@F. Christian

Oh, please. “Keep them talking while we dot dot dot?”

They’re not talking and neither are the jihadis: both groups believe in one thing only, use of brutal force in the present as the preview of coming brutal force in the future are what they understand. (I do love your invocation of “generations yet unborn”: scratch a liberal and find a sentimentalist)

All this is a fist shoved in your face: “You got the cojones to come fight with us? If not, shut up and eat my leavings.” This is international machismo at its rawest. Every day the U. S. does not demonstrate readiness and willingness to use force the strength of the threat of use of brutal force becomes stronger on the world stage.

I’m beginning to suspect Bush is a prisoner of Rice, and Rice is a prisoner of the U. S. State Department which, being in the diplomacy biz has a professional interest in talking and never fighting. What’s eating at you FC is the standard liberal notion that wars get fought because all who fight them, including the U. S., do so because they’re macho muscle-flexers. “If we could just get the testorone level down on the international scene, everything will be all right.”

Watch the Sopranos: people who live by force and threats of force operate the way the Russians do. That’s why we deal with them through the police who carry weapons and not through social workers.

None of this is very complicated. The Russians signed a cease-fire agreement in an brazen act of saying “F..K you. Here’s my signature on that piece of paper, not get the hell out of my face. You want me to do what you want, make me.” For Rus this is the kind of mentality that makes for national pride, and national pride is much of what this is all about. The fall of the USSR has been rankling this recessive typs for years.