Elections over

Back for more after they're finally over I guess.

I cannot say I am surprised at the levels of uneducated responses for voting on our issues here in Ohio. Nor can I say I am displeased by the Democratic control of the Congress. I'm not a Democrat or Republican anyway, what concerns me is really the media's take on the results. The media appears to believe that the election reflects a public referendum on Iraq and the broiling war between various sects going on there (mostly with each other rather than us at this point). Iraq is not the issue; Sheehans to the contrary. Leading up to the election there were a number of polls which inquired as to the level of approval of both the President and Congress. Oddly enough, despite the overwhelming lack of interest in supporting W, Congress was even worse off. And we could say why with a variety of responses, many of which I covered before. Iraq was not one of them. Guess why not.

That's right, nobody has proposed a useful plan. It cannot be an issue if not one person has a clear and purposeful agenda. On either side. The reason is obvious. We did defeat the Iraqi forces, this happened sometime ago. The problem is now an uncoordinated but somewhat effective guerrilla campaign against the government we are installing, and yes we did not have sufficient forces, blah, blah (I am a strategic expert, and we blew a lot but we did go in with enough to defeat Iraq militarily, just not enough to conquer, this is key strategic point I acknowledge). It's not a Vietnam where we were the enemy and problem. We like to think so. But really it is an Iraq where Islam and Western ideas of democracy haven't meshed. The war we are embroiled in now has no central leadership against us, no one country supporting it (although some of the very regimes we back most seem likely candidates for the next 'regime change', ie Saudi & Pakistan), and thus no clear enemy. It is in a sense like fighting the Cold War without the Soviet Union, but instead with organized and separate political and guerrilla movements all over Eastern Europe making it difficult or impossible for us to govern or maintain stability in the region thus imposing their will. There are some focal points, the Ayotollah, bin Laden, the holocaust deniers, Hez'bollah fighters, and the Saudi propaganda wing that makes them look like good guys in all this. But these are minor in comparison to the true nature of our enemies. What we are opposed with is not Iraq, but an ideology, even a sub-ideology, of religious-political revolutionary fervor, cooked up by individuals without the direct subversion of powerful religious clerics. They are coming up with this stuff virtually on their own.

Imagine for a moment that we were given free reign in the West to interpret the Bible. We are of course, but there is a central authority that reigns it in a bit in the Holy See. Get rid of that and there is a whole lot of seemingly conflicting and bizarre scripture that we could refer to as fundamental and core beliefs, picking and choosing those which we preferred and ignoring those somewhat contradictory attitudes at will. How would we fare? Considering the mis-educated lot most of us have been cast, not so well. Now imagine that you do not have a common goal with other Westerners, but instead a similar means of expression, martyrdom. Find some explosives or pick up the automatic weapons and start pushing buttons, and you get the picture. There are some radical clerics with the sort of influence we might need to oppose, but the Islamic tradition does not place importance on a priesthood beyond matters of jurisprudence or interpretation on Q'oranic verse. The passages that are being bandied about are perfectly clear in intent and meaning. They might be a selective reading of the Q'oran, but that's just my opinion (and I couldn't translate classical Arabic yet anyway and so have to rely on others).

In any case, the point I am making is this. The War in Iraq is still there, the war against it is over. It is not Vietnam and it is not a political issue at this point. The War against Islamic revolutionary-fundamentalist attitudes is what continues. Be clear on what it is we are fighting and we can have a plan. This was the case throughout the Cold War: contain the Soviet threat, and later expand democratic ideals. It was clear what we were opposing, Marxism or Stalinism. It should be clear what we are fighting now. The problem herein is that while some in Islam are struggling without through jihad, others have been working for some generations to create gaps in Islam's power politically, reformers really starting in modern times with Sadat, and continuing in quiet and steady paces. It is principally these reformers that are being rebelled against. You don't see bombs going off in Saudi Arabia against Arabs, there they hit us. These chinks are of course, seen as a consequence of Western influence, and thus we as the embodiment of the West are a target. Good times all around. War is inevitable herein, unlike the Cold War where it would be a consequence of policy and failed diplomacy, here it is a consequence of the nature of the conflict. We can't get around it, because there can't be negotiations because there is no clear authority to negotiate with. There can't be surrender either, because we have no entity to surrender to. Can there be victory? Perhaps, but there are many levels that must be worked to proceed.

As far as Iraq goes, there is no reason to believe that either party has a plan to 'win' or to 'get us out of there', because neither party appears to have acknowledged the nature of the conflict. We are stuck in a not-another-Vietnam mode, and we haven't awakened to the fact that we aren't in Vietnam. Dororthy is still in an Oz, and its not the pleasant Emerald City version, but the HBO version. So don't tell me this was an election about Iraq, because if it was, what will change? Nothing of substance, some cosmetic things maybe, like oversight committees.. oooo. What a shift in policy. Give me a break.