Mr. Moderate

I get so mad listening to President Bush continue to argue for his “stay the course” strategy when it is obvious to the majority of Americans that the ship is drifting ever closer to rocky shoals. In my mind, the 2008 election can’t come quickly enough to get the USA a new hand on the rudder of the ship-of-state.

Osama bin Laden is, to all intents and purposes, stronger than he ever was, in that he has more “combat effectives” at his disposal today than he did on September 11, 2001. This result is due to a totally bungled war effort that sent most of our combat forces off to Iraq, where there were few (if any) actual terrorists, and only a few combat troops off to Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan where there remain many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Including, of course, one very tall Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden.

If President Bush had only sent 150,000 troops to fight in Afghanistan and 20,000 troops to Iraq to beef up the weapons inspection teams, what a different world we would find ourselves living in today. But of course, that is 20/20 hindsight.

President Bush has done a lot to destroy our military forces. The combat aircraft fleet is beginning to creak and groan with all the use its been getting. And the National Guard is, by-and-large, quite a bit over towards exhausted from repeated tours in Iraq. The career military is spending far too much time in Iraq and far too little time with their family members and in training, rest, and recuperation duties. And, if the current apparent direction for Iran proves to be the truth, the USA will need to be fighting Iran in the not-too-distant future (sometime not too long after the next President is inaugurated would be my best guess).

We desperately need to stop wasting our combat troops fighting mostly people who are not at war with the United States. The few hundred actual terrorists in Iraq will disappear if the US troops leave because they will have nobody left to fight. And our troops sure will need their rest if we are going to need to go to war with Iran any time soon. We also need to replenish our supply of weapons and transportation equipment, all of which has been greatly depleted by the ongoing war in Iraq.

We also need to take the bull by the horns and clean out the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan which border Afghanistan. There are few enough people there that, with a sufficiently large troop deployment, we can simply arrest everybody and sort out who are terrorists, who are harmless, and who are somewhere in the middle through a process of interviews and “individual peace treaties” (we let people go if they are willing to pledge to not fight the US military and to report any terrorist or criminal activities they witness). We can’t have that mess festering in our rear areas when we get ready to go to war with Iran, which right now seems to be only a matter of time. We will need bases in Afghanistan and the Gulf area in order to fight Iran, but we do not need to maintain a military occupation of the civilian cities of Iraq or Afghanistan in order to accomplish that goal.

Finally, we owe it to the fighting forces that are bound to die to ensure that we have made every possible diplomatic effort to avoid war with Iran before that war begins. War really should be a “last resort” for the United States. We need to ensure that Iran gets the message that its proxy war in Iraq, its threatening nuclear program, and its threats of war against its neighbors (including Israel) are all unacceptable in the modern world community, and that the United States is ready, willing, and able to take the fight to Iran if needed. We are at war with Iran right now, but it is (as I said) a proxy war. We have never won a war against a proxy army as there is no way to defeat an army that lives across a protected border in a “safe haven” (which is why Nixon started bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia). One of the lessons of the Vietnam War is that you must be ready to eliminate all such “safe havens,” even if it means invading a strong enemy nation. (For the same reason, McArthur should probably have been allowed to invade China when they were supporting the Korean Army through just such a proxy war.)

But I will never forgive President George W. Bush for wasting our many resources with this misadventure in Iraq and largely ignoring the two real terrorist enemies: bin Laden and Iran.