I get the impression you were trying to be serious, however you ended up being unintentionally quite humorous. If, however, your post was meant to be satirical you can ignore my response.

You make the satement, “big showy events always impress the simple folk”. So I take it that you are so “complex” that 9/11 was like any other boring day to you… Really? And you dare to admonish others that they neeed to “grow up and learn to think and act more rationally.” The irony is priceless!

“Fear is the mindkiller”. Hey, I think I got that fortune cookie too. I got one you might like, “A life without fear is a short one.”

You have the rambling dissociated writing style of a juvenile. (Just thought I’d point that out in case none of your English profs ever did.)

If you are a teenager (or English is your second language), I apologize for being so condescending. You will mature, and writing English gets better with practice.

If you are an adult, native English speaker, all I can say is, oh my… (Anything else would be rude).

But please continue to post. The terrified, trembling neos need a good laugh now and then.

Gotta run. Need to go light candles at my Bush altar. If I don’t, he’ll send the 9/11 boogey-man after me! >;)

I think you all need to reexamine your psyches and try to figure out why you are so easily manipulated, and then maybe you can grow up and learn to think and act more rationally.

Fear is the mindkiller.

I enjoy your blog and visit it often! Write On!

I welcomed the invasion of Afghanistan. It was appropriate and effective. But Bush foolishly played into the hands of the enemy when he attacked Iraq. What a fool. He is Bin Laden best weapon.

I’m trying to understand this argument. Are you saying that if Al-Qaeda were to attack America now, they would lose support of their allies?

By the way, I do understand how my comments here may seem to be both unpatriotic and giving support to our enemies. However, I think my views are fairly representative of a large number of Americans who want the best for their country just as you do.

It’s rare the two sides ever exchange ideas rather than insults. I hope we can keep it on that level.

I hope I’m wrong, but I think the American economy is actually pretty fragile. We don’t have the manufacturing capabilities of other countries, we’re losing our technological advantage, we are in debt to our competitors, we’re competing with countries who are NOT at war, and our economy is highly dependent on cheap oil.

I’m not trying to be gloomy, I’m just trying to be realistic.

I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein, but I still maintain that:

1) he was not particularly a threat to us, and our leaders knew it.

2) reducing our dependence on foreign oil should have been the priority.

Estimates I’ve seen show ANWAR providing maybe a year of oil at best. It probably will be drilled eventually but rather than despoiling more wilderness, why not first raise fuel economy?

I would have thought most Americans would have wanted the terroists to be distracted from attacking America.

It’d be stupid to do a straight line thrust at an enemy without 1 or 5 feints.

And the pro civil rights people, the Libertarians, should also be pleased, because less attacks on American soil means no fear mongering to remove civil rights.

All wars are a distraction. It all depends on what particular part of your life was distracted. If you were a terroist, it would be one thing. If you were British/French/German, it would be another. Iraq, still another. Iranian, still another. American, yet another.

CIVIL TRUTH

Unfortunately, our political leadership gives us mixed messages: on the one hand, they say we are at war; but on the other hand they fail to call for any sacrifice or change in our lifestyle, telling us to continue consuming away — like the world in the time of Noah, ignoring the warning, eating and drinking away until their doom abruptly came to pass…

That’s cause Bush doesn’t want to seem like Hitler, giving rah rah KILL ALL THEM ARAB speeches.

But why did we invade Iraq? Did we need to prove anything else to the Arab world?

Ya, we did, we needed to prove we had the will to tell the parasites in the UN to pock off.

Coincidentally, it also proved that if you had enough money to bribe France, Russia, and China, you could stall us long enough to go into hiding, cook up an insurgency, and remove any incriminating evidence as well.

The reason why Al-Qaeda has not activated their cells in America, giving us time to seek and destroy them, is because Al-Qaeda cannot afford to lose the support of the Syrian, Iranian, and certain Saudi Arabian elements. When they saw us invade Iraq, they realized we weren’t just hitting back, we were launching a counter-offensive. With Afghanistan, everyone knew what we were going to do, and didn’t bother to stop us cause they didn’t care about Afghanistan. But they did care about a fellow dictator next to their borders. A lot.

Frankly, if the Middle East weren’t the location of most of the world’s oil, I’m not sure we’d care about Israel anymore than we cared about Tibet.

Only children, and child-adults complain about the state of the world. Adults face up to the world and do something about it.

The often spoken “Life isn’t fair” was not meant for adults, but for children. In the hopes that children will grow up to be resposible adults, that while they may not like the situation, will focus their mouth on solving it instead of restating the obvious.

A guy with chemical weapons, good or evil, will always have power over the farmer with some plows and sticks. That’s just reality, you don’t have to like it, you just have to accept it and find ways to overcome it. You may die in the doing, but that’s the risk of living.

ANWAR is not a major source of oil in comparison, contrary to what many people think.

Given that there’s no drilling there, of course. Oil in the ground don’t do us no good, contrary to what many people think, it needs to be refined.

* It was a secret agenda of the administration before 9-11

Honestly, that’s fake. Bush doesn’t have enough guts to plan a war ahead of time before 9/11, Bush doesn’t even have enough guts to tell Governor Blanco to to resign and take over her state before the hurricane hit, during the hurricane, and some time after the hurricane.

And you’re telling me he had the guts to plan “a war against a foreign country” before 9/11?

Oh, the military comes up with war plans all day long, but it sure as heck wasn’t no “secret agenda” of the Bushies.

* It has left us more financially strapped than before

Heard that before.

4% of our national GDP…=financially strapped. Haw haw, tell another one.

Given that we were spending more than 25% of GDP in WWII, the phrase “it has left us more financially strapped” is dubious. When you say before, you must mean before when it was lower than 4%, like in Clinton’s days.

The military and the CIA warned against it, and were ignored by leaders with no military experience

If you value the military and the CIA so much, why don’t you elect them to run the government instead of civilians like Abraham Lincoln?

It has bolstered the claims of Osama that we’re an imperialistic force that doesn’t care about Muslim lives

It has bolstered world wide good will among Muslims and other freedom loving people, such that when 9/11 happened, everyone snickered and felt secretly pleased. But when Katrina happens, everyone is now sending us AID.

Eemphasizing the enemy’s accomplishments like we’re been sitting around eating twinkies, may not be the wisest of actions. For one thing, it kills morale, and without morale, nobody wants to fight.

“I shot him because I suspected he had a gun and was planning to shoot me” wouldn’t hold up in court as a defense without some very good evidence to support the claim.

The War on Terror isn’t a police matter.

It’s always interesting to discover that what you thought was an original thought turns out to be someone else’s talking point. However, I don’t think this idea was planted in my head. I’m not saying that because we’re at war in Iraq we can’t do anything else, but it has drained our resources and been a huge distraction. Army enlistment is seriously down. Our deficit is seriously up. I believe that our response to Katrina would have been more adequate if we weren’t in Iraq.

The idea that we should be invading countries before they become serious threats to us is very old school. If we’re going to do that, I think we need to be prepared to plunder openly – otherwise we’re not going to be able to financially support the many invasions needed to take out our enemies, or economically compete with Europe and Asia (which are not spending their resources on war). There’s also the danger that we overextend ourselves and leave us open to attack, or will be made vulnerable by another natural disaster.

There are many fanatic Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. There are also many more moderates who want peace. On the one hand, appearing weak in the face of attack will encourage the fanatics. On the other hand, pre-emptive strikes by this country would seem to push more moderates towards becoming extremists. A few extremists can cause a lot of damage. I don’t see a simple answer to this question, and so tend to err on the side of that that doesn’t kill people and leave us financially strapped.

Back to oil. It is a limited resource (the idea that it’s always going to run out 30 years from now is a bit of wishful thinking), its use seems to have dire consequences on the environment and the people who live in it, we are dependent on it to the point where it’s a national security issue, and most of it is in other countries. For many reasons, we need to end our reliance on petroleum. We could become a model of conservation and alternative energy sources, selling cheap solar panels (invented here) to the world, or we could just keep putting our energy into trying to police the oil-rich states in the Middle East and buying oil from anti-American facists like the Saudis. Before invading Iraq, the President could have announced a Manhattan project to break our dependence on foreign oil. Now, after Iraq and Katrina? People are feeling far too pinched.

The only thing that our operation in Iraq has made difficult is an invasion of Iran. If we had, alternatively, invaded Iran, we’d be stuck worrying about Iraq’s capacity to bother us in Iran, and their plans for WMD of various types.
We don’t have enough ground forces to invade both at the same time.
I don’t know what we’ll do about Iran. They lost so many guys against Iraq that they did what the soviets did after WW II, and for similar reasons. They provided financial incentives for large families. The result is a huge percentage of the population just becoming young adults, and they’re unhappy with the theocracy. Hoping they can take care of business is possibly a useful hope, but I hope we have a Plan B.

Nevertheless, in some cases I can see how it is justified – Israel attacking nuclear facilities in neighboring countries, for example. Can’t really argue with the practicality and justification for that.

On questions of policy, I think there are shades of gray.

There doesn’t seem to be much justification for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. I actually expected them to have WMD, and I still thought the cost would exceed the benefit. The Downing Street memos show that the people in the know didn’t believe Iraq had WMD. The CIA estimated before the attack that invading Iraq would increase rather than decrease the threat of another terrorist attack against America.

My conclusion is that the invasion of Iraq was far from a “last resort”, but was driven by the ideology of the PNAC, which is all about maintaining America’s military and economic dominance.

I see this as a losing battle, and one that leads us away from our moral compass. Invading Iraq sapped our strength. We have massive debt to China, and they are rapidly building up their own military. We may in fact be a fading superpower.

So what should be our response to all of this? Nothing? Curl up and die? Just wait to get hit again? That’s not what I’m suggesting.

First, we’ve heard for years that a nuclear bomb could be smuggled in through our ports. Buy some damn geiger counters and hire some people to scan containers. In other words, put our resources into security where it counts.

Next, global climate change is likely to be a bigger threat than terrorism – this according to the Pentagon. We may not be able to stop it, but we should prepare for it. Dead is dead, whether through a terrorist attack or through drowning. We have a limited amount of resources to prepare ourselves with.

Back to oil. One was in which we encourage anti-American Islamic facists is to buy their oil. Most of the 9-11 hijaakers were Saudis, let’s not forget. It’s going to take a while to wean ourselves off oil, and I think we need a national effort.

How about this for a tone, “we’re mad as hell, and we’re going to do everything we can to stop buying your oil.”

Actually, fossil fuels were formed over hundreds of millions of years. The industrial revolution is pretty young, and we are by most estimates halfway through our petroleum reserves, with demand accelerating.

People were warning about the end of oil in the 70’s. Their estimates were off, but their point remains. And fuel economy on average hasn’t increased since then. So we’re not paying attention, and we’re dependent on a resource that is mostly in other countries controlled by people who are hostile to us. This isn’t good.