Oh Good Lord

[Professor S]

*The following are my opinions and please take them as such*

I have decided to not have kids.

That reason is because Donald Rumsfeld has resigned and will be replaced by Robert Gates. Now I am no fan of Donald Rumsfeld outside of his "no bs" style of interview. But, at least Rumsfeld was resolved to fight the war against extreme Islam this generation.

For those of you not familiar with Robert Gates, he is not a stranger to Bush administrations. In fact, he worked for the previous Bush administration and was a key member of international defense policy for many years while Bush Sr. was CIA director (I think during that time) and VP.

The problem in my eyes is that unlike Rumsfeld, Gates is from the school of "situation management". Now that sounds fine and dandy, and would likely reduce the US presence in the Middle East, it is also the ethos that got us in this mess. It is the ethos that fed Saddam Hussein weapons to fight Iran. It is the ethos that put Pinochet and Noreiga in power. It is the policy that states: "as long as they are killing each other, they aren't killing us". It is a vulgar, morally bankrupt, ethnocentric (viewing non-Western cultures as barbarians that must be managed) and in the end, futile way of thinking. At best it merely delays the inevitable.

Here is an example of possible way this way of thinking could get us into another Vietnam, and I mean a REAL Vietnam, not the political lie that you heard on TV ads: Gates pulls back from the current mindset in Iraq and instead believes that either the Shiite or Sunis need to gain power for the benefit of US security (we have done this before, don;t think it can't happen) and ask them to convince us which side we should support. So we think that we can sway diplomacy by scaring the hell out of them with picking a side or we'll just help one side annihilate the other (once again, we have done this before under Gate's historical ideaology). Problem is, the Shiites don't need us, they have Iran. So the Suni's accept our help and now we are in the middle of a proxy war between the Shiites and Suni's but its really between the US and Iran. FYI: this is the short version of the situation I imagine so it might come off as simplistic.

The alternative to that scenario is that we convince the Middle East to begin fighting itself again, and meanwhile the population grows, extreme ideaology continues to win and we end up back where we were pre-911, except with a bigger problem on our hands in terms of population and firepower of our enemies when the situation finally becomes completely untenable in a few decades.

Gate's ethos also operates under the asumption that the current state of extreme Islam is manageable, and I think it passed that point in the 90's. Islam is growing far too quickly and we cannot try and keep it in a cultural bubble any longer. Part of our diplomacy HAS to be one of influence in some form or another, or else our very way of life will change in a mere 10-50 years (IMO).