My evil plan to save the war in Iraq

OK, so I've been thinking that our biggest problem in Iraq is not the terrorists, or the lack of proper armor, or even the supposed civil war that we're now in the middle of. The problem lies in how we name our bases there.

Think about it. Everything there has names like Liberty, Victory, Speicher, or something relatively innocuous. Most of them are named for places -- Balad, Taji, Talil. None of those names even remotely sound threatening, not even Anaconda. Kuwait's camps are all pretty tame: Arifjan, Virginia, and Buehring don't sound like bad places at all.

OK, I'll admit that Abu Ghraib just sounds bad, but for all the wrong reasons. If I were king for a day, I would immediately change all the base names in both war zones. I'd start with 20th-century generals like Pershing, Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower -- all fierce, decisive men of battle, men whose very names would strike fear in the hearts of anyone who dared attack us (those familiar with history, at least). None of those valiant warriors has yet been honored with forts at home anyway, so it's about time, espeially since all the good Civil War names are taken. We already have a Camp Walker (in Korea), named for the famous Korean War general who turned things around after MacArthur was fired -- and then led the war to a stalemate -- but that could work in Iraq too. I might even use Rommel, our staunchest Nazi foe.

I can almost hear Osama think twice about sending his suicide troops: "Don't even think about attacking Doolittle Airbase! Remember what he did to Japan?" Or maybe, "Camp Abrams? Forget it -- those tanks are the best in the world!" Then I'd name the most important bases after more recent generals -- what terrorist in his right mind would come anywhere close to Camp Schwarzkopf? Or FOB Franks?

I recently read of a base we have in Afghanistan called Camp Blessing. Camp Blessing?! What were they thinking when they named that one? "Come on in, we won't fire a shot! We'll even forget the rubber hoses in the interrogation rooms!" Maybe that one was meant to be deceptive.

President names might work as well. Lincoln comes to mind, as does either Roosevelt. Truman would certainly work -- after all, he was the only leader in history who used atomic bombs. Camp Kennedy has a nice ring to it, assuming you forget about the Bay of Pigs. Getting your face on a fifty-cent coin is nice, but a war-zone base named after you, now that's an aspiration. Washington would work well on several levels. If we ran out of good American presidential honorees -- I mean, let's be real, why even bother with guys like Wilson, Johnson, Arthur, or Garfield? -- we could always use Churchill. He sure was a tough old bastard. I'd suggest staying away from Nixon or Clinton, for obvious reasons, but maybe the terrorists would be so distracted from laughing that our troops could just round them all up and haul them away to Gitmo.

If that doesn't work, I'd start naming bases after more menacing historical figures like Stalin or Ho Chi Minh (hey, that one worked for the North Vietnamese, gimme a break). Perhaps Lenin or even Hitler would do the trick, or Ghengis Khan. Maybe names like Idi Amin or Pol Pot would make the terrorists give up. Yeah, that would work. A friend also recently suggested Jonestown. Don't go there, the Kool-Aid is a killer!

Another problem I see is that our generals don't have enough rank. The last time we won a real war -- and I mean one with a real enemy, not some Cub Scouts with rusting Soviet tanks -- we had five-star generals. By God, let's start promoting some of these four-stars around here! We're quite simply doing them a grave injustice by holding back that fifth star. Imagine how far General Petraeus could go if we just start calling him General of the Army Petraeus from now on. Or even Field Marshal Petraeus. There's a rank no one has anymore. We'd be watching Osama's hanging on YouTube before Thanksgiving, get that al-Sadr guy too, and have victory parades before Christmas.

Point is, folks, America needs to start realizing that we're gonna be here for at least 50 years. Unless, of course, we name a base after a French leader.