Secularists-R-Us

The withdrawal of the occupation forces is a must because
they have caused the destruction of Iraq,
they committed massacres against the innocents,
they have double-crossed the Iraqis with dreams
--Ahmad Umar al Esawi, Baquba employee

Misprision in the highest degree
--Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Shakespeare
________

General thoughts--

Ranger reads til he's blue in the face; it's always the same stuff. What nobody clearly states is that the Phony War on Terror © (PWOT) is is antithetical to military training, logic and craft. The entire PWOT is based upon hysterical emotionalism based in and justified with jingoistic bombastic sound bites:

--Stay the course--Fight them there so we won't fight them here--Mushroom cloud over NYC--WMD--They want to end our way of life--They hate our democracy--They want to kill us--We're fighting now, so our grandchildren won't

Of course, they won't have the strength to, so depleted will they be with having to work to pay off the incomprehensible national debt currently being racked up. As for ending our current way of life, I'm down with that, as far as the last six years are concerned.

If this were a corporate undertaking, we would be yelling for their heads, as we do when we hear pensioners are raped of their earning by insider trading schemes. This one is jockeying with our future as a solvent nation. Perhaps because of the enormousness of the enormity, we cannot summon the will to shut it down.

In reviewing a stack of articles from the past several weeks I see the repetitiveness of the assault. "We're trying to get them (Iraqi police) to develop enemy targets, but the enemy targets are their friends (Many Trainees are Complicit with Enemy Targets). "The police and army need to be remade to root out secularism" (General's report Offers Bitter Truth).

It's not working, folks, whatever it is. Forcing our "Iraqi friends" to accept the gift of democracy, American-style, or accepting occupation forces in their midst; routing out the original al-Qaida terrorists, who were not there in the first place.

I (Lisa) learned the last lesson early on as a girl. Knowing nothing about basketball, I joined a game, and got the ball. Delighted, I looked around and saw lots of free space--at the other end. I ran down and promptly scored a point for the other team. Lesson: you can make all the right motions, but if you're in the wrong court, you don't get any points. A sobering lesson.

Military virtues include hard-edged assessments of realistic ability to achieve a mission with the assets at hand in a given scenario. This is reality-based and clearly quantifiable.

Military action and the PWOT are diametrically opposed concepts. They are not complimentary.