The thinking after Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait was that there was no need for the U.S. to do any more...that Saddam would cease to be the powerful ruler he'd been.  I remember listening to (I believe) Colin Powell at the time and he said they didn't want to appear to be piling on by following Iraqi forces into Baghdad.  That logic sounded reasonable to me.

Skip forward a few years and you've got all the world's leaders saying that Saddam posessed wmd and that there needed to be a regime change.  U.N. resolutions were in place to have him removed and with the exception of a couple countries who were scamming the oil for food program we were all in agreement that it was time to move in.  Clinton himself proposed the idea of regime change during his administration.  The onus was always on Saddam to prove that he no longer had wmd...he never did that. 

It's troubling to watch as the support for the war has erroded as it has and to understand why that is happening.  Had there been less focus on the negative and more on the positive we would no doubt be further down the road to succeeding in Iraq.  For political purposes it's always been about the negative to help bring about failure for this administration.  Keep the I.V. drip of negative reporting going and before too long you'll have the results you desire...an erosion of pulic support for the war and the administration.  It never mattered that what we were doing was a good thing for everyone.  All that mattered was showing enough carnage day in and day out on the evening news to make certain our chances for success were nill.  It would be nice if they'd take that same approach with partial birth abortion but I'm not expecting that to happen.  Photos can be very powerful you know.

Before I go just let me say that I'm not bitter or all that surprised with the results of the election.  I do think that Bush had gotten a bit too heady with his power.  It's also troubling to me to see him only now begin to reach out to democrats who he had no time for only recently.  Where was that gesture months ago?  Early on in his first term he included democrats in important legislation.  I know that J. Kerry helped to craft the 'no child left behind' legislation.  I think Kennedy was also a part of that team.  Somewhere along the way they stopped working together and that was wrong.  It's my hope that with divided government we can start rowing in the same direction for a change.

Kevin g