First, I hope you are feeling better, Dale, and heal up quick. Second, watch out for Ed because I think now he’s gonna want to raid your medicine cabinet. So, if he shows up with flowers and chocolates and a card…don’t trust him and hide your meds. Now even though you’re on drugs I’m gonna go after you a bit on your post. To sort of even the playing field though I’ve got a bottle of Canadian Club I’m half way through and I’ve swallowed a couple sleeping pills…not to worry though not enough to be considered a suicide attempt.

----------------------------------------------- I'll make this quick; I voted for Bush because, each time he was the lesser of two evils. (Gore? KERRY??? c'mon...) -----------------------------------------------

Even though I’m pretty wasted here I’m going to refrain from using the word “evil” unless it’s a reference to Ed or the guy that flew a rocket into the Snake River Canyon…in which case I think he spelled it “Evel” but I mean come on, can you really expect proper spelling skills from a guy that crashes stuff for a living? The thing is I don’t know how you saw things this way when I think I would have voted for Evel Knievel and found him a better choice than Bush to run the country...and come on I would know going in that all Evel does is crash stuff. I’m really not sure why people demonize Kerry and find him so terrible. I’ve never heard anybody provide any solid reasons for this, they just don’t like him and that’s that.

------------------------------------------------- I supported the war in Iraq because EVERYONE said Saddam had WMD's; Russia, England, Clinton, Kerry. Ask a Kurd. He had 'em. -------------------------------------------------

Well, see this is not true actually. Russia and England did not support the idea that Iraq had a stockpile of WMD’s or facilities that were in the process of producing more. Even members of our own intelligence organizations disputed this idea prior to us attacking Iraq. I can go fish the internet and provide links for this if I must but that’s gonna take some time and I’m not going to go through all that right now. The key part of your statement is he HAD them and we know he did have them at one point yes…because we participated in selling him what he needed for them…but he was forced to destroy them after Gulf War One and put under heavy sanctions. Now the boys from Bushco got creative here and said well if he destroyed them he has to prove it and show us the destroyed stockpiles or evidence they were destroyed…they were asking for this years after he had destroyed them…a joke really...but Iraq did comply and Saddam was able to show he had destroyed most of them but not all and so the boys at Bushco said “Aha! He can’t prove he destroyed them all so therefore he’s got them!” So Hans Blix was dispatched and he and his crew found nothing but the boys at Bushco said “He’s not fully cooperating unless you can check his sock drawer! He must let us look in his sock drawer!” and so they said Hans was a patsy because he could not get access to Saddam’s sock drawer in a timely fashion and so they said that’s it Hans get out of Iraq we’ll be needing to Shock and Awe them at this point. So they sent Mr. Powell to the UN to perform one of the most outrageous dog and pony shows we’ve ever put on and members of our own intelligence community had a fit and said this was an embarrassment and a complete sham but Bushco ignored them and beat the drums and yelled “Mushroom Cloud!!!” again and again so nobody could hear or think anything but mushroom cloud and filled with shock and awe the people of this great country said “Yes, yes!!! We must shock and awe their Iraqi asses!!! Go get ‘em George!!!” Yes, Mr. Kerry too…he took the coward’s way out at this point and went along because he knew if there was any chance of any kind of WMD showing up there it would kill him politically and all the Democrats folded instead of standing up for what was right because it was politically the safest way for them…and yeah I think that is horrible but it does not at all change the how and why of what happened.

--------------------------------------------------- Now, what happened to them between dropping them on the Kurds and before we went into Iraq; who knows. ---------------------------------------------------

Actually we did know. He was forced to destroy them. Also I’ve pointed out in the past that there is a big question mark about if it was in fact Saddam that gassed the Kurds because according to our intelligence that was likely to have been Iran that unleashed that gas because as far as we knew Iraq did not have the gas used to kill the Kurds. The thing was when we were going after Saddam the first time it was better for us to promote the idea Saddam had done that…funny how this stuff works isn’t it?

------------------------------------------------- He had them and he has used them before. That was good enough for me. The risk was too great NOT to do anything and hope for the best. -------------------------------------------------

Actually, the fact that he had destroyed his stockpiles and UN inspectors were in his country and they had been heavily sanctioned for years pretty much meant we had the situation in hand and could have turned his country upside looking for them if we felt like it. There was no great risk in not attacking Iraq…but Bushco sold the idea that the horizon was going to quickly become a sea of mushroom clouds if we didn’t attack. We were all angry and upset at that point due to 9/11/01 and they took full advantage of that fact.

-------------------------------------------------- His biggest mistake in Iraq was not going in stronger. --------------------------------------------------

What was Shock and Awe? We bombed the shit out of them and the place folded like a cheap tent. We marched through the country like we owned it. They ran away! There is now this whole “we didn’t go in strong enough” babble taking place which now is part of Bushco trying to justify sending more troops. How much stronger could we go when we bomb them they run away and we march right into the capital like we were having a fourth of July parade? I suppose we could have just kept bombing them and erased entire cities and towns from the map but we would have looked pretty bad doing that as they ran away. It’s the occupation of Iraq that became our problem not how we went in. That’s the reality. We can’t go hard on them now because we are not at war with Iraq and that’s a key factor there at the moment. See the place fell apart after we Shock and Awed them but since we installed the current government there all we are supposedly there for is to help them train troops and get set up. The problem with that is our military was never meant to be used this way and Bushco turned them into sitting ducks because now officially we have no fight there unless the Iraqi government says we do. You know as well as I, I’d suspect at this point, that the Iraqi government we installed has already told us we have to ignore and leave alone some of the key people involved in all the trouble there…our troops are useless there!

------------------------------------------------- He thought once Saddam was gone Iraqi's would be sooo thankful that they'd fall at our feet and start to play nice. Once Iraq was behaving then Iran would have to lessen it's rhetoric because we would have a presence on both sides of them in Iraq and Afghanistan. And with Iran controlled, they might've stopped funding Hezbolla. And without Iranian funds and arms, maybe they'd stop firing rockets into the homes of Israeli civilians. ---------------------------------------------------

Nobody thought this was anything but the dumbest pile of rubbish they ever heard except the core of Bushco. Even our military commanders argued these points before we went in and said this thinking was outrageous. It sounded dumb then and now it sounds downright insane. It’s painful for a lot of people to even hear this drivel repeated.