The following comments are in reponse to Dennis Sevakis's column on August 19th, Today I Tipped.

'Today I tipped?' Nossir, with all due respect, I 'd say you slipped. Yep, slipped big time on the Liberal Democrat banana peel of trying to put the Bush administration in a damned if you do and damned if you don't position on the prosecution of the war. You see, the Dems believe that by haranguing the President that he's either doing too much or doing too little in this war on terror, there's no way he can win, especially when the mainstream media eagerly pounces on every such denunciation and gleefully trumpets it to a world full of lefties only too eager to hear their own misguided beliefs validated in print and on camera. But the Dems know full well that the President's options are limited.
 
Weren't you paying attention when the Bushitler epithet was the catchphrase of the loons on the Left during the election campaign? Yes, we could have marshaled every living uniformed person under arms in America and sent a half million of them into Iraq in overwhelming force back in 2003; but can't you just hear the cries of 'Bushkrieg!' and the outraged charges of 'unnecessary use of overwhelming force,' and 'unwarranted flaunting of America's military might,' that would have emanated from those selfsame critics on the Left, who now loudly proclaim that Bush and Rummy have mis—fought this war?  And that's not to mention the outrage that such a mass invasion would have inspired at the BBC, Le Monde and other lefty European media voices. Can't you just hear the indignation of the UN Security Council and the righteously worded resolution from that august body condemning America and Great Britain for the destabilizing effects of interjecting such a huge Western military presence into the heart of the Middle East?
 
Not to mention what Al Jazeera and it's ken would have been doing to incite the entire Muslim world to jihad with the alarming news that the crusaders had returned in massive strength to retake the holy land, screaming to the Muslim Street that it was incumbent upon every adherent of Islam to take up arms and destroy the infidel invaders. Talk about having an unwinnable war on your hands, a quagmire; if bin Laden and Al Qaeda were so incensed over having a few tens of thousands of American troops on Saudi soil that they attacked New York City, imagine what the presence of 500,000 or so armed non—believers in their midst could drive them to. How would you have liked seeing thousands of terrorist sleeper cells wake up all at once all around the globe?
 
So, while I actually admire your sentiment that we should smack 'em hard and make it hurt so bad they won't want to get up again, I also recognize that the reality of geopolitics limits America's options in the conduct of this war. As an old combat infantryman, I understand the necessity of achieving fire superiority and killing the bastards before they kill you, but in this case we can't shoot back at all the sources of incoming fire, because some of those bastards are behind us, firing into our backs while we're preoccupied with a truly deadly enemy to our front. Mistakenly we assumed they were with us after 9/11, but the staccato bursts coming out of that ditch down in Crawford are anything but friendly fire and if America is wounded by it, it is anything but an unfortunate combat accident, it's fragging on a national scale
 
Nope, the Lefties are trying to flank our position, moving in behind us where they can lob grenades at George Bush in the world media without ever having to expose themselves to any real risk. That is unless you discount the risk of looking like utter fools. Or worse. Where earlier there were only uncomfortable mutterings in the blogosphere about the agitprop antics down in Texas, now the atmosphere is becoming more charged and the terms, treason, treasonous, traitors and traitorous are rumbling through the ether with ever greater frequency. Because of the sanctity bestowed upon her by the loss of her son in combat, and her Dowd—declared 'absolute moral authority,' the current mouthpiece for the moonbats was given an unprecedented leeway to voice her loathing criticisms of the conduct of the war, our commander in chief, and the Jewish cabal behind it all. Now, her sewer—mouth screechings are beginning to grate, even on those who were sympathetic to her initially. Not too many Gold Star mothers, even in the midst of their grief, will countenance the repeated public use of barnyard epithets and the 'F' word by one of their own. The expression is, I believe, 'She's shot her wad.'
 
You see, you Tippers, while Bush and Rummy understand the term 'measured response,' those who seek to undermine our war efforts do not; they let go with everything they have, and in the end they lose because they've never learned the old infantry discipline of conserving your ammo. They remind me a bit of all the videos of a macho—mustachioed Saddam and his similarly adorned henchmen jubilantly firing their automatic weapons in the air with no forethought as to the physics—determined reality that those rounds are bound to come down somewhere. So the lefties lose credibility and political advantage, just as we might very well have, had we entered the arena of combat in the Middle East with crushing force. Yes, we can increase our presence incrementally if the enemy seeks to recruit and field more terrorists, but any massive buildup of coalition forces would be perceived by much of the world now, just as it would have in 2003, as unwarranted aggression and a threat to the whole of Islam.
 
And again, while this old soldier admires the fighting spirit behind your suggestion that we warn off all Iraq's neighbors with threats of dire reprisals, were we to actually follow through with an attack on say, Iran, I fear we would need more than a half million troops in Iraq to deal with the consequences. Do you honestly believe that those who strategize this war don't share your anger towards those nations who surreptitiously support the terrorists? Don't you think they itch to pull the trigger on such treachery? Fortunately for you and me, cooler heads than ours prevail. And while I also deplore the losses inflicted on our forces in the last two years, I am reminded that those losses are still far fewer than the number of noncombatant deaths inflicted on American soil by an enemy then unopposed.
 
So while the drums beat ever louder against the administration, and some folks like you have slipped, uh, excuse me, tipped, I think back to a poem and a couple of paragraphs of mine, posted earlier on this site about how George W. Bush has consistently and very successfully 'out—dumbed' his political opposition.
 
Who's to say he's not doing it now on a global scale?
 
Russ Vaughn   8 20 05