Jay Bookman and I are usually on the same page. He says this in today's AJC.

"While the United States is now better prepared to detect and fend off attack, the intelligence community reports, al-Qaida has also been active. In fact, it has "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" to the degree that " the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment.""

"In other words, after all this war and death and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, we are back to where we were six years ago. That is utterly unacceptable. In the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, the notion that Osama bin Laden would still be alive and free come 2007, still fully capable of inspiring if not leading attacks on this country, would not have seemed plausible. Yet that is exactly where we find oursleves. . . It is an indictment of America's political and military leadership, which has responded to a complex challenge with simplistic solutions that have relied too much on violence on too little on wisdom."

Read it all here.

It is clear the leadership must be changed and we can't wait another year and a half. And as for not changing horses in midstream, when your horse dies in midstream you must go on without him or die yourself.