At 04:53 PM 9/10/2007, eroustom@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Wow, and I bet we listen to the same radio, and read the same
papers - LOL!
I wasn't talking about the pols... I did say "half a brain", I meant
"At least half a brain."
Well, you do have a way with words!
I doubt that we listen to the same radio stations
or read the same newspapers. But I am
politically involved and do know what was going
on in the ramp-up to the Iraq War. In the
political spectrum, George H W Bush and George W
Bush are moderate leftists who accept an
interventionist role for government -- George H W
Bush lost in 1992 primarily because the
Republican rank-and-file, those little old ladies
in Tennis Shoes who worked the polls for the GOP,
stayed home after he signed the Family Leave Act and the like.
The core of Republican Party leadership strongly
advised against intervention in either
Afghanistan or Iraq as no vital US national
interest was at play. The advice of most of
these folks was to start a dialogue in the Middle
East which included a US distancing of its policy
from a blind support of Israel. Bush was
unwilling to do this, and so we ended up with a
war unwinnable unless we are willing to blindly
kill thousands of civilians who may or may not be
involved in any hostile activities. The US
rather stupidly bought into the Nuremburg
Doctrine which includes a ban on "collective
guilt" and thus forbids mass retaliation against
the populace of recalcitrant territories.
My take? Dump Israel. The Arabs loved the US in
1945. Let's get back there again. Let's work
for energy independence: adopt a flat $5 a
gallon tax on imported gasoline. Open up
ANWR. (No, I do not advocate shooting Green
folks, but I would certainly ignore them on this
point.) Open up all of the Gulf of Mexico and
Atlantic Littoral to gas and oil exploitation
with appropriate safeguards. Open up shale oil
deposits -- I would exempt oil so derived from
that $5 a gallon tax, of course, as it is
internally generated. Once we have energy
independence, then we can ignore the Middle East
and can be a friend to everyone.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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