May I have the envelope please? Deciding who to endorse for president has been surprisingly difficult for me. Odd, you might say, considering that for three years I have produced a comic strip dedicated to giving the current President's scrotum a half twist once a week over his innumerable failures, which at this point amount to a cyclopean heap that would have made a spelunker out of Edmund Hillary. But it has been. To use a phrase which I minted myself years ago but kept in reserve for this very moment, hoping against hope that it would not become an American shibboleth before I alone debuted it, 9/11 changed everything. Whether or not we wish to believe it, it has. It has changed the face of war as we have considered it until now. It has changed our peace of mind and our idea of what constitutes security. It has exposed flaws in the piety of both Left and Right and it has brought into stark relief our varying degrees of willingness to protect democracy, both here and abroad. The nation split along predictable lines following the terrorist attacks. Those that favor rawhide and hellfire took the remote while those that still dream of a day that we will honor our broken treaties with the Apache were sent on a beer run. And honestly, show me a person who would want it any other way and I'll show you a guy who's ready for a numbered tattoo. But with a murky enemy comes murky strategy and even murkier patriotism. As the destruction of the Afghan regime and the scattering of al Qaeda brought a weak, watery catharsis to the country, the ideological machinery of the most hawkish government in a generation started pumping its pistons. A fairy tale triumph against the Afghans was barely completed when unfinished business in Iraq was thrust forward, an ugly stepsister for Prince Charming to kiss. Not as attractive as our Cinderella victory against the Taliban, but wouldn't she make a nice fixer upper? Besides, how long did we want to stay on bent knee trying to cram those bunioned Afghan toes into a glass slipper of democracy? And here we are. The path that brought us to Iraq is so strewn with leaf litter that future generations may never find there way back to the actual terrorist origins of the War on Terror. The military industrial complex, that long scoffed-at bogeyman, has its boys riding high in the saddle and is profiteering on everything from overcharging our soldiers for meals to installing bomb sniffing phone booths at your local airport. Over a quarter trillion dollars will be spent on the War on Terror through 2008. And all it cost to start this joyride was less than a million dollars' worth of flight school, box cutters and assholes. So, easy enough to pick the next prez? Not so fast. THE CASE FOR WAR Lost in a sea of tears wept by the American Left for the flattened families of Iraq, a Left that has as its elder statesman a smug fuck named Michael Moore who thinks that winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes is equivalent to curing polio, is the unanswered question: "Well, what would you have done?" If America was caught with its pants down on 9/11, then the Left was in the middle of poking its hemorrhoids back in. Then, as now, the Democrats, still smarting from an unconscionable loss to George Bush in '00, have offered nothing in the way of vision when it comes to American defense strategy. Their agenda of lancing the Administration's boils until the country can no longer stand the pus may yet cost them the election. They should be rallying around a positive alternative to the neo-conservatives' imploding dream of autocratic regimes quaking in their sandals as their people catch the scent of freedom and mesquite grilled chicken from the new Wendy's franchise in Baghdad. They haven't, and nature doesn't elect a vacuum. The liberals still have yet to acknowledge in a substantive way the new global paradigm: Islam's testicles have descended. 9/11 was not merely the work of a ragtag bunch of beards. It was an indictment of Islamic culture. No, a few rotten apples do not condemn the whole barrel. They condemn the barrel's ability to keep the rotten apples at the bottom, not spilling over the top. If there is a message that the Left and the Right should deliver with one voice to the Middle East it is this: decades of suicide attacks on busses and cafes in Israel haven't weakened that country at all, even surrounded as it is by enemies. Israel is here to stay, and so are we. Fucking learn it. Or get hurt. This is not xenophobia on my part. It is, however, an acknowledgement of the danger of radical Islam and the unmitigated decay of honor that has allowed suicide to become the main tool of political expression in that region. It is a problem that the Left would do well to address, and loudly. And angrily. For that reason I have pondered endlessly whether or not Iraq qualified as a necessary object lesson to the Middle East. I cannot debate the nuance of war, but think about it: a hostile religious movement operating with less and less restraint in a region of the world that is holding on for dear life to its faded glory gets it in their head that they can attack the West with impunity. They know that their decentralized structure is impervious to conventional warfare and they love dying for their cause anyway, thus, the attack has no downside. Do we let that stand, and let the seeds that that action sows flower into ever more brazen attacks, the new face of proxy war? Or do we smite them where we know they are and, for the sake of scolding other nations that may later think of turning their own countries into bed & breakfasts for the rascals, put a people that had nothing to do with the hostility, but a track record of trouble, over our knee as a warning? It would be nice to think that was Bush's plan. Bold, decisive. It would be nicer to think that it could work, that overthrowing Iraq would intimidate other nations into playing nice and leave al Qaeda with nowhere to hide. On any bar stool in any honky-tonk in Texas, you will find a strategist of George Bush's caliber. And as you will see, our own honor is circling the bowl. THE CASE AGAINST By now the Emperor's clothes have long been off, boxed and sent to the Salvation Army. From Richard Clarke to Paul O'Neill to Bob Woodward, the evidence is as compelling as Colin Powell's address to the U.N. was not: George Bush wanted a war with Iraq. Only the most deluded conservatives still try to deny this, but you need look no further than the document that launched a thousand sorties to find the truth. Rebuilding America's Defenses, the military strategy cooked up by the Project for a New American Century—the think tank whose alumni would make up most of Bush's goon squad—was imported as whole cloth into this administration's National Security Strategy. And step by step it's provisions have been unfurled by this White House And why not? It was envisioned by then former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney himself, the man who chose himself to be vice president. The agenda outlined was aggressive, intended to take full and unapologetic advantage of America's global preeminence, and stated clearly: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.' So let us not fool ourselves. Iraq was a done deal from the moment the first plane hit Tower One (and as for the "need" which demanded an American presence in the Gulf, one other thing is made clear in that document: terrorism wasn't on the security menu.) The debacle that Iraq has become needs no further elucidation from me. WMDs now join the ranks of the Titanic and the Hindenburg and, of course, 9/11 itself, in the roster of history's greatest WTF moments. The suggestion that the President thought that these weapons were being hidden from inspectors who were being given unfettered access to Iraq not only defies credibility, it is an outright lie. He shouted his certainty from the mountaintops, yet could not point inspectors to a single weapons cache or mobile lab. Several more months of inspections would have confirmed what it has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives to expose: Iraq had disarmed. The fact that this was in danger of being revealed is why the war was accelerated, and the danger of leaving in power a President who is that brazen and arrogant with American lives is itself enough to recommend his ouster. The benefits to America of occupying Iraq shrink by the day. Rather than stifling it, terrorism has blossomed in rosy glory all throughout the countryside. Nothing has been preempted, except perhaps our ability to use force the next time it is genuinely needed somewhere in the world. And what will the final shape of Iraqi Freedom be? Where will all the President's high-minded talk about democracy and opportunity leave the Iraqi's in the coming years? In a September 20th column, Robert Novak says that the stage has already been set for America's final embarrassment: Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That leaves three realistic options: Increase overall U.S. military strength to reinforce Iraq, stay with the present strength to continue the war, or get out. Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush's decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal. But oh, this has to be the richest: Getting out now would not end expensive U.S. reconstruction of Iraq, and certainly would not stop the fighting. Without U.S. troops, the civil war cited as the worst-case outcome by the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate would be a reality. It would then take a resolute president to stand aside while Iraqis battle it out. Well, George is nothing if not resolute, is he? AND THE WINNER IS... You'll notice that I haven't spent a lot of time touting John Kerry's bona fides. Let's list them: Nineteen years in the Senate, intelligent, inquisitive and skeptical. A distaste for war born of actually having fought in one. This versus a swaggering Born Again who's record of accomplishment is smashing our budget to take America on a blood-soaked floom ride which he is now about to abandon, leaving a nation to devour itself in a civil war which will most likely reduce it to a state similar to Afghanistan's at the end of the Soviet pullout. And all this, while the master criminal who started us down this road continues to suck air safely outside of our President's reach or concern, probably waiting for his moment to hang a shingle in Fallujah. I think Kerry will do nicely, thank you.