WSJ “Welcome Back
To the Great Game”

We are at work because our enemies want us to be at war, and they believe that they can win, and achieve their goals.

Wars are fought only because deterrence fails. Everything that the USA has done diplomatically since at least 1989 – is a failure. Where’s the accountability at State, the CIA, and DoD in general? There certainly needs to be political accountability. Having “won” the cold war, America’s feckless politicians have let the Bear out of the bag again. They (Congress) did not adequately fund our military services, nor project a sufficiently serious beating on foreign policy. Instead, but the right and the left played local pork barrel politics, and only paid any scant attention to foreign policy and the Iraq war when the opportunity to skewer a political opponent presented itself. The Democrats, in particular, made political hey out of every American body bag, hoping for more and more to aid their anti-war-driven election prospects. NO WHERE HAVE THE DEMOCRATS done anything, NOT ONE DAMN THING in the last sixteen years to make America safer from our foreign adversaries.

I am saddened. I am in rough contact with two to three dozen Marines vicariously via my kids (we always seem to have a couple of them sleeping on couches or the floor downstairs). I have served my country in peace time and other times, and the one single thought I had during my career was “If we screw this up, our kids will be in Uniform fixing our mess”. These kids are all terrific, some on their second or third combat tours, and they as volunteers are becoming the next “greatest generation”. The 60′s/70′s narcissistic “me” generation, the “Clinton” generation, have in effect put their own pedantic hedonistic pursuits over the security and welfare of their own kids.

So, the “grand game” begins again. Just great.