Declare WAR or Bring 'Em Home

First reports indicate that the latest attempt to terrorize the American public by attacking an airliner over the homeland was planned, ordered, and supported by a radical islamist group operating out of Yemen. Sen. Joe Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, assesses the threat thus: "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war. That's the danger we face." The fact of the matter is that Yemen has been a battleground of the West's cultural war with the islamo-fascists since the last century--the USS Cole was attacked in a Yemeni port in 2000, killing 17 Americans.

The Colonel's personal frustration with this issue is rooted in the strategy (and that is stretching the definition of the word) by which these re-United States and our (ahem) allies have pursued the amorphous "war on terror." Despite W's claim post 9/11 that the battle lines would be drawn clearly between us and those who did not wholeheartedly ally themselves with us in the fight, we have instead flailed against our enemy's tactic in a nearly single-handed, global, force-exhausting game of whack-a-mole and all but ignored the strategic centers of gravity--nation states supporting, at whatever level, the islamo-fascist movement. To use a well-worn war analogy: instead of "making Georgia howl" or "following Lee wherever he goes," as Sherman and Grant correctly attacked the Confederacy's centers of gravity; or threatening (quite convincingly, given the world's largest army and navy being built) Britain with war if they recognized the Confederacy, as the Union did to isolate the South internationally; we have chased individual rebel cavalrymen around the countryside and weakly implored governments harboring islamo-fascists to take actions which are clearly against their interests.

The clear strategic center of gravity of islamo-fascism is Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria. Instead of directly attacking this source of support of terrorists world-wide (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Fatah, and the list goes on...) we have attempted to "isolate and encircle" Iran with neo-democratic states. The problem with this strategy is that Iran has not sat idly by while we attempted to install one of the weakest forms of government (democratic republics are, by design, weaker than the will of the people in order to protect the people) in the countries on the peripheries of Iran and Syria. Iran has continued to fund and direct the operations of its proxies both in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as world-wide. It's as if we declared war on Japan's naval aviation and kamikaze tactics post 12/7 and conducted single-carrier task force operations primarily focused on eliminating that threat at sea--without ever dropping even one 250 lb bomb on a war materiel producing factory or supporting industrial center on the Japanese home islands. Until we take this fight to Iran, we will not win the war.

We had a golden opportunity dropped into our laps several months ago when the people of Iran took to the streets in opposition to the islamo-fascist clerics running and ruining their great country. We blew it. The Iranian people now know, just as the clerics tell them, that America has gone soft and cannot be depended upon to come to the aid of freedom-seekers.

My friends, we cannot indefinitely fight this "war" as is the plan of the political elite. We will lose it. The American people were "war weary" after only a couple of years of fighting during the Second World War. We are eight years on in this struggle with no end in sight. It is a crime against our people to pour, year after year, our blood and treasure down this rat hole without a clear vision of victory.

Declare WAR and bring our enemy to their knees or bring our soldiers home.