[MEGoody]

"There are ways other than Empire"

So how would you have solved the problem of Iraq other than 'empire' as you call it?

[Iris7]

Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi who made OPEC out of nothing, kept telling all the OPEC types, who all wanted more money all the time, that they were impractical, that they were going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Yamani's most famous quote is "The Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of stones."

To escape the fate of Empire, which would be very nice (one of the costs of Empire is "Gomorrah/Aztlan" as Ambrose put it here on Freerepublic recently) we have to put the Oil Age behind us. There are technically practical ways to accomplish this. (Politically a real uproar, though!) Oil use would then drop so severely, perhaps to 5% of current production (for use as a chemical feedstock), that the Arab world would no longer be of concern.