On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by about a dozen men armed with box cutters. Our country responded with air craft carriers and 750,000 troops and has continued and broadened that same approach for more than five years at the writing of this piece, June 17, 2007, with no end in sight. Some how I think we over reacted. You go after guys with box cutters with a group like the Texas Rangers or a team of highly trained commandos or an assassination team that works in secret and delivers victories without fanfare.

We should have been asking why our country was left so vulnerable and open to such a bold but Bush League attack. We should have been insisting on an immediate remedy to those and similar vulnerabilities. But, instead, vengeance and bravado was presented as the way to go forward and our leadership in Congress agreed. Was there any significant attention to closing the other barn doors, by which I mean, did our leadership take serious steps and spend serious monies on making the clearly identifiable targets less attractive to other possible attacks? It did not. And, all this time later, Congress has still done nothing significant to protect and defend our country's many likely targets from another bunch of guys armed with box cutters.

Read Stephen Flynn's new book The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation and learn just how vulnerable our nation has become and how little our Nation's current leadership has done to rectify these conditions. Then ask yourself, why the dialog about these conditions has been kept so hush-hush? Why has the media kept this issue off the front pages of our newspapers? What is going on here?

Our Country has allowed itself to be duped and bullied by liars and phonies who have taken advantage of the naive, trusting and forgiving nature of our citizenry. We have made a dreadful mistake and must now rectify things. Believing that continuing our Nation's activities in Iraq is helping keep our country safe is absolutely ridiculous and every body knows it. Another group of fanatic hoodlums armed with box cutters or the like could do some pretty horrible stuff tomorrow almost anywhere in the United States and all we would be able to do is to clean up the mess afterwards. If you think not, then read Steve Flynn's book.

As President, "Come home" would be my first order to Americans in Iraq and "Come home immediately". You say you are aghast at such boldness? Well, all the fumphering and wringing of hands over the consequences of correcting our error makes me aghast. What will happen? Nothing that will even make the front page of our news papers the day after our people are out of there. Will we have been defeated? Who cares? We were defeated in Vietnam and now our people visit Vietnam as a holiday vacation spot. You say we owe it to our people who died in the action called Enduring Freedom to finish what they started? Well, you are wrong. We owe them no such thing. They died following orders that were made based on untruths told to them and to us by leaders who were either insanely drunk with the power they wielded and the opportunity they had to wield it or who are so innately evil in and of themselves that they would do anything they could to weaken and hopefully destroy their own country in favor of throwing the globe into the worldwide conflict that their misconstrued religious beliefs require before the second coming and rapture can be realized. Either way, the downward spinning calamity they have caused in Iraq needs to be arrested.

I think the American people are ready for a new administration and they are ready for it now. But, their good nature and the feeling that they will be able to wait out the 505 days remaining until Election Day is allowing them to continue their gullible and permissive ways. The current leadership is never going to end the current situation in Iraq. Rather, it is my guess that it will broaden the battlefield even further by finding a way to attack Iran or some other renegade nation state. They have and continue to act as though they are on a mission and they will apparently do all they can to achieve their objectives, which has nothing to do with what the rest of us are assuming are their goals.