Hello gentlemen,
Things are going well in the United Kingdom, it's paper writing season, so that's why I've been mum for a while. I have this to report:
I attended a
lecture at the University of Edinburgh given by Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector. His talk was "The means of reducing the spread of weapons of mass destruction" wherein he advocated the use of apolitical, multinational weapons inspectors as an appropriate route to detecting weapons. He was impressively dispassionate and reasonable for a man who had been ousted from his job, despite pleas for more time, and who was eventually vindicated in his claims that there was no evidence that Iraq had WMD.
Despite my obvious antipathy towards Bush, I would like to adopt Dr. Blix's reasonable dispassion and suggest this strategy for to Tyler for casting his vote. I believe that the War in Iraq (and by extension the war on terror) is central to deciding whether to re-hire Bush as president, just as he does himself. My thinking is this:
- In retrospect it seems that we were totally wrong in our stated motivation for the invasion: that Iraq presented an immediate danger to the USA.
- There are only two reasons why this could be. Either:
- The Bush Administration manipulated the intelligence that they were presented with in order to justify a war that they wanted for their own ends, or
- Intelligence was wildly inaccurate.
- From these two reasons I draw the following conclusions. If #1 is true, then Bush should not be re-elected. $100,000,000,000 in taxpayer costs plus 500+ US casualties is not in any way justifiable, and we should not trust this man to make future decisions. If #2 is true, and we do have inherently flawed intelligence in the most important of matters, then it does not matter who the commander-in-chief is. No matter who gung-ho our leader is he will not be able to fight said war any better than anyone else. In which case we need to turn to other issues, like the economy.
- I therefore conclude that Bush is either not fit to run the country, or no more fit than John Kerry. Ergo, John Kerry is the safer bet.
