[Dialup Llama]

I hope we are producing arabic language broadcasts in Iraq and printing newspapers and making radio broadcasts explaining how you dont want to end up like Iran. I'd like to think we are doing this but I fear we are not because there is some disease among conservative people that says we don't need to promote our own positions or explain what we are doing.

[mathurine]

Wouldn't bother me if we just packed up and left tomorrow. We got rid of Saddan. We introduced the possibility of something else. If it were a government we could embrace, that would be splendid. However, we have changed a long-standing equation or two in the region, and we probably have made some good contacts both for informational and operational purposes no matter what arises. There is not a lot of point in piddling into the wind over there. Dictators and dictatorial clerics have been keeping the lid on a lot of historical forces for change in that region for a long time and there is no guarantee that the process of change will be pretty, though the outcome is almost certainly going to be prettier than the past there has been. We did demonstrate for the Arabs and other mohammedans that we can kick butt over there from time to time as needed and if they annoy us we will do so whether anyone else in the world wants us to or not. This is fundamentally Islamic versus American culture. Call it anything else and you confuse yourself about what to do. We don't need to superintend changes over there. We just need to stomp the most egregious regimes now and then, and reward any change that looks more like democracy and free enterprise. Clash of cultures is what it is, and we are not going to give up nor do we need to. Theirs is the least competent and most peculiar major world-view on earth today and other than by breeding numerous offspring it can't care for, is woefully unsuccesful politically, militarily, economically, socially or morally. Ours, in turn is the most competent. People who imitate us progress immensely. People who immitate them regress centuries. The mohammedans are not insightful enough to realize it, but their militance has drawn a response from the US; the Russians are dealing with Chechnya, the Indians with Kashmir, the Chinese with their western provinces, the Phillipinnes with the Zamboangans where the monkeys have no tails, and so forth. This is to say that they are managing to incite the wrath of the entire non-Islamic world, which is finally going to unite and put an end to them just as a fly finally get swatted. It's a big religion, but the world it has chosen to assault is considerably bigger, and progressively less amused by their fatwahs or skinny butts.