We all know now that US wars should happen, preferably, with “antiseptic” air power alone and certainly with all ends tied up tidily in a few weeks or months at most, and with everybody happy and contented, especially the anti-American Europeans, US Dem/doves, and also our murderous but misunderstood “enemies”. Else it’s a quagmire

unless, the UN is involved, and then no “exit strategy” need be applied, since peacekeeping and administration duties constitute a perennial job welfare program for UN/EU bureaucrats, and blue helmets need to enjoy their local “fun” and profit, too. (Run, girls.)

The reason the Bush is not trying at this moment to”fix” the UN from within is because it is structurally set up to frustrate reform and maintain the staus qou. Take for example the UN effort to define terrorism. The basic definition that the intentional targeting of civilians and non-combatants should be called terror. Now this doesn’t mean the accidental death of civilians in military actions but if the intentional targeting of innocent civilians, this would include kidnapping,suicide attacks of non-military targets, . This would exclude unintentional deaths because as nasty as this sounds war is not possible without the poorly named collateral damage. But one would think that if you bomb a maternity ward at a hospital even the UN could be able to call this terrorism. But not this ossified institution. The Arab block has stopped any definition that includes specifically targeted non-combatants and there is no way to get anything passed, or if something eventually is passed it will be so vague as to be useless.

This is the institution that has countries with vitually no human rights sitting on the groups that moniter human rights. The only possible way that it will be reformed is to bypass it at this moment till the UN realizes it is becoming obsolete and must change if it wants to continue doing business. It could take 30 to 40 years to reform it from within and the World cannot wait that long. They know that any US President is only in office for 8 years and they would just wait out any concerted internal shake up. As corrupt as I think it is I don’t advocate the US dropping out. I think a combination of going outside the UN for international action and the Reagan method of threatening withdrawl of funding will do more to get this bloated institution to take up reform then any internal effort led by the US.

When I run across it in the blogosphere, I just say I’m still waiting to leave German and Korea.

I don’t want to pile on, but what do you mean by “exit strategy”? It’s like talking about a due date for a library book. WWII didn’t have an exit strategy; we stayed until Europe and Japan were pacified and we are actually still there (although for different reasons than originally set out– oops, changing strategies again, our bad.)

I share your concern about the UN. But if this group of unchecked, unbalanced, free spending bureaucrats were in the US Congress, the voters would demand it be fixed or that a few people go to jail. The cry of horror “Halliburton” should also include “and the UN.”

That is, it reflects an enterprise created to exploit for ["my"] benefit and then flip to someone else’s responsibility as soon as possible. The product or contribution is irrelevant, it’s just an economic marker with a trajectory into my pocket. The cynical edge of the capitalist conceptual continuum.

Soooo… Is it in values terms surprising that the elite-oriented Dems have picked up that idea to beat up on Bush’s policy by any means possible; and that it hasn’t entered the Administration thinking in those terms?

I liked the post today. I read your comments into my Podcast today, as well as those of Little Green Footballs, the Corner, PowerLine and a few others. Listen if you have time. Go for a walk in the park and get your 10 minutes of bloggers each day.

Charlie.

Roger L. Simon liked this part:

As is so often the case, Mark Steyn has this week’s mots justes:

The Democrats’ big phrase is “exit strategy.” Time and again, their senators demanded that Rice tell ‘em what the “exit strategy” for Iraq was. The correct answer is: There isn’t one, and there shouldn’t be one, and it’s a dumb expression.

And by the way, the military is meeting enlistment standards. There is a problem with the reserve and national guard numbers, but moves are being made to shore that up. The sign up is being increased to $15,000. And I don’t think anyone would argue with increasing the death benefit. It is the military, if you join chances are you will get shot at. Soldiers today have a better chance of making it home in one piece than they did a generation ago. We have lost 1300 men in Iraq. We lost 49,500 at Okinawa alone.

If I remember correctly Kerry said he planned to increase our military by 40,000 and still intends to bring that up for a vote. So it seems there is evidence that if the Pentagon needs more people they can get them. Otherwise why would Kerry want to increase an army if we can’t get people to join up to meet present requirements?

We just brought troops off the DMZ for the first time in a half century. We still have a base in Okinawa. We have bases in Eruope. What is our exit strategy from WW2 and the Cold War?

Tell me, did anyone ask Bill Clinton what the exit strategy was when he said we should remove Saddam from power back in 1998? They just thought oh well Bill is blowing off again and ignored it. But he wasn’t. The Iraqi Liberation ACt and Operation Desert Fox along with UN Resolution 1441 and a boken cease fire agreement helped get us here. Our presence in Iraq is actually under UN resolution right now and it states we will leave either when the objectives of stabilizing that country are met or when the sovereign government of Iraq ask us to.

I tell you what, let’s just tell the mullahs and the terrorists exactly when we plan to leave so that they can sit back with their thumbs up their butts, wait for the happy day and then start killing people again.