A Dose of Perspective

The "War on Terror" has lasted longer than the war against Japan did. As of today, the war against Al Qaeda and the terrorist cells that attacked us on September 11th, 2001 has lasted forty-one days longer than the war in the Pacific theatre of operations lasted during WWII.

Get your mind around that. Forty-one more days have elapsed since September 11, 2001 than elapsed between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan.

And we still do not know where Osama is. Does anyone think we might have had better odds of nabbing the true culprit if we had kept our eye on the ball and not foolishly headed off to unseat Saddam, who at least could control his borders? And even General Trainer, who offered post-speech analysis on PBS said that there are "certainly more terrorists in Iraq now than there were two years ago."

Never mind that they tried to do it with too few troops (They ignored the advice of actual military professionals before the war. Rummy knew better than General Zinni what it takes to win a war?) They sent the too-few troops in ill equipped. (See my previous post about going to war in jeeps.) They are not meeting recruiting goals so they are recalling folks who thought their days in uniform were over and they are preventing others from retiring and holding others beyond their term of enlistment. This is, I don't care what anyone says, a back-door draft. The actions meet the definition of conscription. The dictionary defines conscription as "compulsory service in the armed forces." If stop-loss policies are not compulsory service, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I could probably be persuaded to sell.