Drain that Swamp

The other day I walked into the break room and found a colleague reading the newspaper. Being a friendly guy, I asked "Anything happening in the world?" to wit he responded "The world is a mess - we need to get Kerry in the White House to set it straight!"

You would think saying something like that to me would be akin to wearing pants made out of pork chops to the International Half-Starved Rottweiller Convention. However, you would be wrong for two reasons.

First, this guy was clearly a liberal, and vocal enough to let his opinion be known. People like that are not inclined to have an interesting discussion that challenges their notions. In my experience, they get into a real snit, real fast. Second, this guy was of sufficient rank that the last thing I wanted was for him to be in a snit with me.

I smirked out some lame remark "Yeah, that'll fix it". He replied that the 9/11 committee had concluded that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11.

Sigh.

What I wanted to say was "But sir, the war in Iraq was not about retribution, but preemption". While I personally think all terrorist organizations are in some sort of cahoots, in that they are united in their hatred of Israel and her lackey, the United States, I don't particularly care if Saddam and Osama swapped recipes or not. Some regimes just need killin'.

Asylums like Taliban-run Afghanistan and Saddam-run Iraq are swamps, and terrorists are hate-infested mosquitoes. I am perfectly comfortable with draining swamps. Liberals like my friend (I say that without sarcasm - this individual is a very nice man, generous, gregarious and talented) don't, or won't, embrace the logic (if not necessity) of preemption. Instead they toss out banalities about the illegal war or no connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

In fact, from this same 9/11 hearing, testimony came from 1992 Trade Center bombing prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald that Iraq's relationship with Al Quaeda was thawing, going "…from opposing each other to not opposing each other to possibly working with each other".

The notion that after draining the fever swamp of Afghanistan that Iraq would not have been a spanking new haven for these lunatics is itself lunacy. Al Quaeda might have run to Libya instead, but watching Saddam getting lice inspected by a Yankee GI seems to have helped Muammar Ghaddafy get his mind right.

Cold war era détente was rejected by Reagan because it a) proscribed a permanent nuclear terror on society, and b) allowed the Soviet Empire to expand and enslave millions. He was not interested in stalemate, but in victory, and he had to think outside of the box to do it. The naysayers were wrong - wildly so.

Arab dystopias are in fact the breeding ground for terrorists, and the sooner they get drained, the better. We cannot capitulate to them enough to satisfy them. Free Arab societies - no matter how they get that way - are our best defense.

Tim McNabb