I’m honestly getting sick of the pretense that this is a “new direction” in Iraq and that Bush is finally talking tough and being honest about the situation. This is a pure political stunt, and the fact that it took a Democratic Congress for him to be Mr Bipartisan is only highlighting this fact. It’s this that kills me:

President George W. Bush said today that the U.S. military commitment in Iraq “is not open-ended,” and that the Baghdad government must show tangible improvement on the political front.

We’ve been hearing this a lot lately. He said the same during the SOTU address, but the question that has yet to be answered is, “what if they don’t?” A lot of great words, a lot of rhetoric, but no evidence that there’s any bite behind the bark. What’s going to happen if the Iraq government doesn’t show tangible improvement? Will Bush start to pull out then?

And there’s a second problem with this. Since Bush is just barely avoiding saying outright that Iraq will lose American support if they don’t pull their weight, he’s also implying that if they DO show improvements, American soldiers are going to stay. However, that can’t possibly be right, because we’ve been repeatedly told that the soldiers will leave only when victory is achieved. So that leaves us with two options: either the troops are getting pulled out either way, or this “ultimatum” is completely and utterly hollow.

Then comes the emergence of Mr Bipartisan…

“You know, I welcome debate in a time of war and I hope you know that,” Mr. Bush said in opening remarks at the guest speaker at a retreat that drew about 200 lawmakers to a Virginia resort.

He said disagreeing with him over the war — as many in the room do — does not mean “you don’t share the same sense of patriotism I do.”

This from the guy who was all in the “cut and run” brigade during election season. Back in October the Democrats were the party of defeatism and obstructionism, and he simply wasn’t accepting debates. Am I crazy to suggest that if they’d held onto Congress his attitude would have stayed the same?

I wonder if this will get brought up at all this week. One of the biggest pseudo-arguments that gets thrown about in the Faux War on Terror debate is that the world’s Muslims don’t seem to actually disapprove of terrorism. Time and time again it’s proven wrong, and this time we have millions rallying for peace in Bangladesh.

Some 3 million Muslims put aside their country’s violent struggle with political corruption and Islamic extremists and raised their hands in prayer for global peace at one of the world’s largest religious gatherings.

The final prayer Sunday capped a three-day Islamic gathering on the sandy banks of the River Turag in a small industrial town just north of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

Pilgrims, many of whom left work early to join the prayer, streamed into the site stretching 190 acres along both banks of the river. As the crowd overflowed the space, people arrived at the site on packed boats or climbed onto the rooftops of nearby buildings.

Now this case is somewhat specific to the tensions in Bangladesh itself, but the lesson remains.

Okay, I admit it. An Inconvenient Truth really affected me. I’d always been concerned about global warming, but that was the film that made it concrete. I felt it made a solid, apolitical case that the change in the Earth’s climate was an important issue and needs to be looked at immediately.

A debate has emerged lately, though. While there is still the debate as to whether or not the planet is heating up at all, there seems to be an underlying current that says that global warming may indeed be a reality, but it’s not anything we are responsible for. This is a terribly irresponsible viewpoint, and one that needs to be thrown out immediately.

The prospect that Global Warming may be real, the planet may indeed be heating up, but it’s probably not our fault is a throw your hands up, lay down and wait for death kind of attitude. It says that these problems are coming, but since we aren’t causing them then it’s just fine to stick our heads in the sand.

Now, I’m not saying whether or not there is a human hand in climate change is irrelevant. After all, that DOES mean the difference between a situation we have control over versus one we don’t. It’s one thing to stop doing things that heat up the planet, it’s another beast entirely to have to actively cool it down.

We can’t stop hurricanes, so all we can do is buckle down as best as we can and hope for the best when one comes around.

But the problem is that the debate exists. There is evidence. One can make a case for either side. Once we’ve hit that level, there is no need to continue discussing it. Why? Simple, because once we’ve established that it is possible, the level of that possibility is unimportant.

It’s a bizarre dichotomy here in the United States, especially. We have a nation who says that if there is a 1% chance that a country is planning on attacking the United States, we are obligated to invade. If there is a 1% chance that someone is a terrorist, we have to start up the surveillance and hunt them down. Ron Suskind’s book of a similar name, The One Percent Doctrine, goes into that nicely.

And yet that gets thrown out in terms of Global Warming. It seems that unless we can prove that humans are irrefutably 100% responsible for the climate change, we should forget about it. So we have people debating degrees to which the blame lies, or debating what the chances are that it’s us.

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it brings to mind the old trump card theists throw at me occasionally: “Well if you believe there’s a god and you’re wrong, it doesn’t make a difference, but if you believe there’s no god and you’re wrong, you go to hell, so why not err on the safe side?”

Ignoring that such an argument in terms of religion implies a disingenuous non-believing belief (”Okay, I’ll decide to believe because it’s the most practical…”), it applies perfectly in the case of global warming. Those who think we have nothing to do with it could be wrong, in which case we’re in a whole mess of trouble and we can’t fix it. Those who think we’re responsible could be wrong, in which case we’re in a whole mess of trouble as well. However, only in the case where the latter group was correct and we acted upon it can the crisis be averted. In all three other cases either we were unable to do so or we decided against it.

In 50 years, I’d much rather be sitting on my porch, looking at the perfectly healthy outdoors and saying “damn, I was way off!” than be sitting on my porch, looking at the decimated environment and saying the same.