I feel quite comfortable about expressing my opinion about Iraq:

Bush made the right initial move, but the reasons he gave and continues to give are bullshit.

Bad reason (and lies): WMD, al Qaeda

Good reason (and probably his real reason): Iraq is a strategically placed country and it serves our interests to make it a democracy. It doesn't hurt that it is also oil rich.

Bush should have just told the world his real reasons for his actions (includes actions beyond those in Iraq); he should not have tried to cover up his real reasons with his lying and his fake pandering to the religious right.

Bush's sobriety had nothing to do with it.

The focus group testing results of the last 3-day PR blitz came back, and it was hurting the Bush White House. Time for a new message!

Bush's initial move cannot have been correct: he chose to invade seriously undermanned. The US did not have the troop reserves needed to the get the 300K to 500K necessary for invasion, and pretty much nobody in the international community (other than the Brits) would do anything to get us to that troop level. Thus the Bush decision was colossally bad, and never really made any sober assessment of reality.

But I thought we left the political stuff off of MeCha?

drunk or just an imbecile? you decide.

I just watched some video of him in China, and he's still doing that weird jaw thing every other sentence. Creepy.

More on the weird jaw thing.

That jaw thing is weird.

Weird that thing, his jaw.

Jawed a night, writ shit.

I thought the secondary reasons were sensible, but I thought the primary reason was imperative. I depended on secondary sources confirming that reason -- precisely because I didn't trust the administration -- which history has shown all derived from primary sources that were either engineered from the beginning or manipulated at emergence by the administration.

If I could do it all over again, there are about 1000 comments on MetaFilter I'd like to delete.

Watching this makes my OWN jaw hurt. What makes this especially weird is that the CIA just announced they think Castro has Parkinson's. Is that a classic Rove ratfuck "no! not the right hand! look at the left hand!" or what?

My uncle has alcohol-derived dementia. It's not pretty.

Maybe he has TMJ.

/lurk

I'm reprehensible?

Cool!

Meth mouth.

it serves our interests to make it a democracy.

You're probably right that that was the real reason, but it's still not really justification, is it? I mean, countries just can't go around involving themselves in millitary action just to "serve their interests". I'm sure Germany thought it would "serve their interests" to invade Poland. I'm sure there are lots of places that China would like to have "serve their interests". But the thing about sensible, mature global politics and diplomacy is that you don't just go starting wars out of self interest, right? The US has got it pretty good, compared to most of the world, so you wonder what they were hoping to gain for themselves by staging a war like this.

I do much the same thing. I think I'm getting TMJ. That, or my right-side wisdom teeth (the left have been extracted) are raising hell. Tons of clicks and pops and discomfort these days.