{"id":33482,"date":"2019-07-10T16:59:06","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T00:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=33482"},"modified":"2019-07-10T18:58:55","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T02:58:55","slug":"veterans-never-should-have-fought-the-terror-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/10\/veterans-never-should-have-fought-the-terror-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Veterans: Never Should Have Fought the Terror Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/qz.com\/1662561\/veterans-poll-says-iraq-war-wasnt-worth-fighting\/\">What a shame<\/a>. You know, it didn\u2019t have to be this way at all.<\/p>\n<p>Forget that crank <a href=\"https:\/\/libertarianinstitute.org\/blog\/al-gores-an-inconvenient-sequel\/\">Al Gore<\/a>\u00a0winning instead. If Bush had only had anyone but Dick Cheney for VP and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz over at Defense, then Colin Powell would have been his man on foreign policy and the whole damn thing would have ended in 2002.<\/p>\n<p>Don\u2019t get me wrong, Powell is still a war criminal for going along and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.globalpolicy.org\/component\/content\/article\/167\/35189.html\">lying us into war<\/a>, but it wasn\u2019t his policy to expand the war.<\/p>\n<p>No Iraq War II means no war in Libya, Mali, Syria, no Islamic State or Iraq War III. He probably would have wanted to stay in Afghanistan though, and who knows what else, but it definitely didn\u2019t have to be like this: 7,000 dead Americans; a million-plus dead innocent people who had nothing to do with attacking us; as many widows and orphans; Christian, Druze, Yazidi, Turkmen, Kurds, Tuaregs, and millions more Sunni and Shia Arabs displaced and \u201ccleansed\u201d from their homes where their tribes had lived for thousands of years; domestic police state solidified; budget completely busted; capitalism completely corrupted; lost everything anyway; America disgraced permanently.<\/p>\n<p>That must be why the rest of yall drink so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What a shame. You know, it didn\u2019t have to be this way at all. Forget that crank Al Gore\u00a0winning instead. If Bush had only had anyone but Dick Cheney for VP and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz over at Defense, then Colin Powell would have been his man on foreign policy and the whole damn thing would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-33482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33485,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33482\/revisions\/33485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33482"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=33482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}