Complacency Has No Children

I am seriously beginning to believe that we indeed live in Bizarro world. Despite his reprehensible humanitarian record and abuses against the Catholic Church in his country, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who oddly is a Catholic, attends Pope John Paul II's beatification in Rome. Pope John Paul II must have turned over in his catacomb when the guest list was published. Meantime, N.A.T.O. has come under fire over allegations of targeting Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi during humanitarian/no-fly zone/non-intervention support operations in that country. Then there is the continual international coddling of menacing regimes like North Korea and Iran. When did the bad guys become the good guys?

There is a grain of solace:  Osama bin Laden is dead, and at the hands of the U.S. military. Chalk one up for the good guys, whose credit is due for staying the course and tracking him down.

Even with bin Laden dead, must we remain as vigilant globally as the past decade? Probably evermore so. Critics of the Bush Administration argued that by invading Iraq we were distracting from the real mission, that capturing or killing bin Laden was the end game. Yet, it was the resolve of President Bush in pursuing terrorists and those, like Saddam Hussein, who would harbor them that ushered the inevitable day of reckoning for bin Laden under President Obama’s faithful continuation of that resolution. For ten years we have taken the fight to them; and while the head of the snake is gone, the body is still present. We can, and should celebrate, but with vigilant caution – killing one villain has not, and will not, stop the others existent in the world.

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Syria, Iran, and Losing a Strategic Opportunity

Where do we go from here? In the board game Risk, the only true way to win is by sweeping across the board and annihilating your opponents; fall short in Asia, and the person who has stockpiled a gazillion pieces in Australia will sweep back across and annihilate you. The real world is no different. We either sweep the globe of enemies to freedom and peace now, or we get swept by them later. Because while victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan, complacency has no children.

©2011 Steve Sagarra