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Originally posted by sgtclub
The situation at hand more closely resembles the lead up to WWII rather than Vietnam. I know you are pretty damn literate in that history - do you not see the similarities between the appeasement of Hitler and the appeasement of AQ? In both cases, much of Europe believed that if they just turned a blind eye to the agression, the aggressor's appetite would be satisfied and they would be safe. Clearly in WWII they were wrong and I do not see how the intervening 70 years changes this analysis.
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Again you confuse ends and means. Europe was with us when we went after the Taliban. You can support the war on terrorism but not think that invading Iraq was the way to fight it. You can even think that invading Iraq was counter-productive. If we end up with a weak government there -- think Lebanon before Syria came in -- it'll be more of a haven for Al Qaeda than it was under Hussein.
I'm not drawing an all-purpose parallel between Vietnam and Iraq. They're too different.
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I'm not sure where you think Bush has gone wrong. The view on the left is that if Bush would have been "better" at coalition building, our allies would be with us. This is just a faulty belief. Those that were against the war in Iraq would not have been pursuaded no matter who was president or what tacts were taken. So the real decision Bush was left with is (a) do I do what I believe is necessary in order to protect America, even at the costs of alienating certain of our allies or (b) does preserving our relationships with our allies take precedent in all cases, even if I believe they may be wrong? Thankfully, he chose the first option.
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It's now clear beyond all dispute that invading Iraq was not "necessary in order to protect America." We can still disagree about whether the invasion is going to leave us better off in the long run, but that is a different question.
My point about Bush's leadership is this: The way he put his coalition together made it easy for country's to drop out, and with popular opinion running so against the war in so many places, this was surely to be expected. So wasn't he setting himself up for this kind of setback. If, for example, he had been able to get NATO or the UN to commit, then it's harder for a country like Spain to drop out of NATO.
It's not much of a point. It's just that you folks are willing to laud Bush when things go well, but when things go poorly you don't seem to think of looking at what he did to get us here. (I don't even think that what happened in Spain is that much of a setback, objectively.)
