A Damned Good Question!

Thomas Friedman, a man I occasionally agree with, has a dynamite editorial in the New York Times this morning. To follow is just a snippet, but the entire editorial is worth getting and reading.

He asks two key questions + gives some real answers. Question one is, "What is our strategy" in Iraq? The other is, "Why not try to do it right?" He then provides some recommendations. He puts language to what most Americans are thinking these days, and, above all, what they are wondering about the second Bush administration.

When I was in the military, we used an expression "retired on active duty." I grow more and more suspicious that this is the Bush position regarding Iraq and the entire "war on terror." More and more, we seem to be embracing defeat through indifference.

Let's Talk About Iraq - New York Times>, June 5, 2005, by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Well, we need to talk about Iraq. This is no time to give up - this is still winnable - but it is time to ask: What is our strategy? This question is urgent because Iraq is inching toward a dangerous tipping point - the point where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq.

Maybe it is too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort to bring in those Sunnis who want to be part of the process and fight to the death those who don't. As Stanford's Larry Diamond, author of an important new book on the Iraq war, "Squandered Victory," puts it, we need "a bold mobilizing strategy" right now. That means the new Iraqi government, the U.S. and the U.N. teaming up to widen the political arena in Iraq, energizing the constitution-writing process and developing a communications-diplomatic strategy that puts our bloodthirsty enemies on the defensive rather than us. The Bush team has been weak in all these areas. For weeks now, we haven't even had ambassadors in Iraq, Afghanistan or Jordan.

Friedman is so correct. Have the big boys of the Bush administration exhausted their brain power, or their will power?

Iran goes untouched, just "threatened" by such "big sticks" as a stern warning from the UN Security Council. Whooooooooooooooooooo! Syria floods killers into Iraq to slaughter Americans and Iraqis, without consequence to Syria. Saudi Arabia funds and sends killers to Iraq and runs the world's biggest fifth column inside America, to the apparent indifference of the Bush administration. All sorts of riff-raff scurry across ours borders, with equal indifference. If we go belly-up in Iraq, it will be because we "Vietnamed" within the government, and all Americans will pay heavy prices for decades to come for this torpid "group-think."

The nicest thing to say about them is that the Bush administration seems more and more "retired on active duty." Is there anyone with the right character and mentality within the Republican Party to take over in 2008? Or, will we revert to some Democrat who will just give America away, and ask only to be loved in return, pretty please?