Here's a quandary. How do you wrap your head around a moral absolutist argument by those who also believe in moral/cultural relativism? How do you find the theoretical synthesis between having an impenetrable morality all the while believing that other moralities/cultures are just as legitimate, even if they violate the absolute moral code?

Want to know the answer?

The answer is that you don't.

Politics as Life

There are millions of my fellow political junkies out there who eat, sleep, live and breathe the goings on of home and the world. We read the news, the opinion sections, the blogs; we watch the news, listen to the talk hosts, agree or disagree over and over. Some of us are more informed than others. Some of us are more passionate than others. The key thing is that the amount of passion you have for politics has no bearing on the depth of your knowledge and the accuracy of your points.

This is not a phenomenon of the left or the right. Both sides have those who are informed, those who are passionate, some who are more of one than the other and some who are equally both. Of the both category, on the right, you have thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Rich Lowry, George Will and Will Wilkinson. On the left, you have such names as Ezra Klien, Matt Yglesias, Bill Scher and Fareed Zakaria. There is plenty of knowledgeable and passionate people on all sides, all with views that make sense, even if you don't agree with them.

The problem arrives with the appearance of the passionately uninformed politico. In a debate on torture on Blogginghead.tv between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, two distinguished professors, the comments were flooded with post after post on how the Bush administration should be prosecuted for the so-called crimes these people accuse them of. Some commenters went so far as to say both men were dead wrong on the subject because said commenters knew a priori that what the United States did was wrong, and by such astounding argument any other talk on it, or any other path of thinking other than conviction, was null and void.

I'm all for an actual, intelligent, back and forth battle of wits. I think I'm right when I debate, of course (who wouldn't think that?), but I've been corrected by others and I have corrected others countless times. Such is the way you learn and grow your intellectual mind. But it's these people who take politics as a lifestyle, not just a hobby or an interest, that come to be the people who get the deluge of links from eager beaver college students in their term papers when they call President Bush a war criminal and a fascist. It's these people who get vast followings by questioning the authenticity of birth certificates or claiming FEMA is about to round us all up in the event Obama turns out to be a Muslim Martian. These people are the ones that fan the flames of unintelligent debate. And just because it'll piss off the uninformed left, I'm going to focus on their contradictory moralities and totally ignore the right.

Torture as National Moral Rot

The argument I hear constantly from the passionate moralists is that giving a green light to torture, with specific focus on waterboarding, would erode America's moral standing and national moral core. Whether the other methods like temperature fluctuation and sleep deprivation count as well depends on the moralist you're talking to. This argument crosses so many different ideas and cherry picks from them only to make an inane point that has no bearing on the real world.

To start off with torture, there is no conclusive proof of actual state-sanctioned torture. Waterboarding is still being debated by Barack Obama and Barack Obama, let alone the rest of the government. Even in foreign policy hawk circles there is plenty of room for discussion. All this while the other methods are not even on the table except by the most hardened of activists. So to sing the praises of Spanish judges or demagogues is so premature as to be embryonic.

Moving on, the green light to this so-called torture program was given years ago by not only the slew of public policy experts in the government, but by Congressional leaders. Congress is the voice of the people and the people at that time wanted to prevent another 9/11 at all costs. Luckily, for captured terrorists, at all costs in America does not mean beheading, gang rape, burying and stoning, or any other disgusting and horrific methods used by radical Islamists. At all costs, in American-speak, means within reason. What the “torture” memos describe is not the legal gymnastics to do whatever we need, but to build a legal ceiling to prevent torture from occurring while doing its best to not hamper the goal of the entire program: gathering intelligence. Basically, to do the best one can with terrorists who've been expertly trained in interrogation without it actually being torture.

And now we get to the icing on this mudcake: the idea of a collective national morality affected by the collective agreement to institutionalize torture. First and foremost, the idea of a collective national morality is fascistic. Such talk was used by every Progressive from Teddy to Kennedy. It was used by the Nazis, the Italian Fascists and many others. A belief in a collective national morality dismisses the idea that individuals are able to determine their own morality because of some kind of collective psychological slavery to the will of the mob. It also dismisses the checks and balances of our republican system in which the collective can (and has been) reserved in its fury by the executive or judicial branches, as was the case in the Civil War and its aftermath. The nation could be calling for the extermination of all redheaded stepchildren, but it'd still go against a warehouse full of constitutional protections and it would be struck down, if the judges actually did their job. As for our moral standing, other parts of the world have opposing moral/cultural codes which naturally conflict with ours, and so our moral standing with these nations probably isn't exactly high during good times, let alone the times that they can exploit as a war against their values when, in fact, we do nothing of the sort.

So, what we have from this paraphrase summary of the layman left's argument against torture, is this:

The United States, through its representative legislature, green lighted methods that have yet to be determined as torture, but if the people, now in discussion over the issue, do not demand the prosecution of the past administration for crimes that have yet to be conclusively ruled on as crimes, then the collective morality of the nation, a concept both fascistic and questionable, will be affected by the people's choice and negatively affect the nation in ways we do not know nor in ways we can hypothesize except that it won't be good for our moral standings with nations whose views conflict with ours naturally and who exploit every chance they get to denounce us.

Compelling stuff.

Arguing To Win

These politically passionate folk, armed with their air-tight argument against the use of harsh interrogation, strut their stuff on their blogs, on message boards, in coffee shops and on the street. They proclaim the immorality of what President Bush and his administration did. They attack others as fascists and monsters. There is no way someone who is moral can support these methods. No way in hell. Anything else deserves a stern response, preferably snarky or emotional. And this is where the passionately blind lose sight of their goal, if they had a goal to being with.

Their mistake is to believe they can change the mind of someone in a political debate that cumulatively lasts less than an enema (though sometimes the enema may be preferable depending on who you're debating). You're not arguing to win, you're arguing to argue. I don't slide over to my conservative group on Facebook to turn the doe-eyed liberal into a cranky, shotgun toting conservative. I go on there to be motivated to come up with new and interesting ways to prove a point. What began as a “But I'm right” morphed into a “Of course, Alternet is a unbiased source!” to “Eh... Wikipedia? Are you sure?”. The one thing I never did was actually win an argument. The one thing I did do early on was explode due to my opponent's odd opposition of changing his entire code of values. Who knew a conservative didn't want to give up US national sovereignty to foreign powers?

Spy vs Spy: Leftist Theory Fights Itself

“Politics as life”-ers have an emotional attachment to their views and that view's superiority that it puts them in the predicament of contradicting past or current views. For example, the political left's defense of not-so-covert agent Valarie Plame (found in D.C.'s Who's Who next to the name of her ambassador husband while “undercover”) while promoting the outing of CIA interrogators. The “torture” debate puts this front and center when it pits liberal/leftist moral absolutism against their equally vigorous support for multiculturalism, which is a product of moral relativism. Of course, not everyone arguing against the use of waterboarding or other methods are moral relativists, but I'm not arguing against everyone who has an objection to “torture”, but those who have an objection to “torture” that contradicts their other standing views.

Moral relativism has a bad rap because of its association with liberal/leftist social theory. From the left, moral relativism holds that the world has a plurality of moralities and those moralities are equal in comparison as they relate to the individual's belief and passing judgment would be ignorant. Basically, the “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter” argument. Thing is, if you scratch the egalitarianism from moral relativism, you actually have a very basic and accurate theory on the reality of moral views in the world. There are different moralities, that is a fact, but the key thing for any intelligent person (liberal or conservative) is to realize is that not every single morality can be equal with the other. This is impossible because morality is subjective, and no matter how much a liberal may try to respect every single morality that shows itself on campus there's going to be some view that'll outrage them (other than a conservative point of view, of course).

Now, how exactly does someone who believes in an equality of moralities turn around and proclaim that “torture” is immoral?

They want to win. The argument they use is partisan, not intellectual. They want to be objectively right, not just subjectively right, and that involves doing all you can to appear on the winning side of history (and that's only if history exonerates their view). Those who take to the streets, to the blogs and to the boards in anger are not trying to find out what exactly is torture in our complicated world, or add to the discourse on the morality of using torture, if what we've done is indeed torture. They want the honor of being proclaimed victorious over an issue that is mostly subjective and therefore can never be really determined on objective grounds.

So, if you ever encounter one of these moralists in the middle of proclamation of moral absolutes, ask “Who says?”. If they are anything like the person I described, you should be able to hear the explosion. Just make sure you're under something when it happens.

There are actually people on the left gloating about Obama's withdrawal plan for Iraq. Apparently, the timetables the antiwar crowd and the Democrats have been pushing for are now a reality. For five years we've heard the whining about timetables, private military contractors, equipment and so on; for five years such talk was ignored, and rightly so. This is why.

I'll tackle the most controversial first: equipment. No one but the most ardent military haters could argue against our soldiers receiving the best equipment. We want our warriors as protected as they can be when the are at war. Alas, the military is supplied by the government, and the government, as we conservatives know, isn't close to being a reliable supplier of anything to the military, unless you want to live in a centralized military dictatorship like North Korea. Congressional pet projects, ideological debate, political partisanship, appropriation battles, turf wars, favored companies; all play in to the massive cluster**** our military ends up in when it comes to equipment supply during war. When Donald Rumsfeld told a soldier that

It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it. As you know, ah, you go to war with the army you have---not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.---You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up... [1]

While being a massive PR bruise due to media repetition and liberal hysteria, what Rumsfeld said was factual. The military is in the business of war, and nothing is perfect: from the battle plan to the tires on the Humvee. This doesn't mean the government can skimp on equipment or any of us should defend the government when it happens, which happens a lot sadly (the Bush administration was rightly blasted for the problems with its supply line), but it doesn't mean left-wing antiwar activists can suddenly become the patrons of the military when it was their saint Clinton who cut the military nearly in half at a time US power was expanding across the world. Such dishonesty.

Speaking of Clinton's military cuts, that brings us to the private military contractors. These companies, full of former military and police elites, are necessary because of the liberals and the leftists. The Bush administration inherited a military cut by nearly 300 000 personnel, hundreds of ships and planes as well as an axing of six infantry divisions.[2] Afghanistan was the perfect war for our downsized military, but Iraq was much harder due to the split of old alliances by the antiwar bloc in Europe and those in the Coalition. A bigger country with a much more centralized population, the underestimated number of troops needed by Rumsfeld and the Pentagon as well as the early blunders by the Collation Provisional Authority with the Iraqi army, it was very apparent that not all security missions could be taken up by the military alone. Things like embassy security, personnel security, contracted convoy security and other such tasked needed to be taken up by private firms while the military fought the growing insurgency by the Ba'athists and the invasion of mass amounts of Al Qeada terrorists. When the involvement of PMCs became news, right on cue the left wing threw its arms up in disgust with these “mercenaries” (used as a pejorative). The irony, of course, flew right over them.

Now, timetables are something we all heard ever since the first bomb was dropped on Ba'athist Iraq. When are we gonna leave? Why isn't there an exit strategy? Such questions, like all things, have their time and place. Asking for timetables and threatening to cut off aid during the height of the insurgency or during the Surge isn't very appropriate, now is it? The reason Obama even has the ability to announce withdrawal is because President Bush finally smartened up to the failing “withdrawal is victory” mantra that was deeply rooted in his commanders and kicked out the failing generals and replaced them with General David Petraeus, who turned around the war in one year with the Surge and a new community oriented strategy. At the time of his confirmation, he was lambasted by the left and the Surge itself was ridiculed as a failure even before it was implemented. Surprise, surprise, the irony flies over the leftist as the Surge has stabilized a free and democratic Iraq and allowed for the very timetables for withdrawal. But I don't expect you'll hear anything close to praise for General Petraeus or the success of the Surge from those who now benefit politically from it.

The left wing has an odd history with war. During the First and Second World Wars the left was literally up in arms, wanting to kill the Kaiser and snuff out Hitler. But when the Cold War began and the enemy wasn't monarchism or fascism, but their papa Communism, suddenly the pillar of liberalism became peace and isolation, but only if you forget that it was Johnson who expanded the Vietnam War and that Clinton had more interventions and military conflicts than Bush. Now, that the generation of the 60s and the subsequent generations born into a exponentially prosperous America have taken over the nation's leadership, it seems that the more liberally minded of them wish to forget their blood lust (read: the 1990s) and save America from its imperial self. Good luck, since President Obama has taken up most of President Bush's security policies and has pushed for upping the ante in Afghanistan.

Gloat all you want, left-wing. The only reason you can push your programs and claim peace is that we fought for victory and attained it over your objections.

Sources:

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46508-2004Dec8?language=printer
2. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=644

With Senator Patrick Lahey of Vermont hoping to spear President Bush with a thousand needles of so-called war crimes [1], it has become apparent even those privy to the procedures and effectiveness of our intelligence gathering lack the gray matter to properly understand it. For years, pretty much from 9/12, President Bush was attacked by the far left on the treatment of terror suspects. As we took the Global War on Terror to Saddam's spider hole, the liberals and the Democrat party as a whole began to take on the arguments of the far left and were quick to accuse the president and the military of torture. A word used way too much these days by people who don't know what it is.

The method of interrogation targeted by the antiwar crowd has been water boarding. Used for hundreds of years under many names, water boarding basically creates the fear of drowning in its indented subject. Images of the Khmer Rouge's use of it were viral across the blogosphere and on TV when it came to light that we were using water boarding, except that modern water boarding used by our intelligence agents is not intended to create pain for pain's sake, as it was before.

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt. [2]

At no time is the subject under threat of actual drowning from swallowing water, as it was with old water boarding techniques used by the Khmer Rouge or the Imperial Japanese during World War II. The intent of the method is to activate the instinctive gag reflex to create an uncomfortable situation for the subject. Out of the 600 plus prisoners that have graced the cages of Gitmo, only three have been water boarded, according to the CIA [3], or a dozen have, according to ex-CIA sources [2]. In no way is it as prevalent as the antiwar-human rights-leftist groups would have you believe. Also, something that may be unknown (unlikely) to these groups, modern water boarding is used on our own soldiers. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program puts soldiers under intense, but not life threatening situations, that include water boarding, to strengthen them against enemy interrogations. [4]

Harsh interrogation has saved many, many lives and stopped many, many plots. Specifically, a plot called the West Coast Plot, featured at National Review, was discovered and disrupted due to the use of harsh interrogation of terrorist Abu Zubaydah.

Zubaydah was captured in a gun battle and severely injured. The CIA arranged medical care, saving his life. After he recovered, Zubaydah provided what he thought was nominal information—including that KSM's alias was "Muktar," something our intelligence community did not know. But he soon ceased all cooperation. It was clear to his interrogators that he had received interrogation resistance training, and the traditional methods were not working. So the CIA employed alternative interrogation techniques. And Zubaydah started talking.

He provided information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh—one of the key plotters of the 9/11 attacks and a close associated of KSM. Bin al Shibh was the mastermind behind a plot for a follow-on attack to hijack airplanes in Europe, and fly them into Heathrow airport. Now he was off the street and the Heathrow plot was setback.

Together, bin al Shibh and Zubaydah provided information that led to the capture of KSM. 

Once in custody, KSM refused to cooperate, until enhanced interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—were used. Then he began to talk. 

He gave us information about another terrorist in CIA custody named Majid Khan. KSM told us that Khan had been tasked to deliver $50,000 to a Southeast Asian terrorist named Zubair—an operative with the terrorist network Jemmah Islamiyah, or JI.

Confronted with this information, Khan confirmed KSM's account and gave us information that led to the capture of Zubair. 

Zubair then provided information that led to the capture of a JI terrorist leader named Hambali—KSM's partner in developing the West Coast plot. Their strategy was to used Southeast Asian operatives, since KSM knew we would be on the lookout for Arab men.

Told of Hambali's capture, KSM identified Hambali's brother "Gun Gun" as his successor and provided information that led to his capture. 

Hambali's brother then gave us information that led us to a cell of 17 JI operatives that were going to carry out the West Coast plot. [5]

I have a question for these groups: Are you truly willing to stop all harsh interrogation of captured terrorists because you so doubt the professionalism of our armed forces and covert agents that you believe they'd use a last resort technique on someone who may be innocent even though they have literal tons of pages of information on those within their authority to interrogate? Do you really hold our national security apparatus in such low esteem?

I'm not sure on the specifics of each groups' opinion, but some would say yes.

We are at war. We are at war with a covert, ruthless and very political enemy that does not follow the rules of war set down by the international community and whose goal is a worldwide cultural and religious cleansing based on a perversion of Islam mixed with the insane revolutionary zeal of vanguard parties (right from the pages of Marxist-Leninist theory on gaining power). In war, you do not prosecute the enemy if they are not American. You kill or imprison them until the war is over. Clinton lawyered terrorists and that got us 9/11.

We learned that lesson.

Sources:

1. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/02/leahy-bush.html
2. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1322866
3. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2008/02/cia-chief-confirms-use-of-waterboarding.php
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape
5. http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmUxYzRjZTk1N2E0YzlmMzkzOTcwZWVkYWQ4NGYyZDY=

Everyone has an idea of how terrorist leader Osama bin Laden got away during the battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. Some say it was the Pakistanis or the Northern Alliance's fault. Others blame George Bush in a myriad of theories from pure Texan idiocy to keeping the enemy perpetuating as to profit from the gains of war. Everyone has and idea, but only one is true. Former CIA agent Gary Bernstein, the man behind our quick victory in Afghanistan, tells us the truth: it was inaction and bureaucratic politics.

Mr. Bernstein, a twenty year veteran of the clandestine service, beings his story with a jarring phone call in the very early hours of August 7, 1998. He is told of two attacks against our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and rushes in to the office to deal with the problem. His expertise being on Hezbullah, the assumption is that Hezbullah has decided to extend its reach to attack softer American targets, but it is not beyond his doubt that Osama bin Laden's men might be trying to make their mark.

After going to Africa to investigate the damage and attempt to locate and extract the terrorist planers, he and a team of agents known as Jawbreaker entered Afghanistan in early 2000 to find and, if ordered, kill or extract Osama bin Laden. Yet, even before they can truly establish themselves, the first signs of the deadly bureaucratic fear within the CIA shows its face when Jawbreaker is extracted due to its unstable section chief's instance the team was in deep danger. It would only get worse from there.

Right after 9/11 the Agency was in full gear to insert several teams into Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a mosaic of many cultures and languages (Tajik, Uzbek, Pashtun, etc; Dari, Farsi, Pashtun, Arabic, etc), with Pashtun and Dari-learned agents being rarer beyond belief. Mr. Bernstein was told by his boss to gather a team and so he did, but one agent came at the expense of the Translation department. The new head of the Counterterrorism Center (Mr. Bernstein's department), apparently unaware of the impeding war against the Taliban and Al-Qeada, ordered the essential agent back to translating newspapers, wedding certificates and laundry lists found in terror hideouts instead of being in on the front lines [1].

The ground war against the Isalmists went very well, led by the reformed Jawbreaker team. 350 Special Forces troops, 110 CIA agents and the US Air Force along with 15 000 Northern and Eastern Alliance Afghans defeated a combined Taliban-Al Qeada army numbering near 60 000 in only two months. It was a feat that would be considered more notable than General McArthur's miracle landing at Inchon, according Micheal O'Hanlan of the Brookings Institution [2].

It was in the mountains of Tora Bora where the hunt for our enemies went wrong. Jawbreaker Juliet, a forward team from Jawbreaker, had found a major terrorist base and set up observation posts to direct air strikes on them. An agent on his way to meet up with Jawbreaker Juliet came across a functional radio tuned to Al Qeada's frequency. He heard Osama bin Laden address his fanatics. They had him! The Eastern Alliance had surrounded the terrorists, though the generals within the Eastern Alliance were untrustworthy at best (many of them formerly under the Taliban's pay). Mr. Bernstein requested that 800 US Army Rangers be deployed to shore up the Eastern Alliance and to eventually make a strike at bin Laden's surviving cadre, but his requests were constantly turned down day after day. Even with the knowledge of the location of world's most wanted private citizen, the military refused to engage. The rivalry between the CIA (who was pursuing the war with ungodly aggression) and the military (who whined about notifications and use of assets) had come to a head and in the end it cost us a chance to capture or kill the man who murdered 3000 of our brothers and sisters.

From reading Jawbreaker, I see that in a war such as the one we fight against Islamist terrorists, the old walls must come down now more than ever. In a war when civilians and military are interchangeable on our enemy's side, we must also be able to have civilians (CIA) and the military be able to act as one to capture and kill those who would plan murderous acts like 9/11 and Operation Bojinka [3] (an attack on twelve planes heading to America from East Asia). The left wing's constant crowing about the need to try terror suspects, or to do away with the military side of the war and rely on criminal prosecutions, is and always will be a short-sighted, bureaucratic approach to an enemy that does not have the burden of a bloated network of paper-pushers, uninformed activists and agenda-driven politicians taking a magnifying glass to every action done and grumbling over every little thing warranted or not.

A philosophy I've heard recently is that it is better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Reading Jawbreaker has solidified my belief that in a war such as we fight, we can ask for forgiveness for what we do after we've saved American lives from the wrath of radical political Islam.

Sources:

1. Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Three Rivers Press. Paperback. p.80
2. Ibid. p.313
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

Since President-Elect Obama's victory two very important national security issues have been brought up and commented on: the status of the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and the Missile Defense System. Both answers have been discouraging.

Mr. Obama gave no guarantees that the MDS program in Eastern Europe would continue. This answer comes only a few days after Russia brazenly moved missiles in the direction of Poland and a few months after Russia invaded Georgia. Earlier this year threatened the Ukraine with nuclear destruction if it joined NATO. This answer comes during a time with an uncooperative Iran testing long-range, nuke-able missiles with increasing frequency. This answer comes when North Korea is on the verge of a new era of leadership or a new world of chaos as the Stalinist state deals with competing strongmen.

Apparently, our new president has not learned anything from the Cold War. The benefits of the containment strategy are up for debate, but the deterrence strategy was undeniably one of the major reasons the Cold War never went hot between the United States and the Soviet Union. Our ability to retaliate in such force as to completely annihilate the Soviet Union kept the Communists from attempting such an insane idea. Our conventional force acts a deterrent as well. North Korea could easily overpower the forces we have just outside, except that tens of thousands of dead American soldiers would not bode well for the power hungry dynasty. There's a reason our only major enemy during the two decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain has been fanatical terrorists bent on our complete annihilation and its not our lack of things that go boom.

Concerning Gitmo, President Bush has had quite the time trying to explain to the public and to the Democratic left the complexity of the operation and the reality of their detainment. Many of the terrorists and terrorist suspects at Gitmo were picked up on the battlefield. Out of the original 600 prisoners, now there are only 250. Some of those released ended up back in prison, picked up while aiming their rifles at American soldiers. Some have even been been culprits of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. Many of those still in prison have nowhere to be sent as many nations think having terrorists and terror suspects in their borders an abhorrent idea. These terrorists are not normal soldiers, but they are also not the straight up criminals you find daily in American courtrooms. This is a new war in which both national security and criminal justice must be sated. This is not an easy task, and as White House Spokesman Dana Perino has pointed out the Democrats are about to discover this jarring fact.

There are two major questions we must ask the President-Elect if he plans on shutting Gitmo down. Firstly, will the terrorists and terror suspects have access to American civilian courts? Secondly, where are these terrorists and terror suspects to go if no nation takes them?

The first answer can be found in the Supreme Court's ruling Boumediene v. Bush. This is a ruling in which a terrorist was given access to American civilian courts so he may challenge his detention. The 5-4 decision was along ideological lines and outraged the White House as well as national security experts. The ability of terror suspects to challenge their detention through civilian means, and the idea that the War on Terror is only a law enforcement or a military matter, will subvert our defenses against an enemy that has created a version of asymmetrical warfare that requires both law enforcement and military methods to defeat it.

The second answer can be found in another ruling in which 17 Uighur terror suspects found in Afghanistan were allowed entry in to the United States since no other nation would take them. These suspects were not found to have committed crimes against the United States, but there is a significant Islamist insurgency by Uighurs in China. The biggest threats against the 2008 Olympics in Bejing were from these Islamists. Although not our enemies by action, these men are of the same mind and ideology as the bombers in Iraq, the murderers in Spain and Britain and the suicide pilots on 9/11. It is one thing to let these men go because they are not a direct threat to us; it is another thing to send them into a completely alien culture they may find detestable at minimum, an abomination at most. We have millions of non-citizens crossing our borders illegally to find better jobs and lives and there are millions more are trying to get into the United States through legal means. Why would should we allow 18 non-citizens that may have ideological and cultural animosity towards us? One is not an American purely by the fact one resides in America.

President-Elect Obama needs to set his mind straight on these issues. Both involves the lives of Americans and both involve the security of many nations, not just ours. We cannot allow aggressive, imperialistic nations to intimate us and our free allies nor can we just throw back to old, static strategies when it comes to a new breed of military enemy in a new, complex world. Mr. Obama needs to adhere to his talk of change because if he sticks to the rhetoric of the old Democratic Party and of the left wing nothing good will come of it.

Cross-posted at Generation Patriot

Yup. We won:

Iraq's parliament approved Thursday a security pact with the United States that lets American troops stay in the country for three more years, setting a clear timetable for a U.S. exit for the first time since the 2003 invasion.

The vote in favor of the pact was backed by the ruling coalition's Shiite and Kurdish blocs as well as the largest Sunni Arab bloc, which had demanded concessions for supporting the deal. The haggling among the political factions highlighted sectarian-based tensions that hinder reconciliation efforts, nearly six years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

The Shiite bloc agreed to a Sunni demand that the pact be put to a referendum by July 30, meaning the deal must undergo an additional hurdle next year. It took nine months of difficult talks for U.S. and Iraqi negotiators to craft the agreement.

Under the agreement, U.S. forces will withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30 and the entire country by Jan. 1, 2012. Iraq will have strict oversight over U.S. forces.

Now this is something to be thankful for.

An amazing thing happened on Thanksgiving: the Iraqi Parliament peacefully agreed to a slow withdrawal of our troops that would have Americans out of Iraq by 2012. This act, above all other acts in the five years since we toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, is the victory we have wanted for so long. Despite the propaganda from the White House, the Pentagon and others about timetables, this is exactly what we all wanted. There is no greater sign of our victory that our free Iraqi allies and our diplomats hashing out a consensus on withdrawal and the Iraqi Parliament, without violence, passing the resolution by a majority. Victory doesn't mean the war is over, but that its ending faster than any of us imagined.

With our mission accomplished in Iraq (we should take that phrase back, in my opinion), we cannot be blinded to the fact that the War On Terror is not over by a long shot. A success itself, Afghanistan still requires our help in the pacification of the Taliban and Al-Qeada bandits that still throw out massive offenses each spring and summer. The drug trade in Afghanistan also requires our attention as a massive amount of funds to the terrorists come from the poppy/herion trade. All this must be looked too as our troops hold their head high as they leave a stable, democratic Iraq behind.

The biggest threat, though, is not the Taliban or even Osama bin Laden's group. Not anymore. The biggest threat is the hydra known as Jihad, as proven by the co-ordinated and cowardly attack on civilians in Mumbai, India. Since we've taken out most of AQ's command and control, the strategy has become one of ideological infection. The biggest threats are no longer foreigners crossing borders (though that tactic should not be ignored), it is home grown radicals and misguided misfits hoping for a place in history that aim their rifles and bombs at the innocent. London was an example of this. Even in my former home of Canada, several homegrown terrorists planned a massive attack upon the Canadian parliament, though their operation was very, very amateurish.

As during the Cold War, this is a war of ideas as much as it is a war of soldiers. We must not simply just fight them with guns, but with our words and our thoughts. We must make the citizens of the world totally reject that mass murder is a legitimate tool of petitioning one's government over an issue. We must also wipe out the idea that radical Islamist terror is blowback, a term the left has perverted for their own agenda. Any number of our covert and overt operations has created blowback in the Middle East and Near Asia, but that digresses from the fact that committing heinous acts of mass violence for a radical religious pan-Muslim nation is an inherent aspect of radical Islamist terror, not a symptom of our foreign policy.

Cross-posted at Generation Patriot