Bravo, Bodhi, RedTop, and Toad! There are so many shallow uninformed grandstanding critics in the world you have to wonder why some brave souls ever go into politics, i.e., freely elected offices in real democracies.
It's 100 times harder to DO things than stand around in safety on the sidelines and yap endlessly about personal agendas and vendettas.
If Iraq can get its act together after the abuses by Saddam, and if it can avoid theocracy, the world has a chance to be a better place, and the horrendous cost of Iraq might even be worth it.
Democracy, security, and freedom (relative, nothing is absolute) are total mysteries to way too many nations and peoples of the world. People reared in ignorance, whether in neighborhoods or nations, are at the mercy of thugs and exploiters.
Ultimately it's the ancient ends justify the means question. Innocents and good people die in every conflict -- the point is whether they died for something worthwhile or in vain.
Successful leaders somehow have to seize the opportunities at hand and improve the future rather than be crippled by not just differences of opinion but genuine enemies, foreign and domestic, who would attack them no matter what they do.
I didn't vote for Bush but I have to applaud him as a decent human being apparently trying to do the right thing for the nation and for the world. He doesn't pretend to know everything and he does try to surround himself with the best and brightest advisors.
We live in a great nation when even during the Iraq and Palestine miseries we can poke fun at the President's painful fall from a bike many people of his age couldn't even ride down the driveway. Maybe instead of poking fun at our elected leader we ought to inquire more about his welfare and try to help him help us all.
But too many would rather ridicule the President (try that in any nation other than a genuine democracy) and try to portray him as clumsy or weak to cripple him for reelection. Free elections are at once our greatest strength and our greatest weakness, for we can count on opponents around the world working very hard to have us elect the least capable government.
Hopefully all who attain party candidancy are qualified to lead, but usually there is a best choice for the time and circumstances.
I suppose the whole thrust of this rant is that for American citizens, and for true friends of America around the world, the pride and purpose of 9/11 payback and future prevention should focus on what can we do to make the next day better rather than endless divisive wasted excessive expensive second-guessing about what went wrong yesterday, especially when the enemy is given more support than our casualties.
So in Iraq keep cleaning out the disenfranchised militants determined to keep their nation from the democratic freedom so tantalizingly close at hand. It would be an epic tragedy if Iraq, the Middle East, and the world do not capitalize, literally, on the greatest opportunity Iraq has ever had in the modern world.
