Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Two wars

Belmont Club:

Robert Kaplan summarizes the real task before America in the coming years. It is not to find "an exit strategy from Iraq", as if there were somewhere on the planet it could hide from terrorism; nor is it simply to find Osama Bin Laden as some, ever anxious to reduce the current conflict to a law enforcement problem, would claim as a goal. It's task is to hold back the dark until a new global civilization can find its footing.

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And the dark is everywhere; in the vast, decayed structure of the Third World where the shambolic post-colonial architecture has rotted away, leaving areas of chaos the size of continents.

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Kaplan, who is writing a series of books on the US military experience in different parts of the world, realized that Iraq was only a part, and not even the best part, of the global war on terror. In Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Columbia, Afghanistan and the Philippines, Kaplan found small bands of men who were remolding blank spaces on the map in ways unknown since the 18th century. What they valued most of all were not "more boots on the ground" but freedom of action. The freedom above all, to do the commonsense thing. "Who needs meetings in Washington," one Army major told me. "Guys in the field will figure out what to do."...

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What of that extreme pole on the cursed end of Kaplan's Law: Iraq? Writing in the Weekly Standard, Lt. Col. Powl Smith, the former chief of counterterrorism plans at U.S. European Command and currently in Baghdad sees that campaign not as a screen before the advancing vanguard of global civilization but as a battlefield where the main force of the enemy has been brought to battle. Powl compares Iraq to Guadalcanal, which depending on one's point of view is either exceedingly ominous or optimistic.