America continues to sleepwalk into a very scary future. Most of the public has not a clue that the world is changing very rapidly and very negatively. Anecdotally, my boat partner, a nice, reasonably intelligent guy, and I got into a discussion about American politics and Iraq last Saturday as we worked on the boat. It turns out that we both like Giuliani, but for different reasons. I see Giuliani as strong on defense and view his support of the Iraq war as a positive. My partner likes him, but thinks his support of the war is a negative, and sees it as costing him more votes in the general election than it will get him. My partner thinks that we should get out of Iraq right now, despite the fact that his son in law, who thinks more along my lines and with whom he has conversed, returned last November from a year patrolling the streets of Baghdad. My boat partner fails to see any adverse consequences to capitulation in Iraq. Indeed, he fails to see withdrawal as capitulation and thinks we can go merrily on our way to “concentrate our fight” on what he calls “the real enemy”, al-qaida, in Afghanistan. He fails to see that capitulation will have all kinds of negative consequences far beyond Iraq.
Sleeper cells? I would be surprised if they were not here. Hopefully our intelligence operatives have some kind of handle on them. Sadly, I am now convinced that we, as a nation, will continue our sleepwalk until there is another mass slaughter of some sort perpetrated by some radical islamic group. A nuked Las Vegas or San Francisco just might get our attention. Perhaps the activation of Iranian proxies (awakening Hezbollah sleeper cells?) will awaken our body politic from its somnambulence before some jihadi wretches are able to perpetrate the next big act of terrorism. Perhaps not.
