B.J.: the Sunni-Shia split is worth further study on your part. The fault-line between the two is at the very heart of the war we’re now waging.

Hope to see folks on future posts.

djw

As far as Iraq, Al Qaeda and Sunnis and Shites go why do you think they came so quickly to Iraq? They were already there and the Iraq government did nothing to keep the peace, so more came. And now the Iraqis (sovern nation.) need to get it together and get control of their country. We have been patient and tried to help, but they can’t even get along with themselves. We have to have bases there to get them to get in line. We need their oil (unless you want to drill in Florida and Antartica) and we need peace in the region. Israel needs us to be there. The Saudis didn’t want to help and only rip us off for $140 gallon oil, so we have to take it now. Just like any ohter resource to stay alive. Plus it wouldn’t hurt if there was some more religious aid over there. Maybe Christians could help them be more civilized.

I know Vietnam didn’t work out. That was because the same thing you guys are doing happened then. We need to support our troops and buid a safe place for them to have bases over in the region so they can rotate duty through there instead of being in tents for years.

We will win. We can’t leave. We need to be there. Unless you like pushing your car around the freeway.

The best support for our troops is to not waste their lives or lifetimes fighting a pointless war that serves the political ends of a few individuals, like Bush and Cheney. There is a reason that Bush’s approval rating is one of the lowest in the entire history of the country (lower than Nixon during Watergate). No one, not even Conservatives, likes losing a war and it is pretty clear to everyone at this point that there is no victory condition for this war and that we’re wasting our economy and the lives of our soldiers.

You’d think that after Vietnam that we would understand that you can only win a war if you figure out what “winning” means and follow a plan to get there. Occupying a country and threatening our own puppet government to sign a treaty that no sovereign nation would sign is not victory. You say that we should occupy Pakistan. I hate to break this to you but we aren’t the rulers of the world. They are a sovereign nation and they don’t have to have us or our bases there if they don’t want them. Do you think that we can force everyone to do what we want at gunpoint? Is that how victory is achieved, BJ?

You seem unaware that Saddam Hussein was hated by Osama bin Laden because he was a secular leader of a secular state. As long as he was in charge, Al-Qaeda was not going to be working with Iraq. We took care of that, didn’t we?

(I know you don’t care about internal differences in Islam but it sounds ignorant not to bother to know your self-proclaimed enemies, doesn’t it? These aren’t “subcultures” in a popular since unless “subcultures” last more than 1,000 years…)

If I or my fellow citizens are at “war” with anyone, it is terrorists. It isn’t Arabs or Persians (you know the Iranians aren’t Arabs, right?). It isn’t Islam. Iraqis weren’t going to come to America (or Europe, for that matter) to cause problems.They didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and, frankly, they weren’t terrorists. They were led by a dictator that we helped put into place during the cold war but that’s about it.

The fact that you make the typical right wing confusion of Islam, in general, and terrorists and can’t even tell the teams apart in the Islamic world makes you seem like a bit of an ignorant troll here. I understand that nuanced debate is outside the ken of most Americans (and I am an American, by the way) but let’s at least try.

We can’t win a war against Islam if we’re so ignorant as to start one. They outnumber us at least thee to one, to start with, and it isn’t a just war in the end anyway. We’d be better off going after the individuals or organizations that actually attacked our nation rather than simply starting wars with nations that we don’t like for made up reasons that turn out to be lies…

Why do you want to protect them? Do you think they care about you? They don’t.

And to Mr. Williams, I mean Saddam. I hope you feel better to corect my mistake.

And last, we have to continue to spread our bases in the region. Just look at what happened in Pakistan with the prisoners of the Taliban that escaped. If we had more bases there we would control that region to. But instead we get jerked around by a government that doesn’t want us to nuke them and does just enough to act like a friend. I bet they opened the cell doors for the Taliban and acted like they got lose! This is the fight of our life and we have to support president Bush and our troops.

I hope.

But you know it’s true. I understand you don’t want to harm anyone. But what about your fellow citizens? Should they get killed because we didn’t control a region that was begging for a new daddy? Like England was ever going to handle it over there. We own that region now and anything that happens there now only happens when and where we say.

And if you really don’t know who “them” is I feel sorry for you. We should turn that place into a parking lot and build bases from Egypt to Pakistan. And we should be proud to be the only defender of the world. Maybe we pay more today but we get it all in the end and then what will you say?

I think the Islam terrorists are just looking for a fight and why should we wait for them to come here? They hate us. You and me both. So lets get them first and teach them the good peacefull word.