Hey: Thanks for reading this stuff!
Bigtex: Well, it was the end of that rant, I guess.
And . . .I have fully bought into the helio-centric Copernican system; including the concept of a spherical, revolving Earth. By the way—the ideas of Copernicus, that the Earth turned— not the stars, were the original "revolutionary" statements.
WTF: I think that there were several reasons why we invaded first "The 'Gan" and then Iraq. I do not believe that all of them were well informed decisions. Having committed us to war, the effort was half-hearted. Some of the reasons have not been openly stated (not a conspiracy blow-back please!). Ignoring all issues of ideology, religion and domestic politics, there are strong geo-political reasons for having a presence in those places
. One of these places, Iraq, is is bordered by: Jordan, Israel, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Except for Israel, all these countries wish us ill. We now have a nominal ally in the current "government" of Iraq, and we will have a political and military presence there for a long time—as we do in Japan, Korea and Germany. These last were all deathly belligerent towards the US and now are friendly independent nations.
Afghanistan is bordered by: Iran, Pakistan, India and China. Though this is a different sand-box with different challenges, the reasons for being there mentioned for Iraq, also apply. Note that Iran is between both Iraq and Afghanistan. This is straight out of the cold-war jockeying. Any other reason for going into these places can be viewed as window dressing.
All this may sound like the Cold-War shucking-and-jiving that went on between the USA and USSR. It is. It is how things have been since the battle of Megiddo between Egypt and the Hittites about 2500 BC.
I aploogise if this is a hijacked topic.
We still havent heard about WHY the press hasn't really dug into Obama's identity and roots.