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Old 01-30-2008, 10:18 AM   #2950
Alex
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Join Date: Feb 2005
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I think that with the evidence and intelligence at hand in 2002 any significant leader from either party would have considered the continued presence of Saddam Hussein as leader of Iraq to be a serious threat to our national security. While there were naysayers, it was the general belief that Saddam Hussein had old WMDs and was pursuing more.

I considered him an unacceptable threat (without ever linking him to 9/11) and continue to believe that this belief was reasonable at that time.

However, I do not believe that any other potential president would have followed the same course of action that led to the Iraq War. They would have prioritized things differently and it is very easy to accept that this would have move Iraq down the list of immediate threats worthy of pre-emption. It was the specific combination of believing Saddam to be a general threat (which pretty much everybody did) with the neoconservative filter on how to prioritize the many threats that exits (which the rest of the government was then convinced to go along with).

Yes, other presidents may have also made the decision that Iraq was an unacceptable imminent threat, but the way they made the argument may have proven unconvincing. Or any other thousands of factors would have played out differently (with a Democratic president, a Republican controlled congress may have applied the breaks harder just out of general cantankerousness whereas in the reality Democrats who otherwise would have argued stronger knew they were on the losing side and didn't want to be easy victims of charges of unpatriotism once the war started).

That's why, while fun, alternative history and games of "what if" are ultimately pointless. While one can lay out an alternative sequence that seems logical and inevitable given one single variable change it isn't real. It always proceeds not from the logic of its antecedents but rather with the objective of its endpoint.
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