Better Off

*Update:* I hate it when I lose my temper on my blog only to discover “I was already outdone by -an Irishman- a Scot”:http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/18/galloway/index.html?source=RSS. (Many apologies.)

So the other day on the Al Franken show, Franken’s dittohead friend Martin Luther says to Al Franken’s objections to Bush’s military policy “so you think we’d be better off with Saddam Hussain in power?” And Al Franken stumbled over the answer. I don’t know why he stumbled over the answer, because *we were right*.

We were right before we went to war when we said we needed more allies. We were right when we said we needed more inspections. We were right when we said we needed an exit plan. We were right when we said it could turn into another Vietnam.

And then we were accused of being wimps, of hating the military, of hating America. But we were right.

Perhaps there’s some polite moritorium on saying “we told you so.” But screw that. We were right, we were right, we were _fucking_ right.

All other things being equal, a world without Saddam Hussain is much improved. But all other things are not equal. At the very least, Bush’s hunt to seek revenge on the man that once tried to kill his daddy has cost us “1,559 sons and daughters”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6230-2005Apr20.html, some of them mommies and daddies themselves. Are we better off with those 1,559 dead?

Our military is stretched far too thin and unable to respond to greater threats. Are we better off with our military might bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Our budget is broken because of the extra costs of conflict combined with massive tax cuts. Are we better off with a massive deficit?

We’ve traded the old democracies of Old Europe for new friends like the authoritarian false-democracies of the former Soviet states and terrorist-supporter Saudia Arabia. Are we better off with our new torture-friendly, DINO(Democracy In Name Only) friends?

We chopped off one old, slow, mostly toothless head and had a dozen smaller, faster ones appear in its place. Are we better off with an ongoing insurregent war, more terrorist training grounds, more talking points for radical terrorist recruiters?

Where once we could speak with authority on the issue of human rights, we now have Gitmo and Abu Gharib and “extraordinary rendition” and US Citizens incarcerated without recourse to the courts. Are we better off with tortured blood on our hands?

None of this was worth the removal of Saddam Hussain.

It’s not just that the cost is too high. It’s that the cost is so unnecessarily, so needlessly high. At dozens of times Bush had the opportunity to make another decision — one that would have removed Saddam from power but maintained the strength, vitality. and stability of our economy and our armed services. But time and again he chose tax-cuts over safety, expediency over strategy, tough-talk over diplomacy.

You can set out on the right path and make a royal mess of things. You can achieve something good but still cause so much distruction the good is outweighed by the bad. There was a right way and a wrong way to get rid of Saddam Hussain, but Bush tossed them all in the crapper. They weren’t cowboy enough. Bush created his own OK Corral and then got to snarl “Bring ‘em On” and yuck it up pretending to look for WMDs under the podium. Oh, and he got another term because Democrats can’t say “we told you so.” Bully for him.

1,559 soldiers dead. 1,559 soldiers dead _as of a month ago_. Are we better off without _them_?

Personally, if I could trade Saddam Hussain back in power but isolated, weakened, hemmed in for these 1,559 soldiers with their military careers still ahead of them instead of 1,559 funerals not attended by the man who sent them into combat without basic armor, if I could trade the _status quo_ of 2000 for all those lives, the respect of the world, the stability of our budget, the integrity of our Constitution, and the support of our NATO allies, and better, faster response to a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran, if I could make that trade, yeah, I would.

We had the _potential_, briefly, for the world to be better with Saddam gone. But Bush’s administration fucked that up, too. And now we have a goddamn mess. And we should — Al Franken especially should — be able to make that argument without sounding appoligetic about it. *Because we are right.*

_We tried to prevent this_ and when it failed _we tried to force the Administration to do it right_. And at every turn we were ignored, insulted, or reviled. We were told “we _make_ reality” and “screw your intellectual studies and lessons from history, you pointy-headed liberals,” and now what do we see? Thousands dead, a substantially weakened military, growing threats from all sides, and a few goons so totally unmoored from reality they anyone who sees this is a communist or terrorist or both. But we were right, _are right_, goddamn it.

And this administration *still* hasn’t learned.