An Excellent Post

Every once in a while I read a post and think; "Damn, I wish I'd written that". Fellow RINO Done With Mirrors has written that post:

...But I think we'd be at roughly the same point now in domestic politics, with or without the Iraq invasion. The anti-war movement starts slowly, but grinds away relentlessly. If Iraq had not given it the fodder it has fed on, media coverage of Afghanistan would have sufficed. And the erosion of support would have been accomplished, even if Saddam still sat in Baghdad cursing America, and his son still squatted in his rape-palaces on the Euphrates.

But I'll leave the "to no purpose" part aside for now.

It is true that popular American opposition to an attack in Afghanistan was much lower (10 or 12 percent), at the outset, than popular opposition to the attack on Saddam's Iraq, which stood at about 27 percent right before the war.

However, people worldwide were as against a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as they were an attack on Saddam. Gallup International surveyed 37 countries in late September 2001 and found support for a U.S. attack on the country harboring the 9/11 terrorists only in the U.S., Israel, and India. Thumping majorities registered against the Afghanistan campaign in the United Kingdom (75%), France (67%), Panama (80%), Mexico (94%) and so on. One of the crucial contributors to the erosion of support for the Iraq war -- international opinion/squandering the good will of the world -- was in place before the first boots hit the desert from Kuwait.

Read the whole essay, it's brilliant.