QUOTE (Roadster @ Sep 10 2004, 01:30 PM)
The first rule of holes: when you are stuck in one, stop digging.
The Iraq "liberation" has degenerated into civil war and a net loss for the US. The Taliban is regaining control of Afghanistan, Cheney tells us we'll be attacked if we don't vote for him, half the US population has been sucked in by an arrogant, lying, self serving, self righteous imbicile in the White House, the deficit is so out of control even your grandchildren cant pay for it all, and you jerks are arguing about what happened 30 years ago. Absolute insanity.
Jerks, jerks? What's with the name-calling?
Let's put this situation into a little better perspective by perusing a good piece from Victor Davis Hansen who has a much better handle on it than anyone here:
Much of the Islamic Middle East continues to blame others for its own induced catastrophe, apparently unaware — thanks to the lever of oil it didn’t discover, doesn’t know how to develop, and uses to intensify rather than alleviate its poverty — that its entire culture is becoming an international pariah. Islamic young men on European flights are looked at with distrust; they are not welcome in Russia. China wants none of them. They are wary of visiting India. Australia learned from Bali. The whole world is watching — in disgust.
In short, the suicide bomber, the improvised explosive device, the car bomb, the televised beheading, the wacko fatwa, the sleazy propaganda streamer on the Internet, the new cult of death — all cowardly and lethal phenomena — these are now the innovations that the world associates with the Middle East in lieu of gene research, car production, or computer breakthroughs. If you look for gender equity in the Middle East, you won’t find it in Arab Olympic delegations, Saudi schools, or the Iranian government, but in the opportunity for young women to blow themselves up right beside men. Indeed, killing infidels is the nascent women’s-liberation movement of the radical Muslim world.
It won’t do to fault a few bad apples — as if when Ziad Jarrah in his red bandanna yelled out “Allah is the greatest” as he crashed United Flight 93 on September 11, he did so alone, to the horror and disgust of the Arab Street, and without a shared ideology.
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200409100700.asp