Another error of Iraq

I was catching up on my podcasts (not easy in a world of seriously limited bandwidth [an average of 1kbps]) and was listening to NPR’s “Ted Koppel Report” and “On The Media”. I consider Koppel’s commentary to be relatively fair (obviously leftist but in his case not unfair) and he made the mention of what Iran’s place was before 911/Iraq and what it is now, at least in terms of rhetoric and influence they are stronger now than before, why? Well there are no doubt a myriad of reasons but one of the reasons that Koppel points out is that Iran (Shite) was pretty much a balance to Iraq (Sunni) but now that Sadam has been toppled Iran is now somewhat unchecked. The balance held by these two countries was imperfect at best but would it not have been better to let them keep each other in check (neither has been found to ever have supported Al-Qaeda) than sacrifice our troops, reputation, and money to take out Iraq?

 

Another point that I seem to remember now but had forgotten is that the Bush administration (more like Cheney) originally said that Sadam was harboring Al-Qaeda, well it turns out Sadam wasn’t harboring Bin Laden’s cohorts but the irony is that now Iraq is crawling with Al-Qaeda “franchises”, the irony is painful at best.