Highly uncool - Surrender monkeys run amok

You know, I've made serious efforts to remain bipartisan about this whole "War on Terror" thing. I try to be middle of the road. The President's plan in Iraq has long needed some...refinement. I've admitted that there have been alternatives and better ways to do things.

I've been waiting for someone out there, on either side of the aisle, to come up a better way to fix the Islamic terror problems (I say problems because we have distinct issues with Sunni terror and Shiite terror - they're different but equally troublesome beasts).

I've been troubled that, Joe Lieberman aside, I'm not getting anything from the Democrats.

Maybe I need to make my entire position clear. Ahem:

There are people in the Muslim world who have killed Americans, both military and civilian, with relative impunity for more than 25 years. These attacks have been committed by both Sunni extremists (Al Qaeda) and Shiite extremists (Hezbollah). The will to continue this sort of attack is still very much alive.

It is better to prevent these attacks than to let them occur. It is our duty as Americans to protect ourselves and our countrymen. It is impossible to build a giant wall around our nation and retreat within our borders, so we must take the fight to the enemy. This includes murderous regimes that blame America and the West for their shortcomings and misery. Current Middle Eastern governments keep substantial numbers of their people in misery in subjugation, then redirect their powerlessness and rage toward the West. Any offensive strategy in the Middle East requires a comittment to build functioning representative processes to replace dictatorships, which is difficult since the region doesn't have a tradition of such processes.

This is where I'm working from. I cannot imagine any of our national leadership who thinks the best way to counter what happened in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania is to give up.

We've discussed before that I was lukewarm on Iraq as a target. Oh - we needed a target, but if Abby were Queen, it probably would have been a different country in the region.

But now we're there. And man, did we every goatfuck that place. The invasion worked, the immediate aftermath didn't, and we wasted several years while the Administration refused to admit the initial plan wasn't perfect.

Changes have finally been made. We've got a helluva commander on the ground in Baghdad in General Petraeus. You ask me, I'd tell you we still don't have enough guys on the ground, but we're doing better than we were. We've reversed that awful trend leading up to the 2006 elections in which we pulled our people onto the big bases to try to keep them safer.

And now we've got the fucking Democrats in Congress whining for a pullout date. My question - are they stupid, or are they craven weasels more concerned with political success than the long term security of our nation?

'Cause folks, it's one or the other.

A pullout date is nothing. It's meaningless. Spring of '08? What the hell significance does that have? Did I miss the release of the Deomcratic Party Timeline for Success, which outlined the steps and dates for finishing the training of the Iraqi Security Forces (including a robust and functioning border guard), ensuring the Iraqi government is stable enough to run and hold elections on its own (without interference from the Bad Neighbors), and specific benchmarks for establishing enough local security for the defunct factories and oil facilities of Iraq to get fully back on line and offer employment opportunities? Did I goddam miss the part where they explained how we are going to achieve success (that is, VICTORY) by Spring of '08?

No - I don't think I did. Because for some reason, these cringing weasels apparently think we can't win there. We can't do the things in the paragraph above.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is a load of bullshit.

What we may not be able to do is have our cake and eat it too. We may not be able to have our uniformed folks at war while, as the pictures suggested, the rest of America is at the mall.

Only recently did the US Army and Marine Corps get authorized end-strength increases. We've heard the defeatists whimper about how over-tasked our military is for several years now, and only JUST NOW are we getting around to, you know, fixing that. (We're not going to be rude and talk about how our forces were gutted during the 90s - apparently someone thought we'd seen an end to war)

And that's just the beginning. We're currently handling our Reserve and National Guard forces under a "partial mobilization." There are two more steps beyond that. There may be some very hard choices to make if we don't want to lose.

We have options. And we have obligations. There are good men and women in Iraq who will die at the hands of terrorists and criminals if we pull out and abandon them.

There is a large and evil country directly next to Iraq that has watched our wobbling, our lack of resolve, our cringing and which has decided it can get away not only with defying the UN in regards to production of nuclear materials, but has also felt bold enough to kidnap and hold British servicemembers.

Iraq is not just about Iraq. Iraq is also about Iran. There are moral reasons we must not leave Iraq, promises we have made to the people of that country, and upon which they've bet their lives. There are also very serious reasons that we cannot demonstrate to Iran that we have no resolve.

Iran has a puppet state, you know. That's Syria. Syria is, of course, where Hezbollah gets to live and get money and equipment (since they've been largely pushed out of Lebanon).

Guess who's visiting Syria?

Nancy, I got 241 dead American warriors who'd like to have a little talk with you about sitting down with those savages...

Folks, this is all tied together. The term "rat's nest" doesn't even begin to describe this region. We jumped the berm into Iraq and waded ass-deep into the mess that is the modern Middle East. It isn't easy, it isn't simple. It isn't always clear, and it sure isn't made to fit neatly into soundbites.

But there is one country in the world that's a prime target for the rage that brews over there, and that is the U.S. And there is only one entity on the planet with the money, resources, brains and capability to even begin trying to unfuck the region. Fortunately, that is also the U.S.

This is not a short war. This is, as the wise men have said, The Long War. Cutting and running from Iraq misses the point. We need to figure out how to win there, because we're going to need to do it again in the same region before all too long. Whether it's at a time and place of our choosing or theirs, our work in the Middle East is far from over. Iraq is where it's started, and where we can either learn how to win, or begin learning how to lose.

Any politician who favors the later can go straight to Hell.