The War is Not Over

One of those poor tortured souls released from Gitmo has taken over the "I kill you" concession in Yemen and our military just sent American aircraft over a sovereign nation and sent a missile down the chimney of some foreign citizens possibly killing women and children. I'll wager that the lefts black and white worldview will increasingly take on subtle shades of gray. President Obama is going to find that it is one thing to rail against the supposed abuses or failings of a wartime president in an innaugural address but it is quite another to uphold the oath of office.
What Obama does not understand and what George Bush was not able to articulate is that this conflict should not be viewed in the context of two wars. One war in Afghanistan and another war in Iraq. Or as Obama believes one war that is somehow a good war and the other a bad war. The fact is we have a war, what Samuel Huntington called a "Clash of Civilizations". (I know we shouldn't use terms like that lest we create more jihadis) In 1993 Huntington wrote;

“The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to which they are likely to be characterized by violence. Economic competition clearly predominates between the American and European sub civilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict, epitomized at the extreme in ‘ethnic cleansing,’ has not been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines (and Sudan). Islam has bloody borders.”

Previous presidents handled the clash their way, with less than stellar results, and Bush handled it his. You can beat him up for it if you must but he, for the first time, changed the dynamics of a situation that is not going to end anytime soon. That begs the question, will we carry on with the tactics that have prevented another attack here in the US and has transformed the mid-east region or will we go back to the policy of sending in the FBI instead of the Marines. I vote for the latter.