Good Question
From msnbc.com:
worldblog.msnbc.msn.com
I remember asking that same question over and over again before the Iraq war started. Al I ever got for it was getting called a pussy, naive, a liberal and a terrorist sympathizer. I used to say that I’ll never understand what came over America then, but it was only because I didn’t want to go there. Americans, especially the chest thumping neocons, were chickenshit. I am a Republican, have been ever since I could register. But I knew that the Republican Party of 2000 was NOT the Republican Party I joined in 1982. (Even then you could see the subtle infestation of what we would later call the wingnuts.) The problems in 2002 were that on one side you had the neocons stoking fears, but on the other side the opposition was epitomised by the loony left who offered little other than insults about Bush’s daddy, hysteria like “No blood for oil”. In the sound byte war, nobody could hold the attention long enough to argue that we needed Sadaam Hussein to keep a lid on that country. We needed Hussein to counter Iran. Pakistan was even then the most important theater in the war on terror. You couldn’t have a real debate anywhere. So after all these years, I am vindicated. whoop de dam do.