Well boys, it's easy enough to make accusations that the president "lied" to us. Nancy Pelosi and others threatened to start impeachment proceedings against Bush during the last congressional elections, because they thought it would play well in Peoria.
And it did, to a certain extent, but now that she is in power Pelosi has backed off of that threat because, when push comes to shove, she would have to
prove the accusations. That would be problematic, for nearly every intelligence organization in the western world believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. What would you do, indict the man for believing what his own intelligence agency those of our long-time allies told him was going on in Iraq?
If so, then the heads of every intelligency agency that supplied the governments of the west with this faulty information should roll.
You can disagree with Bush's war policy, if you must, but is making mistakes during war an impeachable offense? I think not, else the government would have to fire every general involved in the conflict.
It appears, from many of the criticisms aimed at the war policy, and the constant references to Iraq being a "quagmire", that Osama Ben Laden is right about us; Americans no longer have the backbone for a sustained conflict. By way of comparison, consider this: 25,000 Americans lost their lives during the Revolutionary War, or roughly one percent of the population. Our forces have suffered 4,000 casualties in Iraq. That's approximately 0.000013 of our population. Of that number, nearly 30% were the result of accidents unrelated to actual combat.
For those who believe that establishing a viable democratic government in Iraq is taking too long, consider this: the time that elapsed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of a stable government under the Constitution was eleven years.
We are too impatient, wanting instant results and a swift resolution to knotty and complex problems. Some things simply cannot be solved in a year or two.
As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times said, after visiting the mass graves of Saddam's victims, the presence of wmds was no longer necessary to convince him that the overthrow of Saddam was justified.
I, for one agree with that, and will never apologize for taking him down.
