And it's just mine that people soft on Bush are like that: they just don't consider him as that dangerous. Or perhaps, they don't consider him as dangerous as Saddam.
As dangerous to whom?
Really, whatever Saddam's record, does he intend world supremacy and "full spectrum dominance", unwilling to brook any great power rival?
As for "soft on Osama" -- who is, as distinct from thinking that "Osama, the idea", even as impoverished as it is, can be quelled by military means? Heck, those who think that going to war on Saddam is showing toughness are just about to do an "Osama" in reverse. The crazy Islamicists thought they were most tough and clever in carrying out the Sep 11 attacks -- but they just provided the detonator for Washington to carry out policies and strategies that had apparently been a decade in the making and they constituted the American support for those policies and strategies. Now Bush and Blair are about to hand the Osama-ists a detonator, and hence have to carry on warring -- a conclusion which they seem to have drawn. As Blair threw back at the Scottish National Party's MP's question, "When do we stop?": "We stop when the threat to our security is fully and properly dealt with"! And as Paul Foot commented, "In other words, we go on like Ui (Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) until we conquer the world".
Is it really possible that, a year after Afghanistan (or would that be more like twenty years?), and thirty years after Vietnam, there are people who believe that the US can conjure up a "Third Force" at will? Post-war Japan, the alleged model, bears no comparison. Perhaps the only proximate (successful?) comparison would be Nicaragua?
If I were American, Doug's posting of that WSJ article on Afghanistan would give me the jitters. Hitchens should rehabilitate Kissinger, and bring him back to do a Cambodia in Pakistan because that may be what it would take, although as in Cambodia, that too would be no guarantee. Are the tough-minded here prepared to go down that route?
kj khoo