“Slash & Burn” vs. “Cut & Run”

President Bush did his best to lower the level of dialogue on how best to respond to America’s ever growing terrorist threat under his watch. He suggested his opponents’ strategy of “cut & run” would invite terrorists to America’s shores, as if his knuckle dragging on Lebanon wasn’t a big American Greetings invitation to Hezbollah and Hamas. Up until now, neither group had American citizens or interests in their sights.

Now that Bush has advertised his terrorist open house invitation for the Nth time since mouthing “Bring it on”, he has the temerity to lambast his opponents for being weak on terrorism.

From my perspective, the only strategy at issue is bombing countries that have some terrorists in them back twenty years and occupying their soil with foreign troops. Otherwise, both sides back vigorous intelligence and investigative activities to root out terrorists.

The Bush clan is willing to break the law to find the bad guys, also planning to break the law. Methods include torture, holding people without charges or trials, using hearsay evidence, and rooting through mountains of personal information to identify suspicious activity.

It seems the Bush team is willing to slash and burn a country, a group of people, or an individual to defeat “terrorism”. The country part has seen less than stellar results to date. While no official data is available from intelligence sources, my guess is the estimated number of terrorists intent on harming the United States has grown since the Bush invasion of Iraq. It likely got another big boost from the Israeli stomping of democratic Lebanon.

I want Bush to quit the “slash and burn” tactics inviting terrorists to our shore. Then it won’t matter as much if we “cut and run” or not.