Thank you, Iraq...

How nice that the Iraqi parliament is leaving for a month of vacation. It apparently doesn't matter so much to them, since they have our brave men and women fighting for their country and us taking care of the bills. How much more ridiculous can the situation become, and how much more incompetence can we withstand from both the U.S. and Iraqi governments?

With a civil war in Iraq (with no military solution; even our generals admit to this), trouble in Pakistan (a nuclear state with political unrest and a traditional, nuclear rival in India, right next door), near civil war between Palestinian sects, Iran working towards becoming a nuclear power (after having multiple years of near freedom to do so because Iraq occupied all our resources), North Korea mastering the bomb as we have been fighting in Iraq, the Taliban regaining control of some sections of Afghanistan (as we did not finish the job in our rush to go into Iraq), and al Qaeda growing stronger (according to our intelligence reports, not there is much reason to believe them in the first place), it is clear that the president is correct in saying Iraq is the front line in the war on terror. What he does not tell us, though, is that it is looking more like the front line in our losing the war on terror. The next president, regardless of who it is or from which party he or she is from, is going to inherit a foreign policy disaster/fiasco. It is anyone's guess what the state of the world will be in the fall of 2008, but it is clear at this moment that there could be any number of flare-ups in multiple regions of the world, and, depending on the seriousness of a situation, we may not have the resources to respond. May we learn our lessons well from the present administration's lack of planning, predicting, and what will likely go down in history as one of most, if not the most, incompetent presidencies in our history.