bssc said:
The issue I have with this analogy is that Saddam and Afghanistan were two different illnesses. Instead of going into Afghanistan with overwhelming forces and eliminating bin-Laden who is the source of the 9/11 disease, the USA switched midstream. It only committed 30,000 troops in Afghanistan versus some 120K in Iraq. It was like Bush stopped treating tuberculosis to go after a hangnail.
bin-Laden's forces attacked American Embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole and were responsible for 9/11. Saddam attacked Iran (I don't think many people complained and the US ended up supporting him), Kuwait (after Ambassador Gillespie seemed to signal it was OK) and tried to assassinate Bush senior (and failed).
bin-Laden's forces are religious fundamentalists. Saddam's forces are Sunni socialists who suppressed fundamentalists.
Portraying the two movements are an attempt to disguise the fact that
1) We never got bin-Laden, who was responsible for 9/11 and is still running around free 6 years later because we have dropped the ball
2) The Iraqi situation is a mess of our own making not related to 9/11.
These are two separate diseases.
I agree that Iraq and Afghanistan are different problems. (lets kill the medical analogy) Where we disagree is how related they are. We are not at war just with Al Qaeda but with all radical islamic jihadist, that have the power to harm Americans and American interests. While it is true that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, it is is not true that Iraq had no terrorist. Abu Nidal the most infamous terrorist from the 1970s was living in Baghdad until he had a falling out with Saddam and was killed, we capture several wanted terrorist in Iraq, and Zarqawi himself after being wounded in Afghanistan went to Baghdad. Now I am guessing it isn't because the Baghdad hospitals offered the world class care but because Saddam was happy to help anybody who was fighting there joint enemy.
The secular nature of Iraq under Saddam is mostly a relic of early reforms from the Baath party in the 60s and 70s to modernize Iraq and rein in the clerics. Wahaddism had spread to Iraq under Saddam and he was increasingly becoming a good Muslim. If you read his speeches during the Iran-Iraq war there were only passing obligator praising of Allah, in contrast his speeches in the 90s were all about the need for good Muslim to destroy the great Satans of Israeal and the US. As recently as 2002, when most Arab countries where making at least token efforts to increase woman rights, Iraq under Saddam was going backward. For instance he legalized honor killings that year, and allowed local Islamic clerics/councils to enforce various Sharia laws.
I won't re-argue the event leading up to the first Gulf War, suffice to say I don't think you have all the data.
Regarding Afghanistan, while it would have been nice to put a 100K troops in Afghanistan, the reality is Afghanistan is probably the hardest place in the world for the US to fight a war. US troops require huge logistical support and we simply don't have transport aircraft to sustain a large force. The Soviet never exceeded a 100K troops and they border the country and had devil of time keeping their forces in supply.
The bulk of Afghanistan war was fought by a few thousand special force with much of the manpower supplied by the Northern Alliance. The only way NATO is able to sustain a the force we have there is because we have a built up the infrastructure of Aghanistan, none of this exist right after 9/11. So while it nice to play arm chair general and say we should have more troops in Afghanistan, short of seizing every commercial jet in the country, there just isn't a way to do this in a land locked country on the other side of the globe..
