While hindsight is said to be 20-20, it can be useful, and educational, to look back at history and wonder if anything could have been, or should have been, done differently. So,
WHAT IF we hadn’t intervened in the Sovjet/Taliban conflict in Afghanistan in 1979, helping the Taliban because they were “religious”, while the Russians were perceived as “godless”. Thus, the Russians could have been stuck with an impossible problem in that country, or possible wiped out the Taliban.
WHAT IF the 2000 election vote counting in Florida hadn’t been stopped and the election not thrown to George W. Bush by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, – a decision that Republican Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later regretted? That would have given us Al Gore as president instead of Georg Bush. While Bush ignored the warnings leading up to 9/11, Al Gore would have been more likely to pay attention, listening to warnings, questioning why Mid-Eastern males were given flight lessons with no interest in take-off or landing, why they weren’t tracked. And Al Gore would certainly not have fired Arab-speaking American students at Monterey International studies because they were gay, while intercepted documents with clues to the pending 9/11 were left untranslated until too late.
WHAT IF Al Gore had been president instead of George Bush, and we never had invaded Afghanistan or attacked Iraq based upon lies?
WHAT IF the candidate with the most popular votes had won the presidency in 2016, instead of Trump, and then continued on the improvements under President Obama, instead of setting us back again under Trump?
WHAT IF Republicans under Mitch McConnell had cooperated with the Democrats, for the sake of the country, instead of blocking everything, even projects they were in favor of previously?
How much better off would we all have been?
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