Last time I looked the Pentagon had about 500 people assigned to Congress as technical advisors; the embassy in Baghdad has about 5,000 people ‘advising’ the hapless Iraqi government.

Perhaps “dictatorship” is a bit harsh and judgemental; but when you watch decisions in D.C. made through this decision making process one does get the impression the Pentagon is running the show; not Congress. Murta’s change of mind? heart? was a major bombshell!

Anyone else notice that the DEM’s have backed way off their predictions of how they will end the occupation and ‘war’ in IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN?

DOD plays hard ball and it is very difficult to abandon our ‘boy’s’ in IRAQ by defunding them; nor can you end a war by withdrawing since it is as unAmerican as quitting a game when the score’s tied or you’re slowly getting the Billions of dollars drained from your economy.

So Pelosi & co. have ‘caved’ just like liberal Dem’s have so many times in the past–ever wonder why Vietnam went on so long and it took Nixon to actually end with nearly secret negotiations in N. Vietnam?

o.k. let’s call it a military-industrial ‘advisorship’?

Quick! Trace fjh’s URL and have him arrested!

Never confuse “FOREIGN POLICY” which is what you read about from the state dept. from military policy or whatever it is the CIA, NSA, etc. are guided by.

Instead of appeasement, our policy in regard to most of the non-kowtowing ARAB world is thinly disguised GENOCIDE, borrowed from ISRAEL…kidnap two soldiers who deliberately invaded Lebanon, and Israel goes mad and kills/maims a hundred thousand people and destroys a billion dollars worth of property.

This sure as hell isn’t “Appeasement”.

The authors agree that appeasement is foolhardy and ultimately counter-productive. They also support vigorous U.S. military action to topple hostile regimes. It seems clear that in the event that the U.S. does act to destroy the government (and hopefully in the future the war-making ability) of a nation hostile to the West, we have both the moral and practical duty to install a moderate new government to administer the country.

There are three possible courses we may follow: a) The Alexandrian or Ottoman model of installing a ‘friendly’ dictator to rule for us as a proxy. Our ultimately disasterous support for the the Butcher of Baghdad and the Shah of Iran resulted in the first and second Gulf wars, the re-emergence of the jihadist mindset, and the rise of the Ayatollah; b) the 1980′s Afghanistan model whereby the U.S. helped the Muj expel the Soviets, then, quickly left the region which inevitably descended into civil war, and saw the emergence of the Taliban and 9/11; or c) the post-WWII model of setting up the institutions of representative government to pacify and administer the vanquished country.

In my opinion our problem in Iraq has not been our commitment to democracy, but rather our well-intentioned though misguided attempt to conduct the early war with the “shock and awe” strategy of minimizing the violence and thus the innocent bloodshed, coupled with our recent tepid commitment to follow- through in war and in support of freedom movements elsewhere (Vietnam, Korea, post gulf-war Iraq, etc.) This led to the infuriating though understandable reluctance of Iraqis to stand up in support of their own best interests against the forces of Islamic terror we left alive to sow fear through violence.

History has taught us that to ensure a stable and lasting peace the enemy forces must be totally and ruthlessly destroyed and the population made to capitulate completely before rebuilding can effectively begin. We failed to do that in Iraq, but our commitment to democracy was not the reason for that failure.

Besides democracy, what other options do we have?