Confronting the Debate

Lately, President Dubya and Vice DICK Cheney have been issuing warnings of disaster and mayhem if the opposition party is successful in taking over both chambers of Congress. Now British PM Blair is in on the act – recently claiming that a democratic discussion in the Parliament on Iraq could cause unbearable demoralization of the troops. It seems to me that we have endured quite enough disaster, mayhem and demoralization from the present course. It may be just as the war hawks say, that the arbiters of terror are just waiting for the electorate to grow weary of the so-called “war on terror,” we’ll let up our guard and they’ll strike us again. But, it could also be that history has dished out ample lessons on the folly of confronting terror with warfare. Five years of warfare, massive death, and chaos are hardly what I call productive signs. Look at what we have accomplished: We have taught the world that the so-called “free democracies” are limited in both capability and means to stop terror and that we are willing to compromise our democratic principles to that end; that our war machine has a limit to what it can do while the terrorists are unlimited; that we don’t care what happens to the citizen on the street so long as our homeland is safe and we have plenty of gas in the tank. I feel like Dorothy meeting the Wizard for the first time… peering around the curtain to learn the truth. Let the debates rage.

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