I am afraid that Demosophia fails to understand that there is no pulling out. Were we to do so the country would be torn apart by civil war. Blood would run in the streets as like the Euphrates, and every nation with a border with Iraq will try and turn the situation to its advantage. Syria and Saudi Arabia would back the sunni Arabs. Iran would back the Shia. Turkey would squash the Kurds before they could declare independence. Refugees beyond count, and terrorism at every step. Lebannon and Algeria and Afghanistan rolled into one package, and then multiplied by ten. It would spill over into neighboring countries, and oil prices would go through the roof.

This was going to happen without our involvement, and thus we decided to take matters into our own hands. We can still prevent this, and prevent this we must, if we want to avoid great tragedy.

As for Bush standing aloof, what would you have him do? He is Hercules, and faces the Augean Stables. And alas, no rivers are conveniently close by to wash away the filth.

"Pulling out" of the Mideast on the supposition that it can be left to its own degenerate devices is not an option. This is because of the one thing that is at the bottom of the pile when you work your way down to it, and--for Christ's sake!--it ain't oil, and it ain't going away.

This is the knife which the Middle East jihadis hold at all our throats, which is the ready availability of weapons that can wreak havoc on our landmass so vast and such as to affect so much of the infrastructure of our political, economic, and social existence as that the only realistic pictures which the doomsayer strategists can give us as to the final consequence is nothing less than total destruction of the western way of life, aka, "western culture," as we know it.

That's it; and that's all of it.

Bush has taken serious hold of a central datum of military defense, and that datum is that defense is viable in direct proportion to the distance of first outer perimeter to the center. This datum is , it seems to me, not very difficult to grasp, but in our military-history-deficient society, we know less about how the military operates than the ordinary farmhouse wife did living in Massachusetts in 1777. The WMD flap is a sure sign that they just don't get it, and a lot of them don't want to.

My point is that as long as we are fighting in the Middle East, and as long as there is the possibility of creating a political society that has a fundamental stake in actively resisting jihad in its locale of origin, we stand a fightng chance of extending our perimeter that far away from our shores.

Now--of course--jihad does not move by armadas across seas like armies of old. The "perimeter" I'm talking about doesn't work that way. What it does is take the physical fight overwhelmingly to the geopolitical space that jihad must have, like air to breathe, to domocile in, to train in, to sit, drink tea and contrive mass murder in. They can't do it sitting crosslegged in thin air.

Our "perimeter" contains, in short, as one indispensable part of the whole, a portion of the middle eastern geopolitical space which is a country that is committed to fighting jihad and which can host our military when necessary, and much more important, our intellitence, special forces, and other clandestine operatives, since before there are any attacks and real defenses against real weapons, there must be people on the ground THERE in the middle east who by that reason if none other are positioned to gain the intelligence necessary to interdict the guy crossing the border into North Dakota.

There's more, but I'll stop here. I don't think Demosophia has got a clue on this--Rick Berg just doesn't figure here, whatever one may think of his murder's being made a spectable of (jihad specializes in spectable, the Cecil B. De Mille's of holy war, b/c that's how terror is created, by show and tell).

"Pulling out" of the Mideast on the supposition that it can be left to its own degenerate devices is not an option. This is because of the one thing that is at the bottom of the pile when you work your way down to it, and--for Christ's sake!--it ain't oil, and it ain't going away.

This is the knife which the Middle East jihadis hold at all our throats, which is the ready availability of weapons that can wreak havoc on our landmass so vast and such as to affect so much of the infrastructure of our political, economic, and social existence as that the only realistic pictures which the doomsayer strategists can give us as to the final consequence is nothing less than total destruction of the western way of life, aka, "western culture," as we know it.

And do you honestly think we wouldn't lay waste most of the Arab Middle East (and possibly most of the Ummah) were some local hero to manage to attack us with a weapon killing, say 5 * 10^5 Americans? Or Brits, Frenchmen, or Russians for that matter? Do you really think we'd have a choice? I suppose we could level Baghdad as a last warning, or something like that. Or the tribal lands of either S.A. or the Northwest Territories, as a kind of object lesson or just to salve our conscience a little. But to tuck the Arab Middle East into bed every night thinking that their distruction is really unthinkable to us, is to not only delude both us and them, but to make that distruction all the more probable.

Doomsday strategy? What strategy? There won't be a choice to make, so all of wisdom is wrapped up in simply and certainly knowing that, now. And folly is not knowing that, or denying it.

This is not Bush's war.

It is the American people's war.

Making us come up with our own reasons to support the war is much better than telling us why we should support it.

Mr. Simon:

Making us come up with our own reasons to support the war is much better than telling us why we should support it.

Unpack that for me. If people don't support the war, won't they just choose not to play? My take on those folks is that there really *aren't any* reasons to support the war. None. If Iran nuked Chicago or Detroit even *that* wouldn't be a justifiable reason, because we might actually hurt someone.

I mean, what am I saying with the "hurt" thing? We can't even go so far as to freakin' *embarass them*, let alone deprive them of sleep or sensory stimulation.

The shame of seeing a few S&M snapshots has driven our legislators *completely and utterly insane*.

I am astonied. Agape. Words fail me.

They hit us with nuclear devices and we hit them with nuclear devices in retaliation? Are you aware of the complex thinking that went on during the Cold War re: nuclear weapons as means of deterrence? One thing that came out of that heady debate is the discovery that the doomsday strategy you propose (aimed in those days at Russia) was not a strategy, if one means by strategy a means of getting to a desireable end. It is not only the counsel of despair, more importantly it's being lazy about one's strategic thinking.

I believe that a nuclear deterrent may well be down the pike. I think that if Bush wins the election he's perfectly capable "talking" the way you're talking. But talking and doing are complexly related, as per the strategy of the threat which people like Thomas Schelling worked out in the 1960s and 70s. In brief, the successful threat is the threat that need not be carried out, i.e., you get what you want without having to do what you threaten.

But getting what you want likewise assumes something else, that the threatened are capable of delivering. Who do you threaten with nucelar devices in the middle east? And here's the rub: threatening Al-Quaeda is a non-starter: they don't care if they die. This is ace-in-the hole the terrorists hold in this poker game. However, you can threaten nation states like Arabia, just as Bush's recent declaration of sanctions against Syria is already an implicit threat, though not of nuclear retaliation. What can they deliver? Potentially, quite a lot in terms of both intelligence and muscle, both aimed at ferreting out the terrorist cells in their own domains.

My main response is simple: nuclear holacaust is not an option, but threatening nuclear holacaust is very much an option. The only way the player opposite is going to see and raise you is to do what Russia did: develop its own nuclear threat. But Arabia? Syria? Naaah. As Bush said before, either they're with us or their against us.

(We could say that to the Democratic base, too, I think)