I live in El Paso, TX so I know the need to learn at least basic Spanish however we do need a big push to learn Arabic, Farsi, other Central Asian languages, and Mandarin. We need an all out effort to get our young people into roles we vitally need for National Security just like we did during the Cold War.

Create an atmosphere of national sacrifice, the same way FDR did during WWII when he got the majority of Americans on board to sacrifice with rationing and bonds and political support to fight Nazis – ‘Rosie the Riveter” etc… America needs a common theme – a can-do, muscle attitude. Create more renewable energy certifications in community colleges and degrees in universities, and then create new industries so we can put our young people to work. Force us off foreign oil. Stop the wars for oil, which are adding to the deficit every minute of every day. Take care of the vets when they return home, and limit the military to winnable and absolutely necessary situations only. Their power is finite.

Force the situation. Don’t make it an either-or proposition. Force the tax. Tax high-sugary drinks, alcohol, cigarettes. (thing we really don’t need but are luxuries)…

And get out of Afghanistan. Put the billions into better intelligence networking, hire more Arab linguists, and forge strong alliances and cooperation with countries to help us stop them instead of our troops being sent far and wide, battling for countries that don’t even have stabilized governments or a cohesive society and who despise our presence. Put more money into fighting cyberterrorism -

securing should be ensuring*

Of course securing that oil flowed freely from Iraq was one of the reasons. Securing access to energy resources in the Middle East has been official policy since the Carter administration.

We went into Iraq for a lot of reasons, not very well articulated I will grant you, but there were a lot of reasons we went in.

Now I am not going to get into whether we should or should not of invaded Iraq. I think it’s fair to say all of our views are pretty hardened on that front.

As for forging ahead to eliminating our dependence on Foreign Oil you can count me in. I am for a carbon tax and a high gas tax, although I would refund 100% of the money by reducing the Payroll Tax and the income tax.

I would rather tax things we want less of then things we want more of like Jobs and Investment.

I don’t disagree with Obama on everything. I am amenable to about 60-70% of his health care plan, I support his efforts to get us off of oil, but I am against his means of achieving it (Cap and Trade will do two things, create yet another speculative bubble, and provide hundreds of billions of giveaway’s to pet industries). I have approved of his handling of Afghanistan until recently as well.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/10/the-conservative-case-for-cutting-our-losses.html#more

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/10/the-conservative-case-for-cutting-our-losses-ii.html

Democracy in Afghanistan and respect for minority populations are laudable, but they’re not worth thousands of American lives and the bankruptcy of the U.S. And, as I pointed out, Al Qaeda could remain outside of Afghanistan for the next 100 years and we’d still have a problem because they are now living and training in Pakistan. The removal of a terrorist threat from a specific piece of land does not eliminate that threat; the terrorists simply move to more hospitable land. That is the very nature of non-state terrorists.

As for an Afghan government that can stand on its own, no other outside force has ever produced that and there is no evidence that we are capable of producing it either. We’ve spent 8 years, over a trillion dollars, thousands of dead solders and tens of thousands of wounded soldiers trying to establish stable governments in societies we do not understand. This is beyond our capability.

I never thought I’d say this, but maybe, on this issue, George W. knew much more than many of us gave him credit for. While he deserves blame for not sending more troops to Tora Bora when we had a good chance of killing OBL, he seems to have understood the futility of sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Afghanistan and getting bogged down like the British and the Soviets. Our goal in Afghanistan was to destroy Al Qaeda – not build a stable country. That goal has been achieved.