I am, for the first time, very, very worried about what's going on in Iraq. Before I was upset -- after all, a guerrilla war is a terrible thing and streams of dead soldiers are heart breaking, but, I had expected some sort of counter-insurgency and so was caught unsurprised. My beef with Bush was that he hadn't prepared Americans for what was coming next, not that something different should have come.
But now the political arm of the White House appears to be taking over. We're speeding up their elections and reducing our troops -- and they don't even have a Constitution. In essence, we are running away from Iraq. This is the worst possible thing to do. The only way we could fulfill Bush's rhetoric about Iraq and make it a real imminent threat is to show that if you just kill enough Americans over a period of time, we will concede defeat. There is no action we could take short of invading Saudi Arabia that would give the terrorists as much hope and motivation as to show that their low-grade, conventional weapons based insurgency had defeated the might US Army.
And if it works to get us Iraq, expect to see a lot more terrorist attacks the world over -- for if America shows it isn't strong, American will never again be safe.