A Pox on Both Their Houses

At this point, it seems clear that a democrat president and a democrat congress is a certainty in 2008.  Why does that NOT have me jumping for joy and crying with glee?  Because I know that absolute power breeds corruption and the democrats are no more immune to it than the GOP.  Although I gave money to the democrats and so I am a defacto member of the democrat party, I would like to think that I'm not a liberal, that I cannot abide the far left fringe any more than the wacko right wing of the Republican party.  The good news is that the far left wing is likely to get just as much out of the democrats as the far right wing was out of the republicans, namely: nothing.

Izza truth.  We are not currently at war.  When GWB appeared on the deck of the air craft carrier and announced Mission Accomplished, that "major combat operations in Iraq were over."  He wasn't lying.  That was the truth.  The war was over.  Specifically, the government with whom we were at war had fallen and we were victorious in that quaint old 19th Century idea of warfare.  But the people of Iraq just didn't lie down and play dead.  Then the Bush administration perpetrated a bait and switch on the American people.  Rather than declaring victory and coming home, they engaged in a program of nation rebuilding.  Remember Richard Bremer?  Remember how Halliburton was going to reconstruct the Iraqi infrastructure?  Well that fell through because of the insurgency, and the Bush Administration shifted gears and conflated the war against Saddam's regime to the war against terror.  The rapidly expanding civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis also further destabilized our efforts to reconstruct the nation, and it is now hopeless.  It is time to stop calling this a war--to call it what it is: an occupation, and to acknowledge that the direst prognostications of those who speculated that war in Iraq would lead to civil war and urban guerilla tactics have come to pass and to acknowledge that the Bush administration fought a brilliant 19th Century war three years ago to defeat Saddam Hussein but that their attempts to stabilize and reconstruct postwar Iraq have been utter failures, and to bring our weekend soldiers home.

Now--this is where we have to go from the 19th Century into the 21st Century.  We need to look at the lessons of Mossad.  We need to use intelligence androot out terror at the source.  When we find terrorist training camps we need to bomb them, no matter where they are.  We need to do this and damn the consequences.  Mistakes will be made but we must take this war to them using their tactics.  Exterminate them, quite frankly.  Although we need to keep in place the proscription against the assassination of sovereign heads of state, we do not necessarily need to proscript the assassination of terrorist masterminds who have no sovereign legitimacy.  We need to be very pragmatic.  If they give themselves up, then we also need to give them more to look forward to than Guantanamo Bay!

Izza truth.