Teresita,

I won’t disparage your service to our country. But it takes more than just we veterans to stop the Islamic totalitarians from driving wedges into our cultures and societies. It takes a people and their elected leaders to recognize the threat. And to understand how this enemy wages war against dar al Harb. You may not like GWB and his “neocons” and his Christian Right wingers, for whatever reasons you reserve to yourself, but at least he took the fight to the enemy. The point I have always tried to make, here and elsewhere, is the counterpoint to the Left’s fiction that Baathist Iraq was no threat to the West. It was. For me, the primary cassus belli was that it was a state sponsor of Islamic terrorism. From about 1993 onward the Baath Party and Saddam cloaked their invective in the language of Islamic jihad against the unbelievers. He helped Islamic terror groups, including all of those groups under the al Qaeda umbrella. Besides the unending violations of the Truce terms, this was the most compelling reason for President Bush to get rid of the monster.

These points have been made by others, ad nauseam. Why this does not make a convincing impression on you and those on your end of things I cannot fathom.

Anyway, yeah, I am perhaps some kind of “neocon,” since I left the Left back in ’87. I may not be Jewish, but I sure am a traitor. I do favor a robust policy of being proactive and even pre-emptive against terrorist states and their proxy groups. The only thing these people understand is the mailed fist. Obonga’s sweet talking with them will never dissuade them from waging war in the way of Allah.