The big big picture

A reader appreciates the fact that most Americans seem to be keeping their eye on the big picture (rather than the aberrant behavior of some prison guards) in Iraq. He wishes, however, that more would keep their eye on the big big picture – our progress in the larger, long-term war on terror, of which iraq is but one front. Here’s how our reader sees that picture:
“We’d been under attack for a few decades, and post 9/11 Bush elected to do what his predecessor was too weak to do – to do the hard thing, the right thing, to stand up and fight back. That aggressive stance is bearing fruit:
* despite attacks around the world, we’ve not been attacked in the homeland since 9/11
* Afghan terrorist training camps wiped out and foreign fighters there nearly completely gone now
* Saddam Hussein and his boys wiped out, the Iraqi terrorist cross-roads under our control, with a shot at stable democracy
* we know have a base in the heart of the middle east from which to operate in coming decades as we fight Islamist terror
* this guy, Khan, running the nuclear bazaar out of Pakistan, has been outed and has been talking
* as a result of our presence in iraq, we’re no doubt picking up a great deal of good intelligence first hand
* the UN is apparently in the process of being outed as massively corrupt, crooked to the core, and not to be trusted with our security
* we have a clearer idea who our friends are around the world, and a clearer idea that the French are not our friends
* Libya’s Khadafi gave up his nuke efforts
* some of Iraq’s WMDs may have been located – in Jordan – and we may yet find more
* our economy is booming. . .
* a light has been shined on the entire middle east, and I think the muslim world is in the process of self-assessment
“Perhaps best of all, now that Bush put an end to America’s acting like a sitting duck and gotten aggressive in the middle east, we may ‘know what we don’t know’, which beats the heck out of wondering what is going on out there in a dangerous world and simply hoping the CIA is able to answer that question with some accuracy.
“I think Iraq is going reasonably well, and the wider, long-term war on terror remarkably well…our aggression has cost us hundreds of lives, but I think our continuing to be weak on terror would have carried a far higher price.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses