I'm not encouraged when I hear that James Baker is going to tell us what to do in the Middle East. I suppose he wants to have a few talks with his old buddies in Iran and Syria. I suppose it depends on what the purpose of the talks is, and what we expect from them. Iran declared war on us back when the incompetent Jimmy Carter was President, but we have ignored them as we did bin Laden. We need to realize that we are at war in the Middle East, and not just in Iraq. The situation in Iraq has developed to the extent that it is becoming like Viet Nam. The similarity is that we are fighting a surrogate as part of a larger conflict, that our media and much of our population actually support the enemy even though the enemy clearly states his intention to destroy us, and that we don't have the will to do what is necessary to win. We need to enter into tlaks with Iran and Syria with the same lack of sincerity that they have. We need to lie to them, cheat them, and destroy them. I fear that rather than doing this, our leaders will attempt to appease them. If that happens they will contiue to press us harder and harder until we have to take draconian measures, and millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people will die in the conflict. That is what the Islamists want.