Here & There 4-10-07

Coffee Clatch Discusses Threat To All Of Us

However unpopular the war in Iraq is and any attempt by any political party to undermine our troops were the topics discussed by our Sullivan County coffee clatch recently.
Our six member group who meets for fresh home made coffee and donuts several times a month is made up of three Republicans, one independent and two Democrats so when you infuse a topic like the Iraq war and the funding of our troops fighting this war one never knows what the results of our discussion would be.
We discussed the threat from so-called radical Islamic terrorists and we all were unanimous in our conclusion that this threat will not vanish when President Bush leaves office or if funds for the Iraq war are cut off in 2008.
A frequent charge is that we are bringing terrorists to Iraq. That may be true in the sense that war always brings the enemy to the battlefield.....but we also feel this is false since it ignores why killers like Abu Musb al-Zarquwi......the late al-Qaida chief in Iraq, Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas.....Palestinian terrorists of the 1980's........ and Abdul Rahman Yasin ......involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing...... were already in Saddam's Iraq when our troops arrived there.
During the second round of coffee and donuts one of our tea drinkers brought up some interesting facts when he noted that in October 2002, both houses of Congress authorized the use of force (we don't declare war anymore) against Iraq and this action was done by large majorities. Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had access to all the relevant information at the time, said, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks....and we should not minimize the risks...we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with that threat."
We threw the question of how best do we now fight this war and terrorism and the unanimous answer was that we can't bleed our troops by trying to take away funding designed to fight what military leaders say will end this war.
One of our coffee clatch members noted strongly that attempts to take away funding for our troops only complicates the war and very well could make it unwinnable.
We also unanimously agreed that politics in its dirtiest form has complicated the fight for democratic freedom in Iraq and it leaves our troops out there without the tactical reinforcements that is needed to win this fight.
We concluded our discussion by remembering the statement that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists will not vanish when President Bush leaves office and if we pull out of Iraq before the democracy there is stabilized.....in the short run we will save lives and money......but as the larger war continues after we withdraw, jihadists will still flock to the Sunni Triangle....Hamas and Hesbollah will still rocket Israel.....Syria will still kill Lebanese reformers.....Iran will still try to cheat it's way to a nuclear bomb....Ayman al-Zawahiri will still broadcast his al-Qaida threats from safety in nuclear Pakistan......the oil-rich illegitimateGulf sheikdoms will still make secret concessions and bribe increasingly confident terrorists to leave them alone.....and jihadists will still try to sneak into the United States to kill us.