Terrorism...

I've been going back and forth recently with a couple people on what kind of approach the US is taking towards terrorism. A couple of interesting points have been made from these people, and I do understand where a lot of the Bush backers come from and why they are supporting him. Saying that, I have a very different view than these people on what needs to be done to keep my family safe in this post 9/11 world. Before writing this blog, I need to say one thing. I am NOT a liberal who believes war is never the answer. It is (I regret to say) always a necessary evil to protect America and what it stands for. One of the biggest errors of the Clinton presidency (and Bush I) was after the cold war, assuming that we could do a great amount of our intelligence work through less people and more technology. In retrospect both Presidents should have increased agents and funding for the CIA and the FBI after the cold war. We should have seen that for example, upon the fall of the Soviet Union that their arsenal of weapons would end up somewhere besides the Soviet Union. I see a correlation in Iraq. By not having a plan to secure or target from the air one the largest stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, we allowed someone to disappear with it. In the short term, we are probably safer by attacking Afghanistan and arresting as many Al-Qaida as possible. In the long term, by attacking Iraq, we have created a situation where in the worlds eyes we are now seen as an aggressive occupier. This is not the way to fight a long term terror war. This leads to recruitment for Al-Qaida. For example, when we overtook Iraq, we disbanded the Iraqi military. Looking back at this, I think we made a horrible mistake. What we ended up accomplishing with this was creating a group of Iraqis with no money, no job and nothing to do. I understand that there were concerns on whether or not we could trust this group who may or may not have been loyal to Saddam, but we now have insurgents infiltrating the police force and sabotaging our efforts. This helped recruiting for the insurgency. We would have fewer soldiers dead today if the Bush administration had not made this fateful decision. I agree with many of the Bush backers that America has to be seen as strong, but I feel we need to be smarter about the way we are going about it. This is obviously something I feel in my gut, I'm certainly not a foreign policy expert. Just someone who feels that Bush has made us vulnerable to more anti American sentiment. We have created a great amount of anti US sentiment in many countries around the world, deserved or not.