Official Stance on the War in Iraq

Since its rather hard to tell from previous posts just exactly what my stance is I'll make it clear.

1: We should have finished mop up operations in Afghanistan before doing anything in Iraq.
2: Right or wrong its being really badly run and has from the beginning.
3: We broke Iraq we should stay there long enough to fix it.

I don't believe W's motives were pure when it came to invading Iraq. I stated the day he won the first election, "He's going to do two things; lower the capital gains tax and declare war on Iraq." And my reason for saying this has alot more to do with the dynamics of his family than anything. I think deep down inside he just wanted to finish what his father started and make his dad proud. Not exactly the most sinister of motives is it?

And frankly I could see the political logic of a war in Iraq. However I believe that we should have had more international support before doing so. If a much broader internationally supported coalition had done the job when they didn't find the WMDs it wouldn't have looked anywhere near as bad for us.

Now back to my original statement. This war has been poorly run from the get go. We didn't build a large enough coalition, we didn't send in enough troops, we didn't stop the looting of Baghdad therby preventing weapons caches from falling into the wrong hands, we refused to allow Iraqi police recruits to be trained by non coalition forces (like France and Germany) outside the country the list goes on and on.....

And who do I blame? Donald Rumsfeld. Period. The original decision to send in one quarter of the troops Generals requested was his. A tabletop war gamer could have done a better job. I've played games whose artificial intelligences had a better sense of strategy than Rumsfeld.

I was for getting rid of Saddam and I never ever imagined that the operation would handled so poorly that we'd still be there today. But there we are and frankly unless we want another to create another unfriendly radically governed Islamic nation in the middle east we're going to have to stay there and see this thing through.