March 15, 2008 - It was a super windy day today. I went out with Ellie and Brenda and the puppies to play disc golf at Taylor Park, and felt lucky to finish the day with all my discs. Windy days have a habit of pulling discs off course and throwing them into the water. I played a fairly poor round at +7, but all things considered, it wasn't that bad of a round. We had dinner at my parents and then went to Thai Thani in Clearwater to meet up with Ellie's family celebrating her uncle Jim and cousin Erin's birthdays. We didn't get home til well after 11 PM. I'm going to continue the discussion on Iraq today. I have established yesterday that there were some very coincidental ties between our president and vice president that would give them motivation to wage a war against Iraq, but let's take a look at Saddam Hussein himself. The evidence we used to wage war against him had nothing to do with a threat by him to our country, but rather a perceived threat. The thing that gets me is that after having invaded Iraq and taken control, we've uncovered countless mass gravesite that Saddam was responsible for, as he killed his own countries people if they didn't cooperate with his rule. This would have been excellent pretext for a war against Iraq. If added up, I'm sure all the deaths total in the 10's or 100's of thousands. Innocent citizens killed for disagreeing with their leadership. But we went into war on the pretext that Saddam had WMD's and was sitting in an office with a big red button, ready to press it at any time, and all the weapons would be fired at the United States. What an unfortunate political situation for our president. He used the wrong reason and the fury of September 11th to fuel an attack on Iraq, when if he had done it strictly based on the horrible atrocities of Saddam, he would probably have a very high approval rating, a Republican congress, and no one would be taking the Democrats seriously right now. Instead, we have horrible political turmoil in our country, we have soldiers dying every day in Iraq, and we have no obvious exit or stability strategy for Iraq. But that doesn't matter, because this war is fueling our economy right now, creating jobs for contractors and builders of military supplies. But I see things a little differently. We need to have a frank national discussion on Iraq and the consequences of our future actions. At this point, we can't change the fact that we have invaded Iraq, and that we have over 100,000 troops and contractors in that country. But we can decide what is in the best interest of our country as a whole, which I believe is establishing a well fortified military presence in Iraq far enough away from major Iraq cities that we don't invite anti-American outbursts onto the people of Iraq. We'll fight off attacks in the desert, and hand over control to the Iraqi Army for all urban and rural defense of Iraq. If there are needs after we hand over control, to help on specific missions, great, we've got a base just a few hundred miles away, we'll deploy some troops and help out for that specific mission. Otherwise, we're in our base. Now, this new base is a great strategic place for us, given all of our other conflicts we have with Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, and future problems that are sure to crop up in Saudi Arabia. I think if we take this approach, we'll stop a large amount of the anti-American violence that we continue to fuel by maintaining a in-your-face presence in Iraq. We'll have troops at the ready to help out the Iraqi's, and if anything starts to degrade in terms of Iraqi democracy, we've got a well established position to go back in and begin occupation of the country again.