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Losing The War On Terror? by georgia10 at Daily Kos:

As the President said the day the towers fell, "our way of life, our very freedom" was attacked. And how have we responded in the past five years? Not by preserving our way of life, not by zealously gaurding our freedom, but by surrendering.

This gets to the heart of the problem. From here, it's very difficult to stay away from terms like "Orwellian" and "Big Brother." It is difficult to believe that our leaders would be so cynical, calculating and opportunistic as to use a permanent state of war against Eastasia Eurasia al Qaeda Iraq bears immigrants to jump start some secret plan to keep us all in servitude, but their reaction to the "threat" certainly does not withstand rational scrutiny. (It's also difficult to believe that they're competent enough to actually execute any kind of plan involving more than a Texas two step, but that's a story for another day.)

And John Murtha asks, re Iraq, Does anyone think that things will be better 6 months from now?:

When I visit the severely wounded at our military hospitals, I ask "what happened to you?" Most say they were blown up while looking for IEDs. That's a hell of a mission.

That's the question I've been asking. What are we doing over there? How can we define victory at this point? Would there even be IEDs if our soldiers weren't there?