John McCain in his run-up to being the chosen one of the right reverend tinkywinky and company for the nomination in 2008 was talking about the need to stay in Iraq. I was sitting in a restaurant that had MSGOP on, and was trying to follow his speech on Iraq via the closed-captioning and basically caught this: we have to stay in Iraq or we'll be branded as the Big Chickens of the World. Or as the 1600 Crew talking points would have it: if we leave, the insurgency wins.

Well, other than the obvious fact that we never should have invaded Iraq in the first place, much less gone in without either a plan or a clue, tell me John, how many dead American Soldiers does it take to declare a victory over an insurgency? The last major experience our country had in this kind of a war you spent as guest of the enemy in a POW camp being tortured for a goodly number of years. From that little dust-up the final tally was around 58,000 if I remember my history correctly. Oh, and the dominoes never fell.

Granted that this is a different conflict, but other than invading a former ally on what have now turned out to be outright lies, our claims of trying to "democratize" the middle-east ring hollow everytime a press report comes out that we have been using Willie-Pete as an anti-personnel weapon. We have done nothing to begin to address the problems facing the poorest and most-oppressed citizens of countries that are ripe for exploitation by radical Islam, our new 'worstest enemy' and scapegoat for all our misguided adventurism.

Even with the unilateral nature of the invasion (The Coalition of the Bought, nothwithstanding) allies would have been useful in helping to settle some of the issues we are experiencing now. Instead the unblooded cowboys of the NeoCon wing of the republican party with pump-jacks in their eyes and contractors at their shoulders convinced the Preznit to pooh-pooh the idea of multi-lateralism...going it alone, is after all, the mas macho Rexall Wrangler way.

So now we're stuck. Your Preznit is gearing up to try a major PR blitz to deflect attention back to the Democrats and nay-sayers on your side of the aisle. To provide another smoke-and-mirrors defense of the war and the horrid "black prisons" being run in our name, with a concept of "Justice" ("we're finding terrorists and bringing them to 'justice'") that's so perverse it ought to be rated TV-MA to be discussed on the air at all.

All the upcoming PR bluster will be for the purpose of deflecting talk away from the Preznit and onto Americans who question the need for the war and the abrogation of the human rights for anyone, even the worst of our enemies...if we can't try them openly and fairly, then are we still the America you and I signed up to defend?

So John, just how many dead American soldiers are in the "successful" crushing of an insurgency? Is there a number you have in mind, or do we find out in 2015 when they tally up the names for yet another memorial on the Capital Mall?