[scandium]

Originally Posted by DeepSix

Good God, we actually agree on something! Indeed, none of those things were, in my opinion, fully considered in the haste of going to war. I do think, though, that they have been more successfully accomplished during the occupation than they would have been otherwise. That said, I also think we've done as much over there as we can do. As for alerting whitehouse.gov, I think the lights are on but nobody's home there these days.

I agree with all of these points.

No, I don't refer to the U.S. military by its C-in-C, but the Iraqi Army under its former tyrant hardly compares to the U.S. military under any president. My point was that it would have been militarily stupid to leave Hussein's army physically or organizationally intact after defeating it. Surgeons don't remove "most" of the cancer and then leave a little because "oh, well, it probably won't grow back."

We disagree there as I don't see the army itself as being inherently cancerous. Using your analogy I would say dissolving the army was killing the patient to cure the cancer, since there was a viable alternative in simply keeping the army but purging the undesirables from it.