[Xantar]

You can't tell me that there aren't innocent people being detained in prison. People on death row go through a decade long process and we know that there are still innocent people occasionally getting executed for one reason or another. Not that I want to get into a capital punishment argument as well, but are you going to seriously tell me that every single person in Guantanamo is plotting the next 9/11? No system is that perfect. You can tell me that some people were released and then went back to bombing innocent civilians, and certainly I think that's a terrible thing. On the other hand, I also know for a fact that some innocent people were detained. Five of them in particular were detained for two years and then released after it became clear that they were innocent of anything related to terrorism. I'm not one of the liberals who decries rough interrogation in itself, but I have to wonder what we're supposed to say to people who received that treatment every day for two years without really knowing why. Oops, sorry?

And how do we know that these detainments "need to be done" or that they're producing results anyway? I thought conservatism was supposed to be founded on distrust of a powerful, unanswerable government. The problem with this whole line of argument is it basically means we should all just sit back, relax and shut up while we wait for results which could be a few decades from now since the War on Terror is long and secretive. Sorry if I'm not willing to do that. We have a system here in which some people are released because they were thought to pose little threat and went right back to trying to kill infidels and others are released and go back to being law abiding citizens missing two years of their lives. Either way, we lose, so it seems to me that there's just a little something wrong here. This is a system handled by a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies always screw up even if it's their job to handle it.

Now gekko, I understand you feel very strongly about this, and I'm not going to pretend that I understand what it's like to be in Iraq. But your idea doesn't work. First of all, you can't really compare Iraq to Vietnam. True, they're both guerilla wars, but the Viet Cong weren't accustomed to blowing up Vietnamese children. But if you want to draw a lesson from Vietnam, consider that the most effective units in that war were Combined Action Platoons. Marines in the CAPs themselves said it best: "CAP villages were no longer targets of the indiscriminate Search and Destroy mentality so prevalent during the Vietnam War. We shared the risk of living in the villages 24 hours a day, thereby earning the love and respect of thousands of our villagers who simply wanted to survive a war they didn't want."

I don't know how well that kind of thing could work in Iraq, but I'm pretty sure it would work better than what you propose. You want to just scare the civilians as much as possible until they cooperate, and there are two problems with that. First of all is that we simply aren't as scary as terrorrists. We never will be. Secondly, this war is supposed to be to spread democracy in Iraq and the Middle East. You're not going to do that by terrorizing all the civilians and getting them to hate us.

You might say we have something like CAP going on in Iraq, and that would be fair enough although the comparison isn't perfect. But the thing about CAPs is they take a really long time. So why is President Bush acting as if the war is going to be over any day now? I don't think everybody would be happy about it, but I do think that people would complain about the war in Iraq a bit less if Bush had never said anything on an aircraft carrier two years ago. Either he's spinning the truth or he doesn't really understand what's going on. Both of those worry me.