Neocon, I'll be a lot more impressed with the "adult" approach you so blithely attribute to the neocons/conservatives when I see some evidence that it's a success. There was a time when our problem was an incipient radical movement among the Islamic extremists. Now we have a much more advanced movement along with the care and feeding of 25mm people, many of whom are passively hoping or actively seeking to kill and destroy our troops and mission.
The fact that the Bush people seem to want to overlook, with the exception of Rumsfeld's musing to the effect that we "may" be creating more terrorists than we are killing and capturing, is that there are two primary factors that lend themselves to the birth of terrorists. One is the tendency of some people, especially hot blooded, intelligent and pious young men, to be martyrs in a worthy cause. The second is the number of people that see an abuse of power by an evil force that "must be stopped."
What we've done recently is to point most of those people at us and to greatly increase the number of them. In addition we've swelled the ranks of those who are what I call "revenge terrorists;" the fathers, brothers, mothers, uncles, sisters etc. of civilians or Iraqi soldiers killed in the "war."
With better technology and a smaller world many of those martyr personalities are capable of causing us great damage. Sure they're killing us over there but with the increased number and the increased intensity with which they view us as, to coin Bush's phrase, "evil doers," the number pointed at our homeland has undoubtedly not been reduced. You can be sure that many of them are pondering and planning ways to harm us at home.
So unless you live under a rock and think that the war in Iraq didn't make any more Islamic people actively hate us and become willing to risk death to harm us, that's a price we've paid. The cost/benefit question for you current self-proclaimed adults is "what has the war in Iraq done for us and what will it do for us?"
It's interesting that so much has been said by the neocons about helping those "poor Iraqis." You'd almost think that our efforts and billions and lost lives there are in the form of a humanitarian sacrifice. Of course you don't see those same sentiments at work here at home so I think I'll be a little skeptical about that one. In the final analysis, however, it makes no difference; the Iraqis will go where their religion, culture and history leads them. They may do it sooner, or they do it later, but they will inevitably end up there and if they have to rid themselves of our counter pressure by violence, they will do so.
The bottom line is that the Bush administration's so called "adult thinking" is incomplete and its "mission in Iraq" is undoable. That, of course, is why the "mission" has to change every few months. Being wrong is a big thing when families are losing loved ones. And yes, I mean ours and theirs, but especially ours.
Better to have moved to the center, Neo. The left or the right are both too partisan and are indoctrinated with too much puffery.
And real "adults" understand that the race to defeat and control terrorism is a marathon, not a sprint. Be patient, grasshopper. |
