Safer? No

Are we (Americans) safer?

That’s going to be the underlying question the election hinges on.

Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary says absolutely yes.

But if anyone can think of half a dozen attacks that would get around the current security systems, then I would expect that the terrorists can think of just as many. (It is all they do afterall.)

That was what this was all about at the beginning. Remember? The Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, they were not merely talking points for Presidential candidates to stump on. They were supposed to be pivotal battles in the War on Terror. They were supposed to be pre-emptive attacks against those that could do us harm. But, whatever your view on the morality of pre-emptive strikes, these have failed even to succeed. Few people actually think the Iraq War has made Americans (or most Iraqis) any safer.

In a poll of 108 top foreign policy experts, 91% think that the world is becoming more dangerous for the US. This is up 10% from the same poll conducted in February. Apparently, not only is the world getting more unsafe, it’s doing so quickly.

Since September 11th, we’ve waged war and we’ve caught some perpetrators of terror, but we’ve done little to address the reasons that people flew planes into our buildings in the first place.

Of course, part of the reason is that these people are unstable and disaffected. But even the unstable had to become that way. And how?

On Monday, General Petraeus will ‘report’ on the effects of the surge of troops in Iraq. His report follows the GAO’s failing of Iraq on key benchmarks, including those that President Bush earlier laid out as necessary for success.

"One of the advantages about the benchmarks that we have talked about and the president talked about is they are gauges for whether that strategy is succeeding, both narrowly, in terms of the Baghdad security plan, but also more broadly, because, as you know, some of those benchmarks involve the reconciliation effort."

It also follows a report by General Jones on the failures in Iraq. Iraq is not going to be a beacon of democracy any time soon.

These reports will come out. The President and the major Presidential candidates will come out with statements. The battle in Congress over war funding will be filled with rhetoric and little purpose.

But in the meantime, there are youth in Iraq that are being terrorized, fleeing their country, watching their families die. Maybe they started out in favor of the US, maybe they don’t hate us, but we’re making it hard.

By next summer there won’t be anymore troops to deploy to Iraq. Some kind of withdrawal will be forced simply because there are no more troops. And what happens then? Do we go to war with Iran? With every country that threatens our leaders?

Perhaps it’s time to face the fact that we can’t keep building fences to keep everyone out. It doesn’t work.

If we’re going to have to live in a world with people that hate us, we really should stop pissing them off.