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If we stop fighting the war, it will still be fought against us.


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The war against terrorism, i.e. what you called the war for Natiional Survival (choke, gasp), is not a war in the sense that wars have been fought thus far in history. That idiot of a president sends, as is his wont, gunships, tomahawks and aircraft carriers to do battle ...with ghosts.

Terrorists have no country whose frontiers you can invade; no capital whose capture would cripple their efforts; no industrial or agrarian infrastructure whose demolition would choke them from raw materials; no CCC hubs which can be neutralized.

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Ah, but Cyrus, terrorists do gain greatly by state actors lending them various kinds of support. al-Qaeda was freer to train and plot, when unmolested some years ago in Afghanistan; and today numerous terrorist groups benefit greatly via the shadowy support of Iran and Syria.

So, where should we be cutting off their supports? To an extent, we are already cutting off some of their financial supports; and intercepting their communications, and continuing to catch more of their lietenants: the terrorists would be further yet crippled if Iran and Syria were no longer using the powers of their governments and militaries to clandestinely lend support to these bad guys. So, regime change in Iran and Syria is necessary (for that reason, and for a few other reasons as well).

Does regime change for Iran and Syria need to come externally, as in Iraq? Well, hopefully not; an internal overthrow would be much better. However, if Iran keeps up the BS, and gets really close to nuclear weaponry, all bets are off: limited strikes might lead to a larger war which might lead to regime change in Iran. Which, of course, would be a good end result.

The timing for such might be propitious, too: by Spring, Iraq should be much more stable, while Iran may be approaching the no-turning-back point in the nuclear cycle; strikes on Iran have the potential to be pragmatically on the table about that time. So, we'll just wait and see. In the meantime, Ahmadinejad-al-Crazy will go on spouting vitriol, if he doesn't manage to get himself assassinated first. But Springtime really isn't that far off.