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The feature segment of last night’s Daily Show illustrates how the Repbulicans can claim they are better at National Security than the Democrats. It’s pretty simple really. They are like that schoolyard kid that you never wanted to play with. Like him, they make up the rules as they go, and the rule changes are always in their favor. Stewart calls their game “Terror Ball.” It starts at about 2:20 into this clip with Rudy Giuliani making an incredilby stupid statement that he can only defend by invoking his party’s new rules for controlling the debate.

In the 30 years I’ve lived in this country, I have never witnessed a more shameful and cowardly performance than that of Congress denying the Obama administration funds to move Guantanamo detainees to high security prisons  in the United States.

It’s not like the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) concept is alien to me; it’s just that I never thought I would see such irrational fear and illogic displayed to the world in a way that was so utterly brainless, gutless and weak-kneed.

America’s prisons house serial killers, rapists, sociopaths and psychopaths and other evil doers to compare with any country in the world. Yet our representatives and senators, not to mention their constituents, are scared shitless at the thought of having some of the prisoners at Guantanamo incarcerated even in US military prisons. It’s hard to know whether their fear is of the detainees escaping en masse to wreak havoc in their communities or the thought that al-Qaida might launch an invasion of, say, Fort Leavenworth to free them.

The city council of Hardin, Montana, hoping to boost a sagging economy, has stepped up to the plate by offering to house some of the detainees in a newly built prison that the state now says it no longer needs. “Over my dead health-care plan” says Senator Max Baucus (or words to that effect anyway), ever the study in political courage.

And then there’s the issue of where to put those detainees who have been determined not to be enemy combatants. These are the people whom we scooped up in the Bush administration’s panic-ridden response to 9/11, held for several years in conditions that most of us don’t want to know about, only to find that they were no threat to us after all. Many of them can’t go home because they would likely be imprisoned, tortured and killed by their own governments.

We had an opportunity to release one such group, Muslim Chinese called Uighurs, into the US. These have no axe to grind against the US but oppose the Chinese government’s policies towards the Muslim population. There are Uighurs in the US already, including a community in the Washington DC area. Had we been willing to bring them to the US we might have had more luck convincing European governments to take other detainees.

But no, jittery politicians and a frightened electorate don’t want to hear about it.  The gutsier souls of Bermuda and Palau have put us to shame and agreed to take in some of the Uighurs.

So my question is this: how is it that a country capable of fielding such valiant and dedicated men and women in its armed forces who serve their country so bravely, can be otherwise so bereft of courage?

Palin’s term “Victory” is useless and illuminates a fundamental misunderstanding of the war here in Iraq. There is no Victory.  There never was and never will be.  That’s not just my opinion.  It’s the belief expressed daily by senior military officers.  The search for Victory in Iraq or in the “War on Terror” is futile and a dangerous notion that derails any chance for the measured control of extremism or religious fanaticism.  You can’t kill it with bullets.

When the war began the US Army and Marines came in as warriors.  They kicked down doors and hunted down bad guys.  A day before a major sweep of the lawless town of Samarra I walked along an old gravel pit to survey the men and machines that would make the assault.  “General, how are we doing?”  The one star looked at me, and answered “We’re killing a lot of bad guys the question is are we making them faster than we can kill them.”  That was in 2003.  Even then they knew the fundamental problem.  Now, if you go out and visit the soldiers they are consumed with such tasks as spraying date crops, getting a bus factory back on line or handing out microgrants.  The warriors are nation builders.  At the direction of General Petraeus they also became police–his order was not to kill but to secure the Iraqi public.  Once those Iraqis, who want what we want, believed they could do the right without being killed–they took control of their lives and turned in the bad guys.  If anyone declares a victory it’s them.

Victory for the U.S. implies an end.  There is no end–it’s a process that requires the use of all the tools, including diplomacy, money, and a measured use of human lives.  It’s not just a fight with bullets and guns.  It’s also about poverty, education and the eradication of desperate men with little hope. There were a hundred Osama Bin Ladens before 9-11 and there will be a hundred more after him.

It’s dangerous to talk about Victory.  It shows that the lives of 4178 soldiers have meant nothing. At least their sacrifice should have taught us to stop talking about “winning.”

From Amy Goodman’s interview with Gore Vidal on DEMOCRACY NOW!

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote two books during the Bush administration. Two of the books you’ve written are Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War. Why these two?

GORE VIDAL: Well, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, that’s my main book during that period. That was the foreign policy of the Bush administration: perpetual war. This was also Harry Truman’s dream. He started the Cold War. If any history had been imparted to our people, they’d know all this. And if you think I enjoy having to be the one to tell them about it, I don’t.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about Dreaming War?

GORE VIDAL: Well, same thing. They were dreaming war. You can see little Bush all along was just dreaming of war, and also Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how you knock apart a country like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for the damage you do. For that alone, he should have been put in front of a firing squad.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe in the death penalty?

GORE VIDAL: No. But in their case, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, here we are, moved into the sixth year of the war with Iraq, longer than the US was involved in World War II.

GORE VIDAL: Yes, incredible. That was such a huge operation on two great continents against two modern enemies. And we’re fighting little jungle wars for no reason, because we have a president who knows nothing about anything. He’s just blank. But he wants to show off: ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!’ He goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And look where he got us.

I didn’t realize—I think I’ve always had a good idea about my native land, but I didn’t think that institutionally we were so easy to overthrow, because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11. The whole went crashing. And when we got rid of—when they got rid of Magna Carta, I thought, well, really, this wasn’t much of a republic to begin with.