Are you getting tired of Iraq war?

(October 16, 2006) WITH less than three weeks to go before the midterm elections, it seems that President Bush and the GOP are facing their biggest challenge yet and if votes don’t go their way we may see a change in both houses of Congress as Republican lawmakers keep shooting themselves in the foot. As of this week, the religious conservatives have been declaring that they are abandoning the GOP because of the many debacles it’s been doing to itself that some have accepted a defeat of the party this November,  if not for both houses, at least the House of Representatives.

To make matters worse, President Bush has likened the Iraq war being waged by al-Qaeda as the same as that of the Tet Invasion during the Vietnam War, which bred insurgency. (Sounds familiar? Yes, Sen. Ted Kennedy, the senior Democrat senator from Massachusetts said that.) This, after the President recognized the Baker commission’s suggestion that the “stay the course” policy must be revised and that a gradual withdrawal of troops would be the next step. The civil strife in Iraq continues to worsen and the President has intimated that he is not patient enough to see the unabated growing unrest that has already resulted in the almost 3,000 deaths of U.S. troops.

As I have been saying all along, it’s difficult to impose democracy on a nation that follows their religious tenets first before even thinking of governance,  especially in countries ruled by imams.

The people of Iraq, it seems, do not understand or how a U.S.-style democracy can be implemented on their country. Even in Britain, the Muslims are finding it hard to follow suggestions that the single women take out their veils when “required” by officials, and where Britons find veiled women  “intimidating” even if they were born there and speak with a British accent.

Last Tuesday night though, in a media dinner night held by the Extraordinary Asia Media Dinner in downtown Los Angeles, I couldn’t help but notice Malaysia, also a Muslim country, which doesn’t have any problems it being an Islamic nation. In fact, there has been a growing number of American tourists visiting Malaysia, which has the more radical Indonesia – where terrorist attacks against “white” visitors have occurred in the recent past – as a neighbor. Ironically I can’t help but observed that when the Malaysian Los Angeles tourism official presented a video on Malaysia, it showed Malaysian women dressed like us, their faces are not covered at all, and very hospitable

to tourists, which I might add, must be cited as a model, along with Turkey, Abu Dabi and Bahrain, where women can act and dress like all others without being discriminated at. Of course, some of the Muslim nations are more liberal in a sense, but Malaysians can show that practicing the Islamic faith doesn’t have to be as intimidating and can make use of tourism as a way to economic heights. Malaysia is literally showing it with its Petronas Towers and other buildings being erected in Kuala Lumpur to accommodate its unstoppable progress.

Despite the fall of Saddam Hussein, there was never really a victory as had been declared by President Bush on board a navy ship immediately after the invasion of Iraq, and many Americans from both sides of the political spectrum are getting tired of hearing the news of American troops getting killed or injured, or seeing their loved ones being overextended in their combat duty. Reports Wednesday said, October is turning out to be the deadliest month for the American soldiers with 70 dead in the period alone, mostly killed by car bombings perpetrated by increasing number of Islamic militants. This, in addition to the tribal conflict in which the Sunnis and the Shiites are

trying to wipe each other.

“I think it was a mistake,” was the response I got from a San Diego republican about the Iraq invasion. Of course, we all know that there were no weapons of mass destruction there. Couple that with insurgency, civil war, deaths and an al-Qaeda that didn’t much exist there before because they and Saddam hated each other then, now we have

a recipe for a November 7 disaster for the GOP. I can’t wait for the results of the mid-term polls.(RFL)