Copperheads....

What is a copperhead? There is a poisonous snake that lives in swamps and strikes without warning that is called a copperhead. The name copperhead also refers to those congressional representatives, mostly Democrats, during the US Civil War that wanted to surrender and end the war, effectively splitting the US into north and south....

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Copperheads nominally favored the Union but strongly opposed the war, for which they blamed abolitionists, and they demanded immediate peace and resisted the draft laws. They wanted Lincoln and the Republicans ousted from power, seeing the president as a tyrant who was destroying American republican values with his despotic and arbitrary actions.

Some Copperheads tried to persuade Union soldiers to desert. They talked of helping Confederate prisoners of war seize their camps and escape. They sometimes met with Confederate agents and took their money. The Confederacy encouraged their activities whenever possible. Most Democratic party leaders, however, repelled Confederate advances.

Sounds familiar? Kind of like the modern Democrats that demonize Bush and demand withdrawal from Iraq before completing the mission. The modern copperheads appear to be doing the same thing, assisting Islamists in achieving their goals of regional domination in the Middle-East, irrespective of what the consequences or outcomes of a withdrawal would be.

We are involved in global confrontation with Islam and the war in Iraq will be only one in a series of conflicts that will more than likely last decades. Kind of reminds me of the Cold War. Where Vietnam, far from a defeat in my simple mind, was just one of the battles in a long war where the goal was to tie up communist resources. Remember, that this conflict in Asia included the UN sanctioned Korean War, the stationing of ten's of thousands of American troops on Taiwanese soil when the PRC was shelling the country in the late 1950's, Vietnam, an invasion of India by China in some mountainous region in the 1960's and general risks where the US was compelled to station 10's of thousands of troops regionally and maintain a strong Pacific blue water fleet to defend our interests here and contain the spread of political communism. Some of these conflicts involved the client states of the expansionary Soviet and somewhat rudderless Chinese communist empires post WWII. Anyone that thinks that withdrawing from Iraq and deploying the forces elsewhere will end the conflict with Muslims is delusional. In the unlikely event that we withdraw from Iraq anytime soon, we will probably find that there will be more attacks on US and particularly European soil as fanatical Islam resources are shifted from the Middle-East to the West.