She added: “Your brother created ISIS.”
Mr. Bush interjected. “All right. Is that a question?”
Ms. Ziedrich was not finished. “You don’t need to be pedantic to me, sir.”
“Pedantic? Wow,” Mr. Bush replied.
Then Ms. Ziedrich asked: “Why are you saying that ISIS was created by us not having a presence in the Middle East when it’s pointless wars where we send young American men to die for the idea of American exceptionalism? Why are you spouting nationalist rhetoric to get us involved in more wars?”
Mr. Bush replied: “We respectfully disagree. We have a disagreement. When we left Iraq, security had been arranged, Al Qaeda had been taken out. There was a fragile system that could have been brought up to eliminate the sectarian violence.”
He added: “And we had an agreement that the president could have signed that would have kept 10,000 troops, less than we have in Korea, could have created the stability that would have allowed for Iraq to progress. The result was the opposite occurred. Immediately, that void was filled.”
He concluded: “Look, you can rewrite history all you want. But the simple fact is that we are in a much more unstable place because American pulled back.”
Mr. Bush turned away. The conversation was over.
And so, I might add, are his prospects of winning in November 2016.
Then again, at least 60 million American voters will buy that fantasy and vote for whomever the GOP candidate is...
This is big news. And it also re-affirms my belief that Pope Francis is someone who talks the talk and walks the walk. He may tick off the fundamentalists and some in the New Atheist sphere--I'm looking at folks like Richard Dawkins and Michael Luciano--but clearly this Pope is trying to do the right thing and make this a better world.
ReplyDeleteFunny how people forgot about his role in normalizing relations between the US and Cuba....
Luciano has been flailing pretty hard lately, trying to prop up is schtick of all religion is evil all the time and nothing good can ever come of it. I of course disagree, although every sensible person will note that some evil are doing evil things some times in the name of religion - just like with every other "thing" out there, even kittens.
ReplyDeleteMy special happy happy joy joy schadenfreude comes at the expense of the right Catholic thugs who used the political conservatism of Popes George Ringo and Malecon to bludgeon wrong thinkers into line. Now that the red slipper is on the other foot, they do not like how it feels. We even have the spectacle of Republicans fuming in public that religion has no place in politics and the Pope should shut and tend to the religious needs of his flock.