Iraq: Are We All Doomed This Time Around?

Missed the morning press conference by President Bush but did get a superb blow-by-blow and analysis from PBS just now. Nothing like extended clips, and excellent commentary. Sure beats the heck out of sound bites you get on regular news.

Well, here it is. What almost everyone is saying on both sides is that President Bush is in a state of denial over what has developed in Iraq and that he will not change anything -- strategy, staff, theory, approach, whatever. That means this game could be over really soon.

And we will lose.

I've been around more than a half-century and know a lot about wars. Many of my ancestors fought in every imaginable type of conflict. Take it from someone who knows, and whose intuition has proven extremely accurate over the years, we are at the edge of a cliff and just need one more push to fall and wreck our nation and the civilization it has built over the past 250 years.

Keep in mind nobody has ever really beaten Islam in any real war. The Turks were murderous during World War I, and were equally ferocious during the Crimean War (remember one of Mel Gibon's first pictures, "Gallipoli?").

When the Turks were the Ottoman Turks, they kicked every type of butt all over the Asian and European continents. The Ottoman Empire was never really conquered, it just merged into something the people thought was a little better.

Sure, the low-tech Jihadis don't really have much on the ultramodern United States military machine. Sure, the U.S. Navy and Air Force can deal all manner of death from thousands of miles away, but the question persists: Who is the enemy and who are we supposed to wipe out?

Bush does not know the answer to this. He never will. I always used to be pretty much a Bush fan. I liked Clinton, too, for that matter. All people who become President deserve some kind of commendation for even attempting that idiotically conceived job, the so-called "leader of the free world."

But Bush is in over his head. In this fool's "war on terror" there is no state apparatus to attack, like Japan or Germany during World War II. There was the straw man, Saddam Hussein, that we used as an excuse to get our hands dirty, first in Kuwait, then Iraq itself.

We would be better off bringing back Saddam. Hell, we're Iran's best friend now that we blew out the Shiite Muslims' worst secular enemy. One thing Saddam did was to put a lid on the extremism, even though he had to use extreme measures to do so. He was also feared ]enough to keep those other countries in line in the Middle East.

Now, though, there is no buffer zone. The British are done, and evaporating quickly. The Al-Qaeda forces, scattered around the world and just waiting for a better shot at us than even 9-11 brought, are only holding off for one reason -- their revolutionary bankroll comes directly from U.S. oil money. Yes, they want to destroy the U.S. but not until they've drained every American dollar they can to buy even more IEDs to blow the arms and legs off American soldiers.

Reality is reality. The airliner hits of 9-11 on the World Trade Center and Pentagon amount to the most spectacular military victory of any kind in history. Look what 9-11 did. More than a trillion dollars in economc damage right off the bat. Two or three trillion more after that. It plunged America into a deficit-spending spiral that won't stop or help anything. We are a panicked population, spending yet a trillion more in one sorry country -- Iraq.

Now we're in a real, nightmarish fight for our lives. The nuclear option can't be overlooked, but who do you nuke? Where? When?

Bush was right about one thing: The "axis of evil" certainly includes Iran and North Korea. The decline of Western civilization and its destruction is right around the corner.

And it's not even hurricane season yet.

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