Today is Monday, November 11, 2013 (Veteran's Day). My stats today: 10 minutes of yoga, 10 minutes of lifting weights and 45 minutes of walking = 2.5 miles for a November total of 21.2 miles. My weight was 166.2 pounds.
QUOTE for today: "Don't ever underestimate the capacity of a human being who is determined to do something."
My THOUGHTS today have to do with the Wounded Warriors we have from the Bush/Cheney wars we have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. The TODAY SHOW on NBC this morning was honoring all veterans but concentrated on the veterans from the Iraq/Afghan wars. As I was looking at these Wounded Warriors and the physical and mental scars they have I thought of why did this ever have to happen. After 9/11 we had a right to go into Afghanistan and take on the Taliban and al-Quaida. We did and we had them soundly defeated and the majority of the Afghan people were on our side. All we had to do was finish the job - that would have included keeping a good number of troops there and then help them set up a democracy with a good deal of our help. So what did Bush and Cheney do - they decided to invade Iraq for no apparent reason other than Bush's Daddy didn't do it 1991 plus Cheney was bound and determined to prove that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons and was a threat to Israel and to us.
So Bush and Cheney pull thousands of GIs out of Afghanistan, send them to Iraq to overturn Hussein and destroy his chemical weapons. They did overthrow Hussein but surprise, surprise, there were no chemicals weapons. The other result is by pulling troops out of Afghanistan they did not leave enough troops there to stop the Taliban from rebuilding and then continuing the civil war - it is still going on today.
The Iraq War is one of the biggest blunders in our history. It is one of ignorance on the part of Bush and Cheney. As a guest column writer said in Sunday's paper, "People who do not know history are not necessarily condemned to repeat it. Instead, that ignorance actually can lead to ever bigger blunders." Bush and Cheney proved that. Before those two invaded Iraq in March of 2003 one of Bush's advisors said to Bush, If you invade Iraq, you are going to stir up a hornets nest between the Sunnis and Shiites." Bush gave him his best stupid look and said, "I thought their were Moslems in Iraq." Bush didn't even know there was such a thing as Sunnis and Shiites. Now that is ignorance at its best, especially when you are going to invade that country.
As I was watching some of these wounded warriors being interviewed my thoughts turned to Bush and Cheney. I was wondering if these two feel any sense of guilt or shame when they see these young men and women with missing legs or arms or those who were burned and their faces are deformed for the rest of their lives or those with PTSD for the rest of their lives. And I wonder if they realize how many hundreds of billions of dollars their war has already cost the U.S. and how much more it will cost in the future. Our future costs will hit the 2-3 trillion dollar range because of the disability payments to all these wounded warriors for the next 70-80 years.
I guess for a couple of guys who had never seen combat it was easy to send other men to war. Bush's Daddy got him into the Texas Air National Guard ahead off 200 other guys who should have gone before "W." And Cheney got 5-6 deferments during the Vietnam war and never served a day. The sad part is neither one has ever expressed one iota of guilt or shame or regret for what they did to these young men and women and what they did to our national debt.
I feel better getting this off my chest. For the rest of my life I'm going to be thinking the same way every time I see these wounded warriors from the Iraq war. I simply have no time for Bush and Cheney. I feel they will go down in history in the bottom five of our worst presidents. ( If they don't they definitely should,)
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