Armegeddon may not wait for 22 years
Reader comment on item: Defending and Advancing Freedom

Submitted by Robert H. Tyrka Sr. (United States), Nov 4, 2005 at 10:57

I was delighted to see the thoughtful, and frequently knowledgable comments by your readers. You are blessed with an excellent readership.

Let me distill the salient comments about how much time is needed for Iraq to become democratic:

1. Bush's term ends in a few years, and he's having lots of difficulty in maintaining stalwartness in his goal because of the feminization of our current society, which implicitly equates 2,000 dead with 58,000 dead in Vietnam and a half a million dead in WWII. As incalculable a value as is a single human life, the deadly arithmetic still applies.

2. We don't know, even if a proponent of a free Iraq will be elected President in 2008, whether the Congress will support him as they utterly refused to Ford after the Congressional election of 1974. As a result we deprived our brave Vietnamese allies of the support that we promised them to counter the support of the Soviets and Chinese to the North Vietnamese.

My own awareness is that the world has cataclysmically changed very recently because a few men, or even a single individual can now destroy hundreds of thousands or even millions of people will relatively little effort, and very quickly.

Cultivation of the 1918 flu and its genome information having been distributed to laboratories all over the world could be turned into a multi-million-death weapon against us. Or, a dozen determined suicidal Islamists could saunter over our open borders, freshly infected with smallpox, and disperse to every major metropolitan center and efficiently infect hundreds or thousands of first contacts in a matter of days. A nuclear weapon could be sent in one of the thousands of ship containers that arrive in our ports every day. Don't you think that that national hero of Pakistan, Dr. A.Q Khan, hasn't thought of that?

George Bush, despite his sometimes halting movements, is right in pressing for democracy as quickly as possible--everywhere. We must dredge lots of swamps, including that of Russia and China, in order to gain even a semblance of security against the great variety of WMD.

WE HAVE NO TIME, AND IT MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE!

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