Ijusluvit,

First I agree with you that the latest invasion of Iraq was a mistake, a mistake that incredibly compounded by our deBathevacation (sp?) of Iraq combined with the destruction of the Republican Guard. Clearly the National leaders had to go, but not the mayor, police force and utility management from every little town. Likewise the Republican Guard needed to be stripped of field grade officers and under US direction could have quickly brought stability eliminating Al Qaeda, the Mahdi Army and the Shiite – Sunni violence. We needed the NCOs’ but did not need the Generals. As we have painfully discovered, we needed the police and the armed forces. We have spent far too much blood, money and ability to confront rouge nations since the invasion.

This is unfortunately a repeat of a much larger mistake – the decision by the Kennedy/Johnson administrations to pour over 500,000 of our fighting force into Vietnam without a strategy for winning, but with a loss of more than ten times the number we have lost in Iraq. There is another wonderful book I can recommend to you. It is a book by Gen Maxwell Taylor called, “The Uncertain Trumpet”. It is an analysis of how we lost in Vietnam – the title tells the story. Once again, in the Iraq and Afghanistan war we are sounding an ‘uncertain trumpet’. We are caught with a tar baby. It does not matter what we do, so long as we do not do it as a nation united, we are doomed to lose.

Both of these pale by comparison to our greatest mistake of the 20th century – failing to support the Shah when Iran faced an uprising from fundamentalist Islam. We did not need to send troops or weapons. All we needed to do was assure our military’s counterparts in the Iranian Armed Forces that we supported the Shah. They would have taken it from there. Instead we advised them to do nothing and, unfortunately, they listened to us. A theocracy headed by the Allatolah Khomeini. Equality of women went out the window followed shortly by the occupation of the US Embassy. Carter continued to twiddle his thumbs rather than accept it as what it was – a declaration of war upon the United States.

Growing out of this failure has been Hamas, the support of terrorist groups around the world by Iran through Hamas, the killing of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iran/Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the need for our involvement in Afghanistan and the specter of Iranian weapons. I could go on for many paragraphs on this subject, but I will not. We gave away the recognition of the United States to be a nation with strong values and strong commitment to our friends to once again portray to the world that we were a nation with an uncertain trumpet. Jimmy Carter is the father of Islamic extremism and may well prove to be the man most responsible for the triumph of radical Islam over the Western World.