Bay of pigs preceded the cuban missile crisis by a little more than a year.

Vietnam? pick a year, but 50k dead?

If you see Iraq as “the biggest foreign policy mistake of all time”-you really are trying hard to ignore Kennedy.

I can point to major miscalacs in every war, that has led to far worse situations than we face now.

Do you ever have any actual cites for statments like these? Any evidence to back up your claims ad nauseum here?

I can just as easily (and just as truthfully) say that the Left is engaged in talking points, seeing a chance to attack the Administration’s Iraq policy under another front…meanwhile, the fact remains, and you don’t address it, really, that the UN Security Council has just seen another deadline pass by without offering any credible threat of consequences…

There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iran will have nuclear capacity in less than 5 years. So I worry when I see the same sort of collective lunacy taking hold that threw us head first into Iraq. There was also no urgency there, but for whatever reason, as soon as the White House started rolling out its talking points, a false sense of urgency took over and all serious debate stopped. Anyone who raised even reasonable objections or questions (like Al Gore) was instantly savaged in the media. I remember that period well because I was one of the people with questions, and it seemed to me like everyone in the media, including most liberals, just weren’t interested in asking those questions. War fever had gripped the country. And look where that got us. We just didn’t think it through very well; no one did.

And part of the problem now, both abroad and at home, is that the same people who were careless and hasty about Iraq, are the ones calling the loudest for military action against Iran. That’s the true “boy who cried wolf” problem. Before the Iraq war, Colin Powell went before the UN and presented to the world all our best intelligence, virtually all of which turned out to have been overhyped or just plain wrong. The world hasn’t forgotten that. Neither have a lot of voters here. Now Iran may be the real deal. Maybe. But if so, it would be nice if those advocating for an aggressive stance at least acknowledge why people might be skeptical this time around. It would also be nice if there was some acknowledgement that our invasion of Iraq has made dealing with Iran that much harder. I’m not holding my breath though.

Of all time, eh? Let’s look at the other possible contenders for “biggest foreign policy mistake:”

- Failure to enter WWII earlier on, when Germany and Japan would have been more easily defeated;

- Failure to detect carrier strike force advancing on Pearl Harbor;

- Failure to detect the Wehrmacht’s additional forces that precipitated the Battle of the Bulge, which prolonged the war in Europe another two years;

- Failure to prevent Russia from confiscating the countries that became part of the USSR;

- Failure to outline clear and consistent goals before the Vietnam war commenced, and also a a failure to commit to a strategy that could actually result in victory.

Somehow I don’t think your earlier hyperbole comes close to these actions, but then there’s this:

“It has embolded the crazies in Iran and taken away their fear that anyone will act to stop them.”

Please offer credible evidence from non – partisan sources to state your case here, or else it’s just more bloviation on your part.

Anonymous, I respect your opinion, but the world won’t care whether there was an election looming if Iran gets the bomb – and this was not a U.S.-imposed deadline, it was a UN Security Council deadline. The US is apparently damned if we do and damned if we don’t, when it comes to multilateralism.

That doesn’t mean I disagree that our options are (a) bad and (b) worse, but the upcoming election is a strawman of its own; nothing we do will be resolved before November, particularly since the UN is quite obviously not going to do anything.

So what can we do? I think we have to deal with allies, but Russia and China will torpedo any effective UN response. That means, I think, either NATO or a new ‘offline’ series of talks. There MUST be some response, even if military options aren’t possible at the moment.

The fact is, the question of what to do with Iran is complex, and I’d suggest it is a problem better dealt with in a couple months, after the election. Right now, all you’re going to get it shameless demagoguery and strawman argumentation. This just isn’t the climate for the country to have a serious discussion on this issue.

And it’s worth pointing out the supreme irony of the fact that the GOP is now portraying Iran as Maximum Enemy #1 when, if that’s true, the Iraq war was without question the biggest foreign policy mistake of all time. For Iran, the war in Iraq is the gift that keeps on giving. It has immeasurably strengthened Iran’s position in the region and entirely limited our options for dealing with Iran. It has embolded the crazies in Iran and taken away their fear that anyone will act to stop them. And our troops in Iraq are sitting ducks if Iran wants to retaliate for any airstrike.

The bottomline is, at least the way I see, we simply don’t have any credible military options for dealing with Iran, particularly as long as the war in Iraq is ongoing.