Finally!

According to a SurvayUSA poll, 84% of Americans say the government should keep out of the current Middle East conflict. 52% of responents should back off on talks about a ceasefire.

It is about time!

Since 9/11 (in '01), I consistently say that the one who attacked us was al-Qaeda, and we'll use military force on only al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda alone. Not Iraq, not Iran, not North Korea, not Syria, not Lebanon, but only al-Qaeda. The fanciful "War on Terror" is a joke. In October '01, we invaded Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda, and I'm all for this.

But this was in 2001. In 2006, we invaded Iraq, and we attempted to invade Iran. Both didn't threaten the U.S.A., or even to try to threaten us. As I write this, there are over 2500 Americans dead and almost 20,000 Americans wounded in Iraq. And we failed to get public enemy #1; Osama. The likability of America to the rest of the world is an all-time low. In 2006, or even before, we could take our losses and head home. And by means we wouldn't start a war with someone else! A majority of the American people finally agrees with me.

It reminds me of 1983. Ronald Reagan sent in the Marines to Beirut to secure it. When he sent the troops in, he said he would never turn tail and run. But on October 23, a yellow Mercedes-Benz delivery truck smashed through two sentry posts and a gate, and detonated his explosives, killing 241 American servicemen. After the Marines were killed, Reagan had a reassessment of the policy. When he wrote his autobiography a few years later after leaving the presidency, he wrote this:

"Perhaps we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did nor create in us the concern for the Marines' safety that it should have. In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing that we should do was turn tail and leave. Yet the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there. If there would be some rethinking before our men die, we would be a lot better off. If that policy had changed towards more a neutral position and neutrality, those 241 Marines would be alive today."

Hindsight is always 20/20. Unfortunately, 20 years is too long to remember for George W. Bush.