Talkin' Is Hard Work

The dissolution has become appalling during the awkward ending of the worst administration ever. The rats are leaving the sinking ship, that is the growing image.

Today the cretin in chief is accusing the Democratic candidate Sen. Obama of being an 'appeaser' of the little warmongers he is coloring his opponents as - while warmongering remains his major characteristic.

Amusingly, his Secretary of Defense is recommending the very policies that the lame executive is condemning from Sen. Obama. While Gates specified Iran's little madman, it applies, as Gates notes, to the other radical elements in the Middle East as well.

The United States should construct a combination of incentives and pressure to engage Iran, and may have missed earlier opportunities to begin a useful dialogue with Tehran, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday.
(snip)
A number of senior U.S. military officials have emphasized the need for robust diplomacy toward Iran, while not ruling out the use of force. "I'm a big believer in resolving this diplomatically, economically and politically," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. "The military aspect of this, which I think is a very important part of the equation and must stay on the table," Mullen said, is an option of "last resort."

Gates said yesterday that the U.S. military remained "stretched" by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, although he said that all service branches had met their recruitment and retention goals last month. "There is no doubt that . . . we would be very hard-pressed to fight another major conventional war right now," he said. "But where would we sensibly do that, anyway?"

Future conflicts, Gates said, will be asymmetric. "Other countries are not going to come at us in a conventional war."

It's nice to observe intelligence in action, too bad that the executive branch doesn't have the capacities to make use of it. A new administration perhaps will bring to its management of world affairs some of the wisdom gained from experience that is available to it.

When General Petraeus was put in charge, he brought with him concepts he had promoted for handling an insurgency. Some of it was even put into effect, such as integrating troops into the community.

Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine also holds that 80 percent of any counterinsurgency effort should be political.
(snip)
Yet there is a silver lining in his appointment. Petraeus has the expertise to identify shortfalls and the likelihood of failure, and he has the credibility to force a political response. (Emphasis added.)

While much of the above February, 2007, article by a co-author of Petraeus' handbook is sadly ironic, the concepts of the military commander are revered. Of course, they have been sacrificed to the occupied White House's political viewpoint.

When expertise in diplomatic methods can be brought back into the service of this country, we can begin to work for a revival of this country's operational capacity. The peace which is civilized nations' goal will be hard to regain. It is the only condition under which rational aims can be worked toward, and gained.

Accusations of promoting terrorism will no doubt be a leading feature of the offensive against Democrats. If anything, the charges can only achieve the disgust of an electorate that has seen terrorism empowered by the methods and practices of the war party. That members of his own war team embrace those very methods makes the accusations all the more ludicrous.

The voters in three early elections have shown now how totally the war party has lost public trust. Piling more egregious accusations on the party that is working for the public interest will impress only the obtuse who haven't yet seen how far wrong the right wing has gone, and where it has taken the country from its former eminence.