Starting on 9/11

I wondered for a long time whether or not I should start a blog. Today seemed like a good day, since so many of us have strong feelings about what happened on this day five years ago.

As usual I am on the fence--strongly supportive of the President at first, but disappointed after five years. We bit off more than we can chew. We should have finished Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden before we jumped into Iraq. Or, we should have applied even more resources than we did to both. I was neither surprised nor disappointed that we found no WMD. But it is a shame that we grossly underestimated the chaos that followed the invasion, and the fanaticism of our terrorist enemies.

And the president has not expended enough effort to keep us supporting at home. He compares the enemy to the Nazis, yet he has not achieved one tenth of the public involvement in this war that FDR did in WWII. If he thinks our disgust with keeping scissors and bottled water out of our carry-on luggage and waiting 2 hours for a 45-minute flight will make us more supportive of the war, he is wrong.

I am glad, though, that we are now fully protected against the terrorist who disguises himself as an 80 year old lady with knitting needles, and the one who poses as a 4 year old with a bottled soft drink.

Pakistan is at best a half-hearted supporter. Maybe some folks think it's better to have them as a friend than as an enemy. But it's foolish to count on them to capture Bin Laden. Pakistan appears to view the taliban and the terrorists as favorably or more so than Hussein's Iraq did.

I read that the vast majority of Muslims oppose the radicals and their 'kill all infidels' philosophy. And my anecdotal experience supports that. The few Muslims that I know do not want to be associated in any way with the terrorists or their ideas. Yet we do not see a strong vocal, or physical, reactions among the America's muslims against the terrorists. As with the Pakistanis, inaction is tacit support.

Terrorism is one of the two most significant problems that the United States has to deal with today. The second is illegal immigration [not immigration, but ILLEGAL immigration--there is a difference]. I will comment on that one in a later posting.

Our politicians continue to be more concerned about getting re-elected than they are about solving either of these problems.

I am flying my flag today.