SparrowHawk said:
George W. Bush - I warned you not to leave Iraq!
Ron Paul - I warned you not to go in the first place
There you have it folks.
2003 invasion of iraq wasnt THE MISTAKE it was an escalation of the original 1991 Mistake
imagine a world where we didnt "liberate" Kuwait..
A few royal prince's less... the people still living in squalor.
Al Qaeda grew out of outrage of US Troops being stationed in Medina and Mecca. and other holy areas of the Kingdom(saudi arabia) had we never built up the middle east and removed Saddam from Kuwait, we would have never stationed Troops there.. OBL would have probably never grew out of a local bit player.
No Khobar Towers, No Embassy Bombings, no USS Cole attack, . no 911...
Would he never had become a threat theres no way to tell, most likely he would have turned his attention towards Israel and died shortly after...
George W Bush escalated the mistake of going into iraq but we would have never had a mistake to escalate had we never bothered to go in the first place.. Of course we would have heard rumblings of Munich but im tired of hearing that crap everytime we dont like someone invades someplace... its not always a Munich moment. Kuwait wasnt an angel of a government and had pushed Iraq towards that invasion through high interest rates on the 65 billion dollar debt Iraq owed Kuwait following the Iran-Iraq War, that it supported. And also the oil that Iraq said that Kuwait was stealing using slant drilling.
All of which escalated the conflict But at the end of the day it was a regional conflict. and had Saddam moved his attention south into Saudi Arabia as was the "threat" that made us go to war in the first place, we could have easily have removed him from there too. And there would have been a much larger coaltion.. Saving The holy sites instead of what the followers of OBL in Saudi Arabia saw later as an invasion would have actually been better for us.
yes i know that hindsight is 2020 its easy to give alternate answers to history, but we have OBL's words as to the reason why he declared war on the USA, and it wasnt our "freedom" its not much of a stretch to say had we never put troops into Saudi Arabia to support our intervention in Iraq, we would not have angered a large number of Saudis about being there...