Maybe some of you saw Meet the Press on 2-4-07 with John Edwards like I did this last weekend. I voted for John Kerry and John Edwards as many of you may have. As with all the Democrat front runners, he is opposed to the surge of troops to Iraq. There are some differences that seem interesting. First we have Barack Obama who was clearly always against sending troops to Iraq. As of now he is still not officially in the race but seems to be heading in that direction. Then we have Hilary Clinton and John Edwards who were for sending troops as most were back then. Even a year and a half into the war when we knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction that have been found, John Edwards still supported his vote for going there. Now that he is trying to become the Democrats choose for President, he has made it clear that he now wishes that he had voted against going there. Then we have Hilary Clinton who as of yet has not stated that she regretted her vote which the Edwards camp seems to wish to point out in hopes of being more appealing to the left. There’s something distasteful to me about someone who wants to tell people that he now wishes he had voted differently and that everyone else that voted to give the President the power to deal with Saddam, should do the same as he has. To me it seems that most people would have voted differently if they had known the truth. That’s just the nature of politics. That’s the reason we elect people to make the tough decisions. If they should vote to do something that later turns out to have been a mistake then they should be able to explain why they voted that way without sounding like a flip flopper. Like some like to say, a politician who holds up a wet finger to see which way the wind is blowing today. I believe that Barack Obama is showing a great deal of class because he doesn’t seem to be acting like Edwards in this way. His message seems to be that both parties should stop attacking each other and come together for the good of the country. If you have been reading my blog then you may have seen that this is also my message. Like Hilary and Edwards I too believed that Saddam was too dangerous and needed to be dealt with. In this way I was not like Obama. I believe that Hilary is also showing a great deal of class as well. Perhaps it would be smart of her to distance herself from her decision like Edwards has. By seeing her not making excuses, she seems to be a stronger leader. It’s easy to now look back and see that so much information from our intelligence was very wrong. It’s a much different thing to have listened to all of that bad information and been able to somehow have known what nobody did. I believe that Edwards and Hilary had more information with regards to Iraq but still they were wrong. The one thing that does bother me about Obama is that even though most of us believed that Saddam had WMD’s, this didn’t seem to be a problem with him. I understand that he may have been right but he had no way of knowing what the truth really was back then. This tells me that he must be a very anti all kinds of wars kind of guy compared to most of us. It’s harder to tell if this is true because he hasn’t been around as long as the other two. If I were an anti war person of today then Obama would most likely be my choose because he was right and very anti war. I hate wars like most people, but not so much as the kind of people that hate almost all wars for whatever reason. When the host asked Edwards about the predictions from our intelligents of the blood bath that would follow if we were to leave at this time, Edwards didn’t seem to care about the Iraq people as much as I would have liked. To me, if you made a mistake then you should be more responsible for your actions. (i.e. You break it, you buy it.) If we had found WMD’s like we had hoped, then maybe it would be alright to say, “To hell with these people, there on there own.” I just can’t see how we can go into there country and cause so much damage and find nothing and then say, “To hell with them,” and leave. We all understand that we can’t be in the middle of a civil war but we should also not do anything else to make things there any worse. If we can do something for the government there to help bring order than we should do whatever we can. Of course it breaks my heart to see all of the good men and women that have sacrificed so much so far, but how will we feel when we start seeing the pictures of thousands of deaths after we leave. Maybe you could look the other way and say that at least it’s not our problem any more. I have a much harder time doing this because I supported the mission and I can’t forget that. I believe that today we put too much important in the WMD factor when truly much of the importance was to overthrow Saddam because he was so bad to the Iraq’s in general. I think that not finding WMD’s was more of a surprise to most of us. (i.e. Slam dunk) The fact that he used WMD’s on his enemies and his own people is something many seem to be over looking today. The message would seem to be that as long as we didn’t have any WMD’s to worry about, then others didn’t matter. I have no doubt that if Saddam had thought that he could have used WMD’s against us and had any chance of winning then he would have used them. I don’t believe that he somehow had a change of heart and disposed of any WMD’s because he knew it was wrong to have them. It would seem more likely that he saw that using WMD’s against us would have been suicide and therefore a bad idea. He must have also felt that having people wonder if he had them would prevent them from attacking. If this was his thinking then it didn’t work. Unless there are still some WMD’s that have yet to be found, then this would seem to be his logic. When you play poker and you call someone’s hand, then it’s because you believe they may be bluffing or you have the better hand. Knowing Saddam’s history, we had no reason to believe he was bluffing. He clearly seemed to be someone who never bluffed so why should we think that he was now? Surly Saddam must have felt that we would never believe he was bluffing and so we would never attack. From statements I’ve heard coming from him, he did feel that we would never attack. This seems hard to believe after we ran him out of Kuwait, but that’s what he said later. Whatever his thinking was, I can’t see how we should feel bad because we didn’t find any. Would it have been better to have lost 3000 lives in one attack and then have moved in? Just because he wasn’t suicidal and he got rid of the weapons that we all knew he had at one time, doesn’t make him the innocent victim. If we had decided to not attack, one things for sure, Saddam would still hate Israel and anyone in the West that didn’t play his get rich with the money from the oil for food program. He’d still be laughing at us and our weak allies. Thousand would still be filling the mass graves. To believe that everything would be wonderful if only we had not attacked seems very naïve at best. We are just now beginning to understand just how complicated the problems are that we face in the Middle East. Saddam was just one of many problems that we will need to deal with sooner or later. The later we wait, the worst the problem will become. We should listen to Obama and stop fighting each other and start facing the true problem. Like it or not, we are at war which started before 9-11.