Next we swallowed the stories about a link between Saddam and Al Queda and the existence of weapons in Iraq that could be used to do harm to us here at home. Because we believed those stories we agreed that we had to go to war there too. Now the truth about those wars and our military's effectiveness is gradually being printed on the minds of most of us. But any gains made through the use of war are proving difficult if not impossible to consolidate. What is going wrong there and how can we fix it?

Nobody could have predicted everything that has happened since we embarked on our new policy of preemptive war after 9/11. Of course the Bush Administration is now chanting the new mantra that this is not a new policy but it goes back to the Reagan years. If they can commit us to wars based on false data as they have in Iraq should we believe their fantasies about undeclared policies carried out by Reagan being the same as their own declared policies? Besides we have done this before without using invasion, this regime change thing.

I know that believing these leaders we have today has brought chaos down on our heads from the day they took office. They have exploited a national tragedy for political gain. They have lied to us about the effect of the tax cuts, which will eventually force us to reduce programs like Social Security and Medicare. They have lied to us about the costs and effects of the energy policies that they continue to promote as sound. They have done this in spite of the impact those energy policies have on our need to wage war in places like Iraq. They have lied to us about the impact of their deficits on our economy. They have lied to us about the impact of international trade policies that export jobs and cause balance of payments deficits greater than those ever borne by any nation in history. Why should they bother with the truth this time? Lies have served them so well before, and the truth is really painful now that they have set us on this course.

The Bush Administration is fast becoming the greatest disaster in the history of our nation. WWII, Vietnam, the Civil War all pale in comparison. None of them cost us so much of our credibility in the world. None of them turned a solvent nation down the destructive path of self-immolation by excessive debt. None of them caused us to declare ourselves an empire that stands above the human rights of people everywhere in the world. None of those horrifying events made mockery of our principles as laid out in our constitution or abused our patriotism this badly.

What is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq? What is going on there is just the predictable seeking of advantage by the people of a conquered nation that were not cowed by the conquest. The aftermath of war is always chaotic and they are trying to use that chaos to force our troops out of their nations. They are killing our troops in both those nations and we are failing in our attempts to disarm them. Afghani warlords are unlikely to give up their arms voluntarily, we are unable to compel them to disarm. In Iraq we failed to kill Saddam, and his supporters are among those who are attacking our troops. We have no plans that include an effective method for dealing with these conditions. Our troops are overworked and tired and their tanks and other support vehicles are running without adequate maintenance. There is no safety for our warriors in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Our efforts to impose a government on Afghanistan are a failure thus far. Karzai has impressed me with his sincerity but he rules nowhere outside of the areas patrolled by USS troops. The Warlords have the rural areas of that nation under their control. We are in the first stages of a mess that could go on for years in both nations and now we are destabilizing Iran. Where will our President's radical agenda take us over the next few years? Sometimes in order to look forward it is useful to look back a little distance.

In the early years of the Vietnam War the air was full of rhetoric about the power of Democracy in Southeast Asia. Democracy was supposed to trump Communism, but Democracy proved impossible to sustain in a nation being bombed back into the Stone Age and occupied by our troops. Of course our intelligence community told our leaders in the White House and Congress what they wanted to hear instead of the somewhat more painful truth. Is that different from the scenario in Iraq and Afghanistan today? Well, we are not bombing them back into the Stone Age yet; otherwise it is not very different at all!

Continuing instability in the Middle East will be unlikely to result in Democracy prevailing. Does order automatically come out of chaos by the magic of Democracy? Nonsense! Real Democracy is hard work. First you must believe in the basic goodness of the people in order to believe that they can govern their own nation. Do we believe in the essential goodness of the Afghani people or the Iraqi people? Certainly the troops facing their small arms fire every day do not. If it had worked that way in a single case of our intruding ourselves in another nation's affairs since I was a pup I might believe it was possible. Unfortunately our military or economic presence in other nations has not spread Democracy around the globe.

Democracy is in sad shape in every nation in which we have intervened, from Chile to Vietnam. If I believed that this batch of conquering simplifiers was any better than the last few I might buy a little of their rhetoric about Democracy. I have seen this set of wars several times in my life without the complications of an invasion and occupation by our troops to make matters worse. We have consistently used our economic and military power to force regime changes around the world, most often without invading. This is a little more blatant than those cases but it has continually been our policy to destabilize any government that we found lacking in one way or another. That destabilization process has seldom if ever resulted in a popular revolution that brought Democracy in its wake.

Ask the Iranian people who are suffering under a government that was a natural reaction to our prior intervention in their affairs when we installed the Shah in power. We will not serve our interests by continuing on this path to its ultimate end. We have done little to change the fundamental fact that none of these nations are likely candidates for Democratic reform even without a war and occupation to complicate matters. Islam is not a religion of equalitarianism; it is a religion of rigid hierarchism. That fact alone makes democracy hard to implement in nations where Islam is the major religion. In addition, the loyalty to tribes and clans trumps the loyalty to national government in all of these nations. So does the loyalty to Islam.

So what are we doing there now, besides dying and breaking international law? We are seeing to the husbanding of oil resources that were being wasted and destroyed under the former regime. We are creating another oily mess for our children to clean up if they can spare the time from the effort required to repay our national debt. By the time our children come to power much of that oil will be gone, used in an excess of consumerism that put two SUVs in every driveway and our troops in Iraq Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We will be poorer for that fact because we are wasting our national economic resources instead of investing them in our children. It is sad enough that the children of Afghanistan and Iraq will never reach the level of wealth of our middle class kids. It is tragic that the historic flow of people between our lower classes and our middle class gets harder to maintain every day. Our nation has been one where opportunity was offered to all of us if you worked hard enough and were frugal enough. Now jobs are being drained from this nation by business leaders whose only concerns are their own huge salaries and the corporate bottom line. Without jobs how will those in lower classes rise out of poverty? If these people leading us were real leaders they would be voicing these concerns. Instead they prattle on about how they are saving the world while they are destroying this nation. This nation, which is still the greatest hope the human race has ever built out of the blood and sinews of the people who love freedom. God bless you all and keep you safe in these undemocratic times.