

We then invaded, overthrew Saddam's government, disbanded his Ba'athist army, and then enacted our "plan" of protecting Iraq's oil fields for Halliburton while watching the rest of the country slide into chaos. al Qaeda then used that chaos to ENTER Iraq in the first place, handing them a major victory. Now they had an excellent arena for recruiting and training new members at our great expense (both in terms of the nigh trillion dollars our county has wasted on this war, not to mention the greater expense of the loss of life, limb, and sanity of our brave troops).

And after all this, with the actions of the Bush administration demonstrably making our country less secure, placing our country at greater risk, shamelessly profiteering on the War, and relentlessly assaulting our civil liberties, the de facto Republican nominee has the audacity to say that the Democrats will hand al Qaeda a victory just demonstrates how out of touch with reality Republicans are.

Its frightening... and makes me all the more satisfied with my decision to support Obama to be the nominee for the Democratic party. Its time we run these war profiteering scoundrels out of office and do what we can to clean up the mess the Republicans have made of this county over the last eight years.

We were in such a good place eight years ago... peace, prosperity, strong civil liberties, and more.

Lets hope we can get back.

Ken