Fighting Terrorists – Stay The Course, Cut and Run, Or?

On June 13, 2006, during a surprise visit to the troops in Iraq, The Decider, President Bush, stated, “We will stay on the offensive against the terrorists, fighting them abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”

In his 2006 Memorial Day address at Arlington Cemetery, he said, “Our nation is free because of brave Americans like these, who volunteer to confront our adversaries abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”

On July 4, 2005, he said in Morgantown, West Virginia, “We are pursuing a comprehensive strategy to win the war on terror. We’re taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”

During his 2005 State of the Union speech, he said, “Our generational commitment to the advance of freedom, especially in the Middle East, is now being tested and honored in Iraq. That country is a vital front in the war on terror, which is why the terrorists have chosen to make a stand there. Our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorists in Iraq, so we do not have to face them here at home. ”

During his acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, he said, “We are transforming our military and reforming and strengthening our intelligence services. We are staying on the offensive, striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”

August 16, 2004, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, he said, “You cannot negotiate with them. You cannot hope for the best. We must aggressively pursue them and defeat them in foreign lands, so we do not have to face them here at home.”

On … , OK, have you had enough? I have.

Believe it or not, there are another 165 examples of speeches by The Decider that contain the phrase, “so we do not have to face them here at home.” If you are interested in more, go to Presidential Rhetoric.com and get the full list of speeches with that exact phrase.

So, President Bush has spent the last couple of years preaching to the choir saying the the same thing over and over while trying to keep the tide from turning against their war in Iraq. But inspite of his orchestrated efforts and group think requirements, opposition to his plan is a growing. Some desire to set dates and get the Iraqis to take full control of their country ASAP. To counter this, the rest of the Decider team is following SOP and painting a bleak picture of this alternatve approach to the Bush plan. Either way, where the heck might we end up? What could happen to us and advancing Democracy? Here is the future of these two extreme options.

Option A – The over-simplified alternative defined by the Bush team as “cut and run”

Where do you think the now highly trained (at our expense) terrorists, with their more sophisticated bombmaking abilities, will go? Will they take their new-found expertise and spread terror far and wide? Will they begin attacking and unifying the nontheocratic Arab nations and become truely national? Will they manage to create a United Nations of Islam? Will they then expand to Europe and Asia wreaking havoc around the world as they zero in on the U.S.?

Option B – The B(ush Plan with the terrorists still on the loose somewhere.

President Bush will simply extend his consistent plan for keeping the terrorists distracted. He will relocate our troops either back to Afghanistan to finish what we started or maybe into Iran to bring an end to the only theocratic country in the world. This will make sure that our fighting men and women are the only U.S. citizens getting killed by terrorists “so we do not have to face them here at home” and so we, or at least some of us anyway, can enjoy our tax cuts.

But how long can our nation keep distracting the terrorists? How many more troops will we need? How many more terrorist troops will be recruited by the consistent Decider plan? When will the terrorist rate of growth surpass the growth of our volunteer military? When will the U.S. government have to reinstate the draft? Just how far will we slide on this slippery stay-the-course, “preemptive,” slope that President Bush, VP Cheney, and SecDef Rumsfeld put us on?

Where will either option end? How long will it take to finish off what will become The New Holy Wars?

Frankly, neither option is acceptable – neither the one we know nor the imaginary one. There needs to be a third. Maybe something based on what has worked in the past. What led to Democracy in East Germany in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall without our having to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to send in our military? What lead to Democracy in Eastern Europe in 1991 after the fall of The Soviet Union without the U.S. making a preemptive strike? When are our elected officials going to do ‘right’ and stop their political self serving get reelected antics?