Delphic Ponderings

What is to happen? Wretchard comments here on a piece in The National Interest on where we go from here.

Chester has a link-rich post on various Iraq plans being mooted currently and points out that this is a crucial time in the war. He also posts a long well written critique of certain intellectuals love of defeat, which is not so very different from Flagellants or other religious groups desire for piety through self-punishment.

Of course, if we bail on Mesopotamia, it will not be us who suffer, but those we abandon who will be slaughtered or live in a Taliban like hell. This is of little concern to those who want to see the US taken down a notch but it should inform our actions.

The Dems, fresh from their recent victory, seem determined to turn a bad situation into disaster if this Drudge-linked story from Roll Call is to be believed. Murtha is an ethical, and strategic disaster. The Dems seem to be going out of their way to prove that hey are worse than the foetid Hastert regime they replaced. Unlike Blackfive I can't chuckle, as the stakes are quite high. They are higher in the immediate short term for those in Iraq and Afganistan caught in the middle of this war, they are very high for us in the long term given the inexorable march of technology if the pathologies of the middle east go unchecked as super-blogger Chester points out in this podcast.

What is of most concern to me is that the entire plan of many of this wars critics is to snipe at past decisions that others made, yet make no meaningful contribution to available options themselves.

We have no oracles, no Tardis, nor even a map for the dark road that is the future. We should all remember that 20/20 hindsight is not the same as vision as the future is met through the windshield, and not the rearview mirror.