Bush used classic bait-and-switch manipulation to get our country into Iraq

I will present basic steps in bait-and-switch sales tactics, followed by the corresponding action on the Bush Administration. First, the salesman must have a desire to sell a product. -Bush's desire to sell the "War on Terror" is nothing short of legend. The salesman uses fraudulent means (bait) to get the customer into the store, with no intention of holding his/her original promise. This usually takes the form of a sale of some sort, with the marketing of a product that is very cheap and attractive to the buyer but unprofitable for the seller. -Bush's fraudulent bait was WMD and Hussein's support of Al Qaeda. Both of these bait items turned to be unprofitable, and the switch was made to a more profitable approach. Next, the salesman cuts loose the bait (tells the customer they have no more of those left, for example) and switches the customer over to a more expensive, more profitable item that the salesman REALLY wishes to sell. -Once WMD and Hussein's Al Qaeda ties turned up no leads, Bush switched us over to the current "Spreadin' Freedom" line. We are now there to encourage democracy and freedom, instead of protecting ourselves from WMD and cutting off funding of terrorism. The coercive nature of bait-and-switch is two-fold. First, the customer has sustained "sunk costs" by wasting gas, time etc. to get to the store and secure the purchase of the cheap sale item. Second, the customer has a psychological yearning to not leave empty handed, after already convincing himself/herself that they will have the item. -Our sunk costs were colossal, and this was a very good strategy indeed. Troops lives, countless billions of dollars. Imagine the axe that would have fallen on politicians who supported the war and spent all this money and lost all these lives, just to have to concede that it was one big mistake and they got conned by the Bush Administration. They would have faced fatal scrutiny from the press, their peers etc. and probably would not have gotten re-elected. As for the psychological effect, this took its form within the voters. Republican voters in particular had been supporting the war from the beginning, and rushed right in. They have a huge vested interest in seeing it through and no matter what happens they will never be able to admit they were wrong, without facing (percieved) humiliation. The Democrats are going to get elected this November, pull out of Iraq, and take the fall for ending this disaster without the Republicans having to get their hands any dirtier than they already are with it. I posted this debate because I'm getting really sick of people saying "we may not have done the right thing going in there, but we need to do the right thing and finish what we started". Wrong. What we started was wrong, and it doesn't get any righter to switch the reasoning and continue doing the wrong thing. It makes no logical sense for us, after discovering the wrongful nature of our actions, to perpetuate them by making a different excuse for it. I'll leave the other laundry list of reasons for getting out of Iraq for another debate (unless my opponent brings them up first).