It’s mind-boggling. I believe that one of the many jobs of the MSM is to soft-pedal what you have just hit on so that the “horse race” in 2016 will have as many people “on the edge of the seats for the results” as possible.
Aside from the fact that Iraq has more connections to our present Middle Eastern problems than I have space to get into in this thread, Afghanistan owes a great deal of its current misery to G.W. Bush turning to Iraq when the following occured…(quoted from historican Stephen Tanner)
"Second, America’s goals in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001, became muddled. George W. Bush, who decried “nation-building” in his 2000 presidential run, appeared to go fuzzy once he had a nation of his own to build. The almost bloodless (for the U.S.) fall of the Taliban left the Bush administration with a desperately poor, war-weary people who appeared eager to accept for the first time in their history Western democratic and free-market principles as a basis for regenerating their state.
This perception was not an illusion, and the U.S. had at least two years to demonstrate that the power of its ideals could translate into tangible benefits for the Afghans. Supported by its many allies–in effect, the entire world in the immediate aftermath of 9/11–the U.S. might indeed have created a new precedent by setting up a prosperous democratic state in the center of Muslim South Asia.
As it developed, however, Bush had another project on his mind–invading Iraq–and the Afghan project was deprived of both a serious reconstruction effort and the armed force necessary to support it". *
taken from
Stephen Tanner, AFGHANISTAN, Philidelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009, pp. 323-324
In March 2006, as the security situation and sectarian violence in Iraq took a turn for the worse after the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) suggested creating an outside commission of prominent foreign policy figures to provide “fresh eyes” and propose recommendations on resolving the conflict in Iraq. The ten-person panel, whose membership comprises five Republicans and five Democrats, issued its report on December 6, 2006. The commission is headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, a close friend of the Bush family, and former Indiana Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, who also cochaired the 9/11 Commission, and is being coordinated through the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a government-funded think tank.
The fact that Ol Jeb is volunteering his opinions-critisc of Iraq gives me warning since he was a signatory of the PNAC and formed his foreign policy after consulting the same people who served as advisors during his fathers and brothers presidencies.
Is this the early branding of Jeb as a “centralist” candidate who once elected will transform into a bat shit crazy neocon…
