The hot vinyl seats on the Gator burn

I'm not sure what else I have to add.

My wife recommended reading this column (twice, read it twice, and the links, which I confess I have not yet done): Hawkish Gloom, by Stanley Kurtz at NRO:

"No, I don’t think our venture in Iraq has gotten us into this mess. I think this mess has gotten us into Iraq. And the mess will not go away, whatever we do. Our Islamist enemy has proven himself implacable — unwilling to relent in the face of either dovish or hawkish policies. That means we’re facing years — maybe decades — of inconclusive, on/off (mostly on) hot war, unless and until a nuclear terror strike, a major case of nuclear blackmail, or a nuclear clash among Middle Eastern states ushers in a radical new phase.

...

"Gerges makes the doves’ favorite point: bombing and war only breed more terrorists. True enough, but only because the underlying cultural dilemma of Muslim modernity has created a need for scapegoats. War ought to produce the realization that peaceful compromise is the way out. Instead it produces the opposite. Gestures for peace fare no better. Withdraw or attack, the results are the same: more hatred, more terror, more war. Compromise and settlement have been ruled out from the start by a pervasive ideology, an ideology that is a product of the underlying inability to reconcile Islam with modernity."

There will be no peace through paper. There is no set of circumstances in which the absolutist Arabic/Islamic personality of the Middle East can coexist with Western culture and values. The random person reading this site can argue with this all they want, but visit this place. It is delusional to think that this storyline ends with all the characters reconciled to one another. It is not possible. And those who think this problem will go away through elections in the United States are fooling themselves - this problem has existed for decades, while the Middle East was relatively weak and backwater. Now that Iran and Syria are relatively strong in the region, with force projection platforms that potentially threaten Europe, the problem has come and will remain in the foreground. Another President Clinton doesn't solve anything, except to maybe kick the can further down the road, allowing those who strongly desire the destruction of the West to continue to draw strength. That worked great in the 1990s.