Bush: World must stand united against terrorism

[pardus]

How did his 9/11 response suck? We took over a large foreign country in a matter of days.

Yeah, but it wasn't a very nice foreign country!

 

[Bravo Five Romeo]

How did his 9/11 response suck? We took over a large foreign country in a matter of days.

I'll let it slide that 9/11 happened on his watch... a fact I think many would be unforgiving of if it was another President in charge.

When the nation woke from its MTV and celebrity gossip slumber on 9/11 and looked to our leaders for guidance, President Bush took that opportunity to tell the people to go shopping and carry on as usual... and eventualy the nation went back to its MTV and celebrity gossip slumber while the military and their families went to war.
That was failure number one.
No, we didn't need scrap drives or millions of volunteers like we did in WW2.
But he blew an oportunity to rally the nation and call for sacrifice, urge people stay informed, to help in their communities and become better citizens... a raly cry that a week earlier would have been ignored, but in those immediate days after 9/11 when the people were angry, scared, and frustrated they would have listened.

Moving on...
The world was united behind America more than ever.
Bush blew it and in a short time turned the world against us.

Iraq.

How did his 9/11 response suck? We took over a large foreign country in a matter of days.

Is it Iraq you're talking about in that statement?

The same Iraq that Bush said we needed to invade because they had WMDs and Al Qaeda ties.
The same Iraq that Bush told the rest of the world to fuck off over.
The same Iraq that months after the invasion when we didn't find the WMDs we thought were there and teh Saddam Al Qaeda ties turned out not to be true, Bush tried to pull a Jedi mind trick on the American people and say that that was not the reason for invading Iraq... but the reeson was to spread the "freedom agenda" in the Middle East. That worked well.

As to the invasion... our military, even with the smaller numbers than they requested, kicked fucking ass, defeated the Iraqi Army and drove on to Baghdad and toppled the Iraqi government and military in record time.

Our military handed Bush a victory.
Bush took that victory and fucked it up and gave the military years of insurgency and over 4,000 dead after the fall of Baghdad.
How?
the Bush administration's plan for the occupation.
Or better yet the lack of a plan for the occupation and stupid ill advised plans created by people with no expertise on the region who were warned against by people who knew better.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army instead of using them to control the looting and restore order... also putting over a hundred thousand armed men out of work... yeah, that was smart.

DeBa'thifying all levels of the civil service, putting hundreds of thousands out of work and crippling the country's infrastructure to make it take longer to get the country up and running.

Back at the white house, he performed poorly as President during all this, allowing Rumsfeld and Cheney to run interference for him, blocking out any advisors who were against these ideas, including Colin Powell himself.

On the domestic front, to aid in the war on terror he later appointed an attorney general who was more interested in politics than law and didn't believe habeas corpus was a right of Americans in the Constitution.

Saying Bush did well responding to 9/11 just because he responded is wrong.

 

[Boondocksaint375]

No, Afghanistan (ie OEF) was the US response to the 9/11 attacks. My statement had nothing to do with Iraq.

 

[Bravo Five Romeo]

No, Afghanistan (ie OEF) was the US response to the 9/11 attacks. My statement had nothing to do with Iraq.

My apologies then.
I have no issue with the decision to go into Afghanistan and I understand the logistical issues with the terrain and location and political issues with the locals that limited the scale of our response.
Seldom has any military acted for a more just reason.