What we are experiencing now in the GWOT is an ebbing of the West's resolve to pursue victory. Perhaps the tidal shift began when Israel ended it offensive in Lebanon without recovering it's kidnapped soldiers or dismantling the terror infrastructure in the Bekaa Valley. We have recently witnessed Bush's foreign policy rejected at the polls. Al Qaeda is redeploying their forces from Afghanistan to Iraq and who knows where else. In the latest symptom of this shift, Tony Blair now calls for rapprochement with Syria and Iran. (The short term gain from achieving a dubious split between the Shiitie Iranians and the Sunni al Qaeda does not trump the fact that the Iranians and the Facists in Damascus are themselves dangerous enemies of the West)
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President Bush and Rumsfeld meant well by trying to use limited military force in concert with political efforts to transform the Middle East - but such a transformation will take 2 generations - if at all. In retrospect the USA has been much too soft on its enemies. The enemy understands only 2 things: power and the willingness to use it - anything short of that is perceived as weakness.
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No one in Iraq would benefit from the retreat of the Coalition forces, except the enemy - an enemy which gleefully murders scores of innocents everyday. We need to increase troop strength - not decrease it! We need to divide the country into smaller compartments, better secure the borders with Syria and Iran, disengage from the population centers and let Iraqi security forces take over the front lines.
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Anyone who believes that our retreat from any battlefield would encourage the enemies of freedom to sue for peace is a FOOL! The islamic fundamentalists who threaten us must be destroyed. Every day wasted is a day where the danger grows in magnitude.
1 comment:
Surely the dead Iraq civilians recognize our need to wipe out Islamic fundamentalism.
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