Conservatives Still Clueless on Iraq

Why do the Phoenix area dailies have to print letters from boneheads on Saturday morning? Can't they print reasonable things to make people look at the issues from a practical standpoint? Why do they have to print letters like the one in today's Arizona Republic they titled "A few questions on liberals' war policy," (21 July 2007)?

If I had to guess, since the author lives in Peoria, he's somewhere in his 70's and thinks of military operations in an Eisenhower and McArthur context. This is the same age group as Rumsfeld and while they had a military strategy that worked 60 years ago, warfare against the U.S. has changed signficantly since then and they haven't kept up. This is a problem for them and for us.

As usual, conservatives miss the freaking point of terrorism and why traditional military operations do little more than create more sympathizers. Think about it, anyone who had any money or skills bailed out of Iraq right after the "end of military operations." All that's left are those who have to stay there. Are they the educated folks? Nope, they're the uneducated ones. They're the ones who are more succeptable to catapulted propaganda (kinda like here). They react emotionally rather than rationally (kinda like here). Therefore, when someone in their mosque gets them wound up with a speech/sermon, they go out in the streets and do things that are not in their best interests (kinda like here).

There's also the simple fact conservatives--still-- know little about the Arab culture, even after all of this time. When you kill someone in an Arab's family in a war, they don't chalk it up to bad luck. They look at the circumstance. If they believe their family member should not have been killed, whoever did the killing has an enemy not just for this generation, but for generations to come. They do not forget. So the "mistakes" we've made under GWB will haunt us for decades. If you don't think that doesn't feed into support for terrorism or guerilla attacks against our soldiers, you're blind AND stupid.

The point is Al-Queda will be a problem as long as we continue this boneheaded, testosterone-driven policy of "we won the war, you lost so get over it" military policy. It has never worked there before and it won't work here. So redeployment is a simple acknowledgment that doing something over and over and not getting the expected result isn't working.

These old guys who think the Middle East is like WWII are simply wrong. Bush's strategy was doomed from the start and, if you remember, Bush had to fire enough Generals until he could find some who would agree with him. If that wasn't a clue we were in trouble, I don't know what is. But until we deal with the many problems our Bush family "victories" are causing over there, we will always have a terrorist threat against our country. Forcing the Iraq government to take control of the situation by redeploying our forces to hunt Bin Laden is a fine start.