How hopelessly backwards have our politics become, that it is a matter of course to ignore the security of the United States and the safety of American citizens to GAIN SUPPORT for your parties reelection bids! In the same vein, I'm not surprised that our current crop of leaders would put off any truly forceful military action against the Islamist camps on the Pakistani border until after another terror attack would force them into a political corner, so their action would avoid 'making waves' without massive popular support.

Of course I seem to remember in Marching Towards Hell that you, Dr. Scheuer, stated that the CIA keeps an almanac of the Islamist training camps worldwide, and as I remember you said the number of 'known' camps during your tenure was well above 1,000. It kind of makes you wonder if, even if we did wipe out all those camps in the Pakistani border regions, what overall effect that would even have on Islamist operations aside from a temporary setback while they just moved in other forces?

Finally, I caught your interview on Freedom Watch over the weekend. I must say I was taken aback by your response to Col. Shaffer's allegations toward the CIA, primarily about his 'primary intelligence asset'. Though I found it fascinating that you had (for your sins!) followed that individual since the '80s, the most shocking part to me was the Col. Shaffer claimed that person, one of their PRIMARY human assets for Abel Danger, was assisting on spearheading black ops, and had provided them with much 'actionable intel', yet from your apparent longstanding experience with the person you knew him to be a "liar of the first order" who had "never provided a piece of good information about anything". That means one of the primary human intel assets for Col. Shaffer's Abel Danger op was completely useless! Maybe it's just me, but I found that both fascinating and shocking.

I cannot say I'm surprised to see yet another former newsman attempting to give their 'expert' analysis on subjects they are only familiar with insofar as their vague recollections from a teleprompter display. I'm even less surprised that he has found himself taking the position of the current Democratic establishment. A group which itself holds a position that seems to differ from the Neo-Conservative position only in that they believe that the Islamist threat, along with every other woe that befalls us, popped out of thin air only when Bush took power.

I did have a small chuckle at his assertion that our troop expansion is to somehow 'secure' the Pakistani nuclear arsenal from Afghanistan. As you noted, the main reason that arsenal would be threatened in the first place was the US gov't, as you say, dragooning (I miss that term) the Pakistanis into doing our dirty work against the will of their population. Feel free to correct me, but I remember reading that the president there even ended up suspending elections and declaring martial law to keep his government intact a good while back, while at the same time taking various tongue-lashings from our gov't for 'not helping us enough'. So we are (still) in the absurd position of sending more troops to Afghanistan to resolve a situation created by sending and keeping troops in Afghanistan.

Either way, Dr. Scheuer, here's hoping we eventually see news that may warrant an article with a positive outlook on the future instead of those that give me an urge to dig a fallout shelter.

Totally defeated as a military power? Have you ever looked at the planning they had for Operation Olympic (the mainland invasion plan)? They were going to use the 2nd Marine division as the spearhead force, however by D+5 and on you notice they aren't used in any operations. This is because by then they had roundly assumed that the entire division would be annihilated within 5 days of landing.

Remember that the planners believed there were around 650,000 Japanese troops dug in throughout the island at most, when in actuality the figure was over 900,000. This isn't even counting civilian participation, which you could be nearly sure of. If you counted the Japanese "Patriotic Citizen" militia force, than the figure balloons to over 28 'million'. No matter how you much you slice up those numbers or try to game surrender ratios, choosing to drop the bombs instead of taking it to them straight on saved hundreds of thousands on each side.

Clinton's idea of 'attacking' an enemy is dropping a couple cruise missiles at some randomly chosen building for the cameras and hightailing it. The idea the GWB would suddenly pop into office and pick up that one issue that had been sidelined for years might seem simple and obvious in hindsight, course everything looks obvious in hindsight.

I think I know what you are working at with 9/11, but I'm not gonna make the call on that. Suffice to say that every theory I've heard and seen in that vein is either based on blatant falsehoods, horrible misquoting, pure coincidence, or a mix of the three. And I've even heard the 'best' theories straight from Jones himself.

I particularly like this little bit here : "Now, there is no reason to change U.S. policy simply because Muslims do not like it. If Americans decide current policies in the Muslim world are essential to U.S. security, then they must be kept. But to so decide, Americans first must be able debate the issue on a factual basis..."

That right there is one of the main reasons I like Dr. Scheuer's work so much. He can look at the facts of the issue, analyze it, and come to a decision based not on partisanship or some moral equivalence, but on what is most beneficial to the well being of the United States and the American people and to Hell with everyone else.

But why is that attitude so rare among those who are 'currently' sworn in to support and defend the Constitution and the Republic? Why do we have and continue to support 'leaders' who in case after case value personal gain and votes over even the lives of American citizens?

My best guess they do not see themselves as Americans any more, but as a ruling, noble elite class that is above it all. I suppose kind of like the situation for many nobles in Europe from the middle ages on up past the time of Napoleon, where if their country went south they could just hop over to the next country where a relative was ruling and keep on living the high life.

I had never really considered the issue of defeatism in the Muslim world as an issue in the various Islamist attacks. It's one of those things that now that I see it, it should of been a rather obvious factor now, looking at the history of the various conflicts in the region. But then again, that is why I like to follow your work, Dr. Scheuer, because I get a view of these issues from an angle completely outside that 'establishment' left-right trash that seems to color almost everything.

Of course a more pressing focus of this piece is our unique ability in this conflict to actually create the mines we step on that destroy any chance of making positive progress. I think I saw you say it first, and it is likely very true, that bin Laden must be truly convinced his mission is blessed if for no other reason than the US keeps making horrible policy decisions, picking truly unwinnable fights, and in general screwing ourselves over in our quest to destroy Al Qaeda. It's as if we are trying to win a fight by punching ourselves more than the other guy can, and the only times we lash out, we hit the referee.

It is almost blindingly obvious that dropping those bombs was viewed as necessary by the military commanders and the government at that time. They had just seen the Battle of Okinawa, where despite defeat being plain, and being woefully under-supplied, the Japanese still fought to nearly the last along with mass suicides in the population. They of course assumed given all the facts they had, that any assault on mainland Japan would meet far stiffer resistance with much higher civilian deaths. They had assumed losses nearing a million, with the result of a near total depopulation of Japan.

Of course the naysayers these days point towards things that have come out during the last half century from Japan and such showing little things that they can nitpick at, as if assuming that Truman in 1945 would of had full access to all the Japanese archives and documents we have today, and as if assuming that having every other fight with Japan ending in them fighting to the last might not have an impact to how we would look at an assault on their homeland. It is worth remembering, I assume, that there was far more government dissension and far less widespread to-the-death fanaticism (look at the prisoner figures!) in Nazi Germany, yet the battle for Berlin was still one of the bloodiest of the theater. Any honest person would know that that Imperial Japanese would of fought far harder and taken far more casualties along with widespread mass suicides. Remember that before the bombs, they were actively training schoolchildren how to dive under American tanks to detonate explosives among other such things.

And no, no way Clinton would of ordered the bombings, unless they might distract from his impeachment proceedings. Meanwhile if Bush was president then, by 1945 we still would of been building schools and clinics on Guadalcanal to win their hearts and minds while invading some country that had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor because they may be sheltering Japanese agents.

I guess that's what it comes down to. Can we get our 'leaders' to change their bipartisan-supported trash foreign policy and unqualified support of Israel, do will we can up sacrificing more and more rights so we may feel safer while the government ineffectually tries to deal with their home grown/imported Islamic insurgency here at home? Personally, I'm of the belief that they would gladly tear our Constitution to shreds before altering their beloved foreign policy status quo and threaten all that election support and AIPAC money it entails. They would already prefer to engage in no judge no jury outright execution of American citizens rather than admit the reality of the issues, and have cultivated legions of Americans that they can get to agree with their actions and goals.

Of course as we have also seen, "Domestic terrorist" is kinda a catch-all term for people on the 'fringe' that disagree with the government on a fundamental level instead of differing on various left-right talking point issues. Ron Paul supporter? Possible terrorist. Think the government has expanded way too far in every sector? Possible terrorist. Pocket Constitution? Possible terrorist. Gadsden flag? Possible terrorist. Visit websites that offer alternative views of current issues? Possible terrorist. Gunowner? Veteran? Possible terrorist. On and on and on. The second one of those Islamists do something big and stupid here, all that stuff is gonna start going into overdrive and any rational discussion on foreign policy would be even more nigh-impossible than it currently is.

The amount of willful ignorance that pervades our governing bodies and media pundits continues to fascinate me on a nearly daily basis. On that Wikileaks deal, most sectors of the mainstream media as well as all the usual talking heads seemed to only care about either the illegality of the leak and ways to make that Assange fellow disappear or expressing outrage at the Pakistanis. Credit to Scheuer for focusing on the content of the docs instead of joining the "Send out a hit team to disappear them and let Obama unilaterally shut down Americans' access to their site" crowd.

The one place where I might disagree would be your perennial assumption that we could turn Afghanistan around by killing the hell out of everything in sight over there. Now I know one reason COIN can almost never work is the effect of prolongated military occupation and conflict tends to rack up the civilian deaths, and as McChrystal himself said, we have been killing an astounding number of civilians already. Since each one of those helps turn a portion of the local population against us, no surprise we are ending up with more and more local insurgents. Add to that the fact that the Soviet invasion showed they can endure pretty hefty civilian casualties and it seems at this point that to "kill our way out of it" we would have to undertake a campaign that would approach the scale of ethnic cleansing. Now I agree we should of gone in there with serious force and killed the enemy outright instead of playing nation-builder for a decade, but I think our current foreign policy makes us look hypocritical enough without engaging in Soviet style mass slaughter of civilians. But thats just me.

What is going on with this stinkin' healthcare debate? Why are the only options either health insurance or tax payers getting soaked? I remember back when my uncle busted his spleen 'round 1982; had no insurance, and worked a crap job with crap pay. So he couldn't afford the surgery or hospital stay at all. So did the tax payer get soaked? No! The stinking hospital sent someone to sit down with him to work out a PAYMENT PLAN that he could handle! Why is this old method barely considered at all in the debate when it is just about the best true free market option?

But nope, it always goes right back to "What can the Federal government do to make problem X better?" That helpless attitude that has been eating this country alive for a long time.

We are living in a culture where secularism is not only widely accepted, but also praised, and so called 'artists' putting out the most horrible filth are touted as another victory for 'Freedom of Speech'. But that leads to what I found to be one of the more insightful lines in this piece: "we also must accept that just because our elites have decided to call a thing a “human right” or a “universal right” does not make it so." We as a society are practically brainwashed to think that the Constitutionally protected rights we have not only apply to the whole world, but everyone else in the world secretly desires to have all of our rights so they can start doing exactly what we do. AKA "Inside every Iranian is a Westerner waiting to get drunk, watch reality TV, sleep with anything in sight, have an abortion, dump their religion, etc."

I tend to think about it more towards how Mike laid it out in the epilogue for Marching Towards Hell; that Western culture and our concept of natural rights are the product of many centuries of great thinkers, great bloodshed, lessons learned and lost, and very slow painful development. That is not something you can easily just take out of a box and override other societies who themselves developed their own cultures through similar rough trials.