Combat vet on Bush's speech..

From www.optruth.org ... and being combat vets, they know what they're talking about...and they did not appreciate Bush's speech last night:

The President's Speech, or The Live Bait Approach to National Security
Re: the speech last night.

His speech says basically "we were attacked on 9/11 and so we went to war." And then he goes on to "we're fighting terrorists in Iraq." But it's like, woah. Wait a second. They weren't there before we fucked it up. That's an important point that needs to be addressed. And he loses credibility by not doing so.

It's like assaulting a building because you're convinced WMD-wielding terrorists are there and want to kill you, discovering there's nothing there but a big warehouse full of newspapers, accidentally lighting the newspapers on fire, and then when people ask what the fuck you're doing in the building in the first place answering, "putting out the fire."

That shit may be convincing if you just arrived on the scene, but we saw the whole thing go down up close and in person.

And I've just never been a big fan of the "live bait" theory of national security. That being that it's better to send volunteer Americans to a target range in the middle east so they can be killed there rather so that non-volunteer Americans don't get killed on our own soil. If we're going to be sending Americans to a war that WE start, it had better have a pretty damn good, well-thought-out strategic objective from start to finish, and I don't think that standard was met. I'm furious every time I hear some asshole say "it's better for Americans to die overseas than here at home." To paraphrase someone much more famous than me, the point of combat is not to die for your country, it's to make the other poor bastard die for HIS country.

That being said, the President is obviously right. We ARE being attacked by terrorists in Iraq now, thanks to our own piss-poor planning. And we do have to defeat the terrorists and it is, to some extent, nice to have them all in one central location so we can kill them there. But that assumes that the guys that are showing up in Iraq are terrorists who have been diverted from operations elsewhere (like our own CIA and other spooky operatives) rather than new recruits who were recruited on the basis of the invasion itself. Unfortunately, the available evidence seems to indicate that our presence in the region is manufacturing plenty of local (though not necessarily Iraqi) insurgent recruits so that operatives elsewhere can continue work as usual, and THAT is not a strategic objective that is worth our effort, in my opinion.
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