The New Road

Cheney has finally lost it

According to Cheney we are fighting a roving band of terrorists in Iraq who follow our troops like Deadheads follow the Grateful Dead.

Cheney said. "If we pull out, they'll follow us," he said of terrorists.

He went on to talk about attacks all over the world. Ok. So what is preventing them from doing that today? Nothing, because the small Al Qaeda group in Iraq is just a cell. There are Al Qaeda all over. And this notion that they would follow our troops? Huh?

I think re-deploying and actively fighting terrorist targets, as opposed to nation building, would scare Al Qaeda. It would be a statement that we are going to fight them using our strengths and not like some predictable loafing zombie. So far we have telegraphed all of our moves. Getting out of the quagmire in Iraq would free us up to make some very aggressive and effective special forces attacks to decapitate the Al Qaeda organization. The way we should have on September 12th.

This notion that the best response to supressing a disjointed set of terror cells was to invade and occupy the host country has never made sense to me. (And that was Afghanistan.) We should have just sent in special forces and raided the camps. Let them know they aren't safe anywhere, in any country. These big army strategy takes months to spin up and the important targets are long gone before we get there. We have satellites that can pin-point position people, we can put a cruise missile anywhere, and we can dominate air space and inject special forces in any country we want with only hours of notice. Those are our strengths. Let's play to those.