if it hadn’t been for Iraq (I still don’t know why we invaded)

I was surprised that, for as much as most of the country had turned against him during his second turn, there wasn’t more noise made about how insane the big picture policy behind this decision looked in retrospect. The “War on Terror” meant overthrowing every “rogue state” that sponsored terrorism. You’d hear people accuse Bush of arbitrarily picking Iraq so settle a score for his dad, but in reality Iraq was being identified in the media all the time as the #2 target after Afghanistan by in media discussions of the policy long before the government actually identified who they’d invade next. At least that’s how I remember it, and I think I’m remembering accurately because I remember assuming that it would actually be somebody else and the media were just talking out of their asses and picking the most obvious Middle Easter Bad Guy Country. Well…I was wrong. They probably just picked Iraq because it was somewhere on their laundry list of governments that this was a opportunity to get rid of, and was probably seen as the easiest next-one-up to sell to the American people. If the policy had worked the way the Bush Administration wanted it to, people would have kept supporting it, and there would have been a bunch of other wars.

All other things being equal, we’re probably lucky that the insurgencies didn’t take longer to build up, if they were going to happen anyway, or there would have been a third invasion of somebody.