The War Within
When Bill O'Reilly asked Obama if the surge was working in the war against terrorism, Obama should have made it clear that the war in Iraq is a different war from the war on terrorism. One can argue the war in Iraq from many different perspectives and conclude that we are winning, or that we are loosing, depending on what you call winning and loosing.
Iraq aside, the war on terrorism is really two different wars. If you talk about the battle fronts in Afghanistan as well as covert operations around the globe to curtail and keep an eye on terrorist activities, you could argue that we are winning because we are not getting attacked....or you could argue that we are loosing because our presence in certain Muslim countries around the world is fanning the flames that is creating more terrorist. There is however a third war, which is really the most important war, and that war we are definitely loosing.
I'm talking about the war that Bin Laden started when he attacked us on 9-11. He knew he could never defeat us on the battle field and that was never his intention. His intention was to set into motion a spending cycle that would eventually cause us to self implode, kind of like what Reagan did with Star Wars when he got Russia to spend their way into economic collapse. It worked then and it's working now.
The real war has been going on right here at home. The real war has been with ourselves, and it seems we have been our greatest enemy all along. We were never united on Iraq where we have spent a trillion bucks. We never achieved any sink-your-teeth-into-campaign finance reform. The few well connected corporate giants, via their lobbying efforts, have been able to keep corporate regulation at a minimum as well as monopolize the large industries that should have been kept to a manageable size. Liberals helped to make it possible for low income families to buy houses they couldn't afford. We over reacted to terrorism and did too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right things. We were so eagerly spending money we didn't have that we did not want to see the big bubble forming around us. Everybody is to blame for this mess. Everybody from Osama Bin Laden to George Bush to congress to the lobbyist to the greedy rich to the ignorant poor to the over spending middle class.
The real war is the war we have waged upon our selves. Bin Laden started it and we will finish it.