I wasn’t excited about the speech, but I did listen. On the war…right now Hagel is right. There is no strategy. We are just buying time, which the Muslims seem to have more of than they have oil. Be sure on the really important stuff, like social security, tax reform, health care and all the financial issues, the Dems won’t cooperate with Bush on anything of substance. That has been much of the problem for the past six years.

The one thing I give Bush credit for is homeland security. If he just wanted his numbers up, all he had to do was let a plot slip by. The real mess starts when the car bombs start going off in downtown Manhattan. They may get away with that on the sidewalks of New York, but if it happens in Dallas, there will be imams hanging from the trees.

Iraq will end up partitioned. I don’t know if it will be an organized process that we institute or just the end result of a civil war, but that place has no national identity and I think that the varied Islamic factions precludes it ever having one. The current borders in that part of the world must be rearranged to enclose the political realities as they exist. This will mean a lot of upheaval for a while, but once they get all sorted back into their tribes, they can go back to traditional invasion warfare. Islam is always bloody violent, and that is not going to change.

I have a tuning customer, a Russian Jew, trained in Moscow as a mechanical engineer. He is now 70 and still looks in on his 95 year old mother every day, often walking the five miles through Madison to see her. He likes to talk more than I do, so it is really hard to leave enough time before the next appointment. He asked me, “How is it that Stalin kept all the Muslims under control? Why can’t anyone else do it?”

I think the answer is obvious. Only someone as ruthless and unconcerned about the innocent as a Stalin has any hope of containing them. Our hypersenstive fear of harming innocents will never allow us to gain control.

My solution is to use the next few “surge” months to push for a partition by tribes and grab control of the oil money to be distributed as a carrot for good behavior. I don’t know if it can be done, but if not, it is time to clear out and let them go back to playing “Ute”ball. (I think that was the chief’s name.) Have you watched “The Man Who Would Be King” lately. If not, you should.

Dad