Guest columnist says Vice-President was correct in calling Iraq a quagmire

The safety and security of our nation is the reason we are still in Iraq,” writes a reader of the Livingston County Daily Press and Argus in a August 5, 2007 Letter-to-the-Editor entitled “We need to pursue national safety”

I have a different take, 1,575 days after " Mission Accomplished.”

The incompetent Bush Administration unilaterally invaded a country with a 40 percent unemployment rate, dismantled an army of 500,000 trained troops, neglected to guard the weapons (can you say insurgents), eradicated the state and civil service (de-Bathification) took out the infrastructure (Shock and Awe) brought in outside contractors to rebuild it (Haliburton) and continues to spend $12 billion per month, heavily borrowed from Red China. They admit, "mistakes were made.” Ya think?

The sad fact is that this administration from the beginning wanted to go to war with Iraq in the worst possible way and apparently did. Using 9/11 as an excuse, the neocons set out to spread Democracy and free markets by force in the Middle East. The President told us our troops would be greeted as liberators. Instead, we are bogged down in a Civil War with no end in sight.

There is currently circulating on the Internet a film clip showing (Vice-President Dick) Cheney in 1994 expounding the reasons the U.S. did not proceed to remove Saddam from power after the first Gulf War. To proceed toward Baghdad, would have got us involved in a “classic quagmire.” The bi-partisan commission on 9/11 found no link whatsoever of Iraq complicity in the attack. Cheney maintains that Iraq was involved, as if he knows something the rest of us don't.

Richard Clark, Bush's former National Security Advisor, said invading Iraq after 9/11 would have been like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor. Sad but true. We are in Iraq not because of our safety and security. We are there because George Bush is to the Federal Government what he was to the Texas Rangers, an inept front man.

(Mike McGonegal is a Green Oak Township resident in Livingston County and a former Democratic candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives for the 66th District)