The insurgency opposition we've run into in Afghanistan and Iraq is not the kind that I want to run into any closer to home.

We are doing the world's dirty work, and it's a shame the world isn't doing more on its own to help out. I'm not saying the world has to join us militarily. I'm saying the world should pay a lot more attention to security issues and issues we're all going to face such as Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons capability.


I'm going to repeat something I wrote elsewhere, an analogy I made to a film called: The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart in a memorable role as a badly unhinged ship's captain in WWII. His officers take control of the ship away from him and are courtmartialed for it. Their defense lawyer played by Jose Ferrer is pretty abusive toward them but he gets them off by putting so much pressure on the captain that he falls apart on the witness stand. As they are celebrating their not guilty verdict he shows up drunk and tells them off. The world was fighting for its civilized life, he says, and while they had a defective leader, they could have made do with him if they'd gotten together to support him instead of cutting him off at the knees. Instead, the effort they could have made to defeat the enemy was turned in on itself. That's how I see the lack of support from France, Germany, and Russia in particular. Bush is not a great leader, and he isn't 'right' on a lot of things but he's the guy we've got for now; the US deserved more support than it got, and that support could have been modulated to make Bush a whole lot more easy to live with. I think he deserved that much. And while the specific WMD assertions that were made were not backed up after we moved into Iraq, there is no proof that Bush lied to us. (I'm not going so far as to defend all the other guys in the US information system, there are some incompetent folk there).

As for the insurgency in Iraq, I think there are powerful forces maintaining it with money and weapons. Those forces are primed to install a repressive regime once we move out.