Worst since Vietnam?

[Jonesy]

So, a leading Vietnam veteran politician is calling Iraq our biggest mistake since Vietnam? Do you agree? I think the verdict is still out on how bad Iran/Contra was, especially if we end up fighting Iran. also, Reagan's pull out of Lebanon emboldened a new generation terrorists that we are fighting now and could rank up there with Bush's mistake in Iraq.

 

 

Hagel: Bush speech worst blunder since Vietnam

11:25 AM

 

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) -- U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel offered Thursday what might have been the harshest criticism to date of President Bush's plan to commit more troops to Iraq, calling the president's Wednesday night speech "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder carried out since Vietnam."

 

Hagel's comment drew applause in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in which members questioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the plan to commit 21,500 additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

 

The commotion prompted Committee Chairman, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., to call for order.

 

The remarks by Hagel, a Republican, followed his scathing rebuke Wednesday night of the Iraq plan. He called it a "dangerously wrongheaded strategy that will drive America deeper into an unwinnable swamp at great cost."

[moocks]

He might just be right.

 

We cut and ran in Viet Nam. That was the mistake.

 

Now the same voices are calling on us to repeat that mistake in Iraq.

 

If we don't want to win a war. We shouldn't get invorved in the 1st place.

 

If we do. We should take the gloves off.

[Joe]

Worse than Vietnam is a distinct possibility. Nothing that happened there has come back to haunt us. This freakin' disaster in the Middle East could screw us for decades!

[BrianBM]

I'd put it a little differently. Iraq is the American Blunder of the Century because the President was absolutely, totally unwilling to commit the effort needed to make victory there and in Afghanistan a certainty, not because we went in. If he'd been willing to make the effort recommended up front by Gen. Shinseki (and every retired brasshat that spoke) we'd've won. I think history will be more generous to the President, in evaluating his decision to go to war, then in the unique incompetence he brought to the waging of it. He's been an ennabler of every bad consequence imagineable.

 

What a difference, now, between the President Bush who spoke this week and the cocksure man who pretended to fly onto a carrier, to announce Mission Accomplished! ....