The Line In The Sand

I suppose it's the odds that not everything you write in such a fluid media as a blog can be memorable, or noteworthy or climb the comment charts. But sometimes you start writing something, and hope that it gets noticed. This post is one of those times.

So maybe you can help me with this one. Read it, send it around, let's help each other out here.

Because as the year comes to a close, and we face our future, as a people, a country, part of a global community, the events of the past five years are coming to a crescendo as well, and it's not a pretty sight.

Even as one who has seen up close the worse that this administration and the current neo-conservative wing of what was once the Republican party has to offer, I too have been lulled to sleep, distracted by the real world, and work and family and life.

But I'm awake now.

We all need to be.

Because it is not left wing hysterics or blog rant to suggest that the next thirty days are critical to our country, and our future.

This is not just chatter, and I'm not just saying that now is critical to sound dramatic. I am saying it because I truly believe that, as they say on Sunday afternoons, it all comes down to this. It's not just important, not just let's have some hearings and dig into contractor corruption, but a mind-boggling critical time.

You see before there may still have been some lingering doubt about what was happening in Iraq, before there might have been some question about the President's true intentions and quality of vision.

Those doubts are gone now.

President Bush will escalate the war in Iraq in a double-down measure of vanity and desperation. He is playing not with the house money but with the lives of our children and the future of their children. The surge will bleed into escalation and permanence.

Bush will increase the force in Iraq by 20,000 to 50,000 soldiers because he thinks that by positioning it as "helping our army that is stretched so thin" he can make it political suicide for anyone to oppose him. It's not. It's the duty of each and every one of us. He wants to escalate and elevate the conflict into a regional war. He is going for broke with our future.

The question is will we let him?

We need our leaders in Washington, left, right, doesn't matter to stand up and say no. We need to transfer all the energy and passion online to the offline world and say no. We need to join with the world and say no.

No.

For quite some time now, we've been doing more harm than good in Iraq. We've been sacrificing our youth on the altar of vanity of a gambling man who doesn't know when to stop. There is no good reason to fight on and on and on with no end in sight.

For quite some time now, the President's true intentions have become increasingly and horrifyingly clear. He doesn't care what the Iraqis think, what his generals think, what we think, he's running off a different playbook on a suicide mission. The Iraq Study Group was a farce, window dressing for public consumption - exactly like the 9/11 commission was. The "we'll consider all options" mantra of the 2006 campaign was for public consumption only. Privately, they are off on their mission.

The scary thing is that now the Administration knows they're not winning. They don't care.

The scary thing is that now the Administration knows over 70% of Americans want to change course. They don't care.

The scary thing is unless we do something, unless we put all of our options on the table and force change, they won't care.

Between now and the 2007 State Of The Union address, we need to rally. We need to truly help our troops. We need to save their lives and start caring for those damaged by the war. We need to do this now.

So over the next thirty days, support those who stand up and lead the fight. Write letters. Call your friends. Iraq will never have a moment of pure victory, but if we can stop the surge, we will. We can end this war. We have to.

And then, we can let the healing begin.