I believe that the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, under the aegis of Sept. 11 and under the guise of ridding the world of an imminent threat to the US vis-a-vis nasty, ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction was wrong. It drew attention away from more important and immediate problems elsewhere; it was based on bad (or at least way fuzzier than we thought) intelligence; it set a terrible example of how to deal with an inter-connected world and the nasty people within it. I could go on and on, and maybe I should.
Still. I've made peace with the fact that SH is a bad guy. If the "[insert favorite Democratic candidate here] strike force" were somehow sent to Iraq, and they pulled SH out of a frickin' 8 foot hole - alive and captured, no less - I'd be happy about it. With BushCo. doing it, I find myself less than pleased with that.
Here is the crux of it, which I think we haven't thought through well enough. Democratic candidates benefit politically from a quagmire in Iraq. Not because Dems were right or wrong (they are right), nor because Repubs were right or wrong (they are wrong), but because a quagmire illustrates in vivid, heartbreaking immediacy the stupidity of going halfway around the world for a war we didn't need and a set of goals we find dramatically problematic.
And I think that sucks. It makes me personally feel like US deaths - of soldiers, who are clearly doing their job, under ick circumstances - are allowing me to say 'we told you so' to the current administration, which I detest. And it gives me a tinge of annoyance that SH was found, and that Bush will take the credit.
We need another way around this problem. Why? Because it rears its head under other circumstances. As a good global citizen (of the US), I kind of want China or France, or Brazil to give us the big F-U every time we slap them around in that high-handed Bush administration way we have come to deal with other nations. And I kind of root for the stock market to tank, the economy to tank, and Bush finally to get blamed.
Is this endemic to being the opposition party, that you have to root for things to go wrong in order to make a good case against the incumbant party? If so, fine. But I feel like a dick for opening the papers, seeing another soldier (or more) die, and thinking "won't people finally see the stupidity of the Bush administration." Conversely, I feel perverse seeing GDP go up, or unemployment drop, or SH having his ass dragged out of a hole, and thinking, "darn."