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"Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later [makes squish gesture]get squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do "yes" or karate do "no." You karate do "guess so,"[makes squish gesture]just like grape. Understand?" Mr Miyagi, Karate Kid This scene from Karate Kid has been playing in my mind over and over the past few days. I'm pretty sure it has to do with our actions in Iraq over the past decade plus. Now, I'm not claiming to have the answers, but I think we "karate guess so'd" over there and we are about to get squished. Our actions, however you want to view them, were not complete or whole. We intervened in a situation without doing so completely. We patchworked together a country with loose stitching, that was clearly not taking the whole population's greater good into consideration, and expected it to hold. We built Frankenstein's monster, gave it life, and now have to play the God role to determine if that creation is worthy to remain. We wasted thousands of lives, and millions of dreams, to essentially return to a point far more dire than the one we began with. Now we are once again faced with the proverbial "shit or get off the pot" scenario. From the limited information that I have been afforded on the situation, inaction will lead to far greater action by those that view us as their enemy, but swift and decisive action will enrage them even more, not to mention start a shit storm among our more liberal members of society. These are the days where I am glad our collective action as a country is not my decision to make. The evangelical democracy we shove down the throat of the rest of the world is coming back to haunt us. We take it upon ourselves to make decisions for other instead of simply lending a hand when asked. We have lead with our ego and not our intellect and now have to deal with the repercussions of doing so. Hopefully smarter men than I can make better decisions so that we no longer have to take steps backwards.