This is the Tom Hartman program.

Tom Hartman here with you.

There's a couple of things that I wanted to just lay on the table and have a conversation with you about my protracted rant about my opinion. the learning whatever on where we're at what happened what has happened in the last

24 hours in particular but I want to share this with you in a fairly unvarnished

fashion and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. First of all, if you go back to the invasion of Iraq,

both invasions of Iraq, in fact.

You know, we invaded Iraq back in, I think it was 91, when George Herbert Walker Bush was president and that

was going to get him reelected in 92. It didn't work out that well. As his son

pointed out his war only lasted 100 hours, he should have been at war all the way up to election day if he wanted to get himself reelected.

This is what George W Bush said.

In fact, Cindy Sheehan laid this out, you know, I think fairly brilliantly

and just as a reminder.

As a matter of fact, in interviews in 1999 with respected journalists and longtime Bush family

friend Mickey Herskowitz, then Governor George Bush stated,

one of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen

as commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he

drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.

If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it.

I'm going to get everything past that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful

presidency." End quote.

So that was George W Bush pointing out that there's a strategy here.

Republicans have been doing this since Reagan and Grenada. Have a little war and, you know, you get reelected.

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