Sully admits, grudgingly, “Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let’s concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism?” How about the way that many of us proposed back in 2002-2003 while Sully was infatuated with Baghdad? Afghanistan and Palestine. Nail al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for which we had worldwide support, and really rebuild Afghanistan (thus demonstrating that we were serious about this not being a crusade). Meanwhile pull a Bush I on Israel and force through a real solution to the West Bank and Gaza. With all of that going on, it’s really doubtful that Saddam would have held out for more than a year or two….
And why on earth does Sully raise the spectre of Saddam helping al-Qaeda? Has he learned nothing? Is his argument so weak that he has to grasp at such totally discredited straws?
Of coure all of this is purely hypothetical, and presumes a basic competence in policy execution which is obviously absent in Bush’s team of bozos. In hindsight, since they were going to screw things up whatever they did, it would have been better if they’d done as little as possible to exacerbate the situation.