In a room full of soldiers, only the bad guy was armed; no Hollywood director would buy it

An unscientific poll of an unspecified number of rational American citizens found Wednesday that the country has two questions about the U.S. military effort in the Middle \East.

The questions are:

Why are we still in Iraq?

Why are we still in Afghanistan?

One notorious skeptic offered the comment that, given America's inability to establish a minimally rational government on the continental mainland, how could it achieve any semblance of rational government in distant, more primitive societies where citizens are still killing each other over events that may, or may not, have taken place in the Seventh Century.

The cranky one also noted that U.S. and allied forces are going to great lengths to stamp out poppies, Afghanistan's only cash crop, required for the making of heroin, while Mexican drug gangs are blissfully tending to marjuana farms they have set up in the middle of national parks in the American West.

Aren't American policy makers aware of the principle of substitution?

If the poppies are destroyed, perhaps the Afghan war lords will start buying marijuana from the Mexican gangs, and the war lords will fight to protect their trade routes and storage sheds? The kiling will  go on, and perhaps spread along the supply line.

Meanwhile, the Mexicans will take over more and more U.S. park land to meet the new demand from Afghanistan. Unemployed aliens in the U.S. illegally, sharing a language with the marijuana growers, will be drawn to the domestic side of the marijuana trade, enlarging America's criminal class.

Then, predictably, it will be discovered that the Mexican marijuana farmers have been receiving stimulus checks from the Obama administration.

We have been preparing for war, or waging war, for nine years. Our original motive was unambiguous. Our original attack was well planned and effective. Then the transitions began, each one murkier and less persuasive than the last.

Now, we have reached another turning point, perhaps the most consequential one since the Afghan war began. We have been attacked lethally on the home front, at least in part because of the continuing war in Afghanistan.

An American-born muslim soldier, Army Major Nadal Malik Hasan, murdered 13 and wounded many more at Fort Hood. His emails and conversations make it clear that his intent was to punish Americans for waging war against muslims.

Disarmed by a deranged liberal education establishment and its principal accomplishment, a smothering and pervasive regime of political correctness, we can't even bring ourselves to call it a terrorist attack without risking stern rebuke, or worse.

If scripted, the crime scene would have left any Hollywood director shaking his head. It was too preposterous.

In a room filled with American fighting men and women, some of them battle tested, the only one armed was the bad guy. How could that happen?
As Andrew McCarthy points out in National Review, "To stop bad things from happening, you have to come to grips with what causes them. We won’t."

 "... with Hasan, the biggest challenge was not whether to investigate an infiltrator wearing a neon 'Islamist' sign, but how to promote him up the ladder and burnish our diversity cred while intimidating the suspicious into silence.

"Mission accomplished."