Changing Horses
By Gordon Bloyer (07/15/04)
You are at the racetrack. The race starts, and at the halfway point your horse is leading by six lengths. At that point you realize that the jockey on your horse is not the one you thought it was. He is not the guy that wins most of the time. You also learn that the weight on the horse is more than you thought. In fact, you find out that everything that you based your bet on was wrong. Today the track is muddy and you thought the horse won every race he ran in the mud, but in fact he has never run in the mud.
What do you do? Do you run to the betting window and try to get your money back? Only a fool would do that. You do the only thing you can do, you keep pulling for your horse too win. He is six lengths in the lead and heading for the finish line. When you made the bet, you did not know then what you know now. You based it on the best information you had. You can’t change your bet, you can’t change horses and to try to do so, would be dumb and it really does not make any difference anyway.
When a reporter asks people if they would change what they did in the past if they knew then what they know now, it is the dumbest question that can be asked. Now they want to ask that question about Iraq, after the horse has left the gate.
I guess that makes Lesley Stahl of CBS and Chris Mathews of MSNBC two of the dumbest reporters known to mankind. Mathews has asked the question repeatedly to anyone and everyone. On ''60 Minutes,'' Stahl asked John Kerry and John Edwards that question. I’m not quite sure what their answer was, because it was so convoluted. I think they were trying to change their bet. They did not know then what they know now. Kerry and Edwards had the same information that President Bush had on Iraq and they made the same decision he did at the time. Now they say it was a mistake. Second guessing doesn’t work.
When the Iraq war started, what did we know then? We knew Saddam Hussein used WMD on the Kurds. We knew he invaded Kuwait and signed a cease-fire which he then violated on hundreds of occasions. We knew he violated 17 United Nations resolutions. We knew he fired on U.S. planes. We knew he killed, tortured, raped, and gassed his own people. We knew he paid money to terrorists families. We knew he had a training camp where they trained people to hijack airplanes. We knew he had given safe-haven to terrorists. We thought he had weapons of mass destruction. We know he had them in the past. We knew he used them. It was HIS obligation to prove that he did not have them. It was NOT our obligation to find them. We knew he was a liar and could not be trusted.
The war was caused by Saddam Hussein, not the United States. He could have lived up to the cease-fire agreement. He could have obeyed the 17 United Nations resolutions. He could have given free reign to the United Nations inspectors. He did not do any of these things. Hussein is responsible for the war, not President Bush. Did we invade some innocent country? Did we overthrow some benevolent leader of a peaceful republic? I’m trying to figure out why our media keeps trying to blame America first?
If President Bush invaded Switzerland on false information, I would vote against him. If the only reason the media can come up with for not invading Iraq is that they did not have WMD at the precise moment we attacked, that is ridiculous. We don’t know if Saddam moved them out of the country. We don’t know if he hid them so well we can’t find them, yet, or he destroyed them. Does that really matter? HE was obligated to prove he did not have them.
We all would like to have the luxury of changing our minds after we made some previous decision. We have to live with our decisions. It is the media that keeps trying to make the Iraq war some kind of mistake. It was not a mistake to get rid of Hussein. As to whether Iraq will become a democracy and become one of the good guys, it is still to be answered. I do know that the race is not over and we are leading by six lengths. We don’t know what the results will be, but I’m still pulling for us too win. We have to win and the people that are pulling against us are not our friends.
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