On Iraq

I really don't think we need nukes to get the job done. We need to finish what we started. Even if we started for the wrong reasons. Leaving the job undone signals that to beat America all you have to do is hold out for an election cycle, maybe two.

Assymetric warfare's victory conditions are entirely dependant on the will of the stronger nation. There is never any doubt that the stronger nation CAN win. The question is always, "Will the stronger nation do what it takes to win for as long as it takes to do so?" For the weaker force to win, the stronger force has to quit. That is the only way for them to acheive vistory. They hope to survive the attrition until we quit, nothing more.

I do not support a time table for withdrawl, rather a set of goals, "We stay until everything on this list is true." No dates given. If it happens tomorrow, no problem! If it takes twenty years, so be it.

I will say it again, in terms of our casualties per capita compared to WW2, it is slightly after midnight on Dec 8, 1941. Now compare that to the number of days we have been in Iraq. We're going to lose more people Super Bowl weekend to drunks than we have in years of fighting.

We as Americans have a bad habit of projecting our values onto the rest of the world. The problem with this is that the rest of the world tend to use its own value system when making decisions and that makes their decisions incomprehensible to us. Our refusal to understand their value system makes them unpredictable. The TERRORISTS understand our values and use them to predict our actions. Yes, Virginia, it is possible to understand values and still reject them.

And their values are not values that allow for other schools of thought. Find a world conflict that doesn't envolve Islam. Not many, are there? Sooner or later we are going to have to start fighting this war like one side is seeking to eradicate the other. They are. Guess who they are trying to eradicate?

It is also much better to have the fight there than here. Were the fight even in Mexico, it would still be better than having the fight here. The flypaper strategy might not have been a conscious decision, but it is happening.

I have a lot of friends who are still in. They all beleive in what they are doing and that it is better to have them doing it than not.