Well, what commissar or camp commandant didn't think what he was doing was in a good cause? How we act is what counts. As a Klingon character once said on Star Trek: "Motives? Who cares about motives? Humans, perhaps. What mattered was that on that day you acted like a Klingon." Or, if you want to invoke the philospher Karl Marx, "a lion is what a lion does." Being good is not about intentions or motivations or "thinking you are acting in a good cause." It's about acting morally. The Buddha and Confusius nailed that one way back. I'm tired of this dopey Protestant idea that if you are washed in the Blood of the Lamb your actions are secondary, the whole justification by faith nonsense. I was raised a Catholic--and being Catholic and "loving Jesus" wasn't close to enough to get to through the Pearly Gates. No, you had to DO stuff. Like live like Christ. Americans are not the good guys, cops are not the good guys, unless they act rightly and do good. The rest is excuses.

Pace going raises two questions: 1) is he on his way out because he had no stomach for an Iran invasion debacle? 2) Will the Bushies launch an invasion with a lame duck in the Chair at the JCS? My instincts tell me that this puts the Iran option off the table until October. That the Navy is getting the Chair may be because it is their turn, or it may indicate that, given that the Theatre of Operations Commander over there is also a Navy admiral, the Bushies are planning purely for a cruise missile/airstirke operation and crossing their fingers that the Iranians will either fail to retaliate or do so in only a weak, half-hearted way. The disconnect between the Bush Adminstration rhetoric and their preparation is very pronounced. Could they be crazy enough to go off half-cocked? Or do they intend to introduce nuclear weapons at a very early juncture in the operation? Either way, they scare me.

The "lets kill lots of Iranians" crowd may be eager, but they are just plain crazy if they want to initaite a showdown with Iran. America, in short, isn't ready for such a challenge. Iran is so much more formidable than Iraq ever was they do not merit comparison. It is almost three times larger, with over twice the population of pre-2003 Iraq, and a much more vigorous economy that has not been subjected to ten years of blockade and intermitent bombing. Most of the Pasdaran and at least part of the regular army are ready and willing to fight (that means over 200,000 armed and motivated fellows willing to resist any invaders). Iran's geography favors the defense, withl considerable mountainous areas in the east. The road to Teheran, unlike the road to Baghdad, is through the mountains. US Army and Marine forces right now cannot both hold down Iraq and Afghanistan and invade Iran, not without abandoning Europe and Asia and stripping the Continental US of combat forces. And the occupation of Iran would be many times tougher and more costly than Iraq is now, plus the fact that the 60% of the Iraqi population who are Shiites and would mobilize to fight in support of their coreligionists in Iran, making Iraq untenable without a garrison at least as big as the one it has today. These are immutable facts. The only idiotic scenario that clowns like Lieberman could be fantasizing about would entail our bombing the crap out of Iran and the Iranians simply taking it on the chin and cowering under the blows without hitting back. Could the Connecticut Jackass in King George's Court really be that stupid? I fear that he is. Or they could have another scenario in mind. It's out there because Lieberman and too many other folks int his country (and in Israel) share his bizzare combination of both utter hatred and contempt for Moslems as stupid, inept, subhuman scum, and an exaggerated fear that somehow they will wipe out poor, helpless, vastly armed and nuclear-ready Israel. I think milions of these folks, Christians and Jews alike, would love to, as they say in unguarded moments, bomb the "Arabs" i.e Moslems back into the stone age. A screwed-up war against Iran that starts to go very badly will give them all their "we have no choice, our men and our holy Israeli allies are in peril, we've got to send in the B-52s and unleash the Tomahawk cruise missiles with the tactical nukes in the nosecones" excuse and 65% of the American people and 90% of the media will nod, bring up irrelevant nonsense about Neville Chamberlain, the Holocaust, and how Hiroshima "saved a million lives" while the mass murder will already be in full swing without any chance to stop it. If that day comes to pass, I will renounce my citizenship and get the hell out of here.

...is how few prosecutions for terrorism or terrorism-related organizing and bankrolling we've seen in the six years since 9/11. People who are all weak-kneed over the terrorist threat should be really pissed off at the Bushies, not mad at people who want to protect their freedoms. People like Tiberius and Shooter seem to want to substitute torture and confession (and given enough torture, people will confess to anything, be they guilty or innocent) for actually getting the people who are the big problem (like Osama bin Laden, who, if Clinton were still President, they would remind us every day is still on the loose, but because Bush is in the White House, they don't seem to care where he is or what he's up to). The best analogy for terrorism I've ever seen is piracy. Unfortunately, our government and a fair number of citizens are more interested in jailing and torturing anybody they metaphorically find with a beard and eyepatch than they are in scouring the "seas" for these wretched enemies of all mankind.