John Lewis is NOT a neocon; I apologize for my sloppy comment structure. Yes, John's article is a must read.

Submitted by MelM (United States), Jan 21, 2007 at 00:29

Jaladhi and others,

Oh dear! My error!

John Lewis is definitely, absolutely, assuredly, and unequivically NOT a neocon. (nor is he a neolib) I should have structured my comment more clearly. I apologize to everyone who tripped over it.

The quote under the "Decline and Fall of American Conservatrism" (by C. Bradley Thompson) link is from the lead commenter: laurent breach. I assumed that a reader would have remembered the laurent breach comment and that the quote would be correctly assigned to him/her and not to John Lewis. I quoted laurent breach as a header for my remarks that followed--including the link to the John Lewis article. The intension was to let the John Lewis article dispute the claim of laurent breach contained in the quote. I hope this clears things up and gets John Lewis out of any erroneous inclusion in the neocon movement.

Yes, the John Lewis article is important because it's the only (as I call it) "defeat and contain" strategy that I know of. The Pentagon's "generational war" idea has us screwing around with the jihadis for up to 100 years! Meanwhile, the funding, ideological, and inspirational power centers are left intact while they try to build up jihad all over the place. The problem with the war in Iraq is that it is not a war against these power centers and cannot achieve its original goals until the real war against Islamic totalitarianism is won. Bush did not expect to run into a problem with radical Islam in Iraq but that's exactly what happened. So, we're fighting an effect of radical Islam but not the power centers that are the cause. Bottom line is that radical Isalm will take control of Iraq even if we get the place stablized enough to leave. After the U.S. is out, the real fight for religious power will finish and 3000 lives and several 100 billion dollars will have achieved nothing at all in the war against Islamic totalitarianism. In fact, I think the situration will be worse.

U.S. leaders don't seem to know who the enemy is or where to find them. And, I don't see any change to this situation at all: not from neocons or neolibs or the Pentagon or...... So, I think we're going to get hurt.

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